New homes with new streak face higher flood risks due to climate change, new study finds

New homes with new streak face higher flood risks due to climate change, new study finds

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During the early 20th century, U.S. consumer banks regularly practiced a systematic lending practice, known as a new line, that denied colored people loans to buy homes outside areas of cities considered “undesirable” in part. because they are built on areas with higher flood risk.

According to researchers from real estate agency Redfin, homes worth a total of $ 107 billion are now 25% more flooded than homes that have not been re-ordered. The firm on Monday morning released the findings from the analysis of flooded and non-reclaimed communities related to climate change.

The report, which examined the flood levels of 38 major U.S. metropolitan areas, noted that modern U.S. flood risk maps look a lot like maps from the 1930s.

In recent years, the increase in sea level due to climate change has increased the number of flood risk areas across the country.
Some of these places are already dealing with floods every year. Black homeowners in Chicago, for example, have complained about increasing rainfall fueled by climate change, which is overwhelming the city’s sewer system and causing flood damage to homes that did not have the same floods a decade ago, according to the Chicago Tribune.

“The discrimination that has taken place in the past may seem like it did a long time ago, but it’s increasing,” Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, told CNN Business. “The historical practices that were discriminatory do not seem to have diminished. It seems to be increasing in reality.”

Redfin researchers have found that areas in the cities they have surveyed that have not been relinquished are at risk of $ 85 billion worth of homes being damaged or destroyed by floods linked to climate change – $ 22 billion less than the surrounding regions.

In their report, the firm’s researchers said that more than 58% “of households in neighborhoods previously identified as undesirable for mortgage lending are not white” and “history has shown that when storms strike, color communities in these previously reclaimed areas often suffer the most. “

“[More than] “600,000 properties have faced a 100-year flood risk, which could be hit by one of these catastrophic floods,” Fairweather said.

S Telemachus Street in New Orleans is flooded after flash floods hit the area early on July 10, 2019.

Fairweather noted that Hurricane Katrina was in New Orleans in 2005 on colored people in New Orleans, and Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was on the black and brown Houston residents to illustrate her point.

Four of the seven zip codes that suffered the worst flood damage due to Katrina had black populations of at least 75%, according to government records quoted by Scientific American.
In a 2017 Think Progress analysis, out-and-out low-income black and brown Houston neighborhoods were more damaged by Harvey than more affluent and whiter communities.

Without public and private intervention, Fairweather said the damage that future floods could cause to areas across the country could widen the already enormous racial prosperity gap between most White Americans and their black and Latino neighbors.

“It will definitely put us back,” Fairweather said. “It really depends on what the policy response is.”

To solve the problem, the study authors recommend that the federal government give money to some new homeowners to make their homes weatherproof and to relocate homeowners in areas where weather resistance is not enough.

“If we do help people move, we need to encourage them or insist that they move to places that are not so affected by climate change,” Fairweather said.

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