According to a new study, relocated US homes face higher risk of flooding due to climate change

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In the early twentieth century, U.S. consumer banks routinely engaged in a systemic lending practice known as redlining, which refused loans to people of color who wanted to buy homes outside of partially considered urban areas. “Undesirable” because they were built on areas at higher risk of flooding.

Today, as a result, homes totaling $ 107 billion are now 25 percent more likely to be flooded than unlimited homes, according to researchers at real estate brokerage firm Redfin. The firm released findings from the analysis of redline and non-redlined communities facing climate change-related flood risks on Monday morning.

The report, which examined data on floods in 38 major US metropolitan areas, noted that modern maps of the US at risk of flooding are very similar to redlining maps from the 1930s.

In recent years, rising sea levels caused by climate change have increased the number of areas at risk of flooding across the country.
Some of these places are already facing annual floods. Chicago black homeowners, for example, have complained about the high rainfall fueled by climate change that overwhelms the city’s sewer system and causes flood damage to homes that did not have the same flooding problems a decade ago, according to Chicago Tribune.

“The discrimination that has taken place in the past may seem like it happened a long time ago, but it’s getting worse,” Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather told CNN Business. “It’s not like historical practices that have been diminished in effect. It seems they’re actually increasing in effect.”

Redfin researchers have determined that areas of the cities they have examined that have not been redistributed risk $ 85 billion in homes damaged or destroyed by climate change-related floods – $ 22 billion more. less than redefined neighborhoods.

In their report, the company’s researchers said that more than 58% of “households in neighborhoods that were once designated undesirable for mortgages are not white” and “history has shown that when storms hit, communities of color in these areas previously redlinate often suffers the most. “

“[More than] 600,000 properties face a 100-year flood risk, which is the risk of one of these truly catastrophic floods hitting them, ”Fairweather said.

S Telemachus Street in New Orleans is flooded after lightning struck the area in early July 10, 2019.

Fairweather noted the disproportionate impact that Hurricane Katrina had on people of color in New Orleans in 2005, and Hurricane Harvey had on black and brown residents of Houston in 2017 to illustrate her point.

Four of the seven postal codes that suffered the worst flood damage from Katrina had black populations of at least 75 percent, according to government records quoted by Scientific American.
A 2017 Think Progress analysis found disproportionately that low-income, black-and-white Houston neighborhoods were more damaged by Harvey than richer, whiter communities.

Without public and private intervention, Fairweather said future flood damage could cause redefined areas across the nation to further widen the already enormous racial wealth gap that exists between most white Americans and their black and Latino neighbors.

“He would definitely come back,” Fairweather said. “It really depends on the policy response.”

To help solve the problem, the study’s authors recommend that the federal government provide funding for some homeowners to withstand the weather and provide relocation assistance to homeowners in areas where weather resistance may not be sufficient.

“When we provide assistance for people to move, we should encourage them or insist on moving to places that will not be as affected by climate change,” Fairweather said.

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