Zillow Doesn't Care If Climate Change Destroys Your New Home

[SamuelTheThird]

When we try to plan our lives rationally, the climate crisis stymies us at every turn. There are already so many other factors to consider—where can we find community and work? Where can we afford to live?—and useful information can be hard to come by. Zillow, the real estate listings platform, just made matters worse. In October, The New York Times recently reported, the company ceased publishing climate risk with its listings. The listings platform had only begun this potentially helpful practice last year, using data from First Street, a risk-modeling firm.

For homeowners, failing to consider climate risks could be catastrophic—in fact, it already is. Almost half the homes in the United States are at serious risk from the climate crisis, whether due to flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, heat, or bad air quality. Adding to the problem, while potential homebuyers struggle to obtain data to guide their decisions, the insurance industry does not suffer from challenges of this kind. Insurers are making rational decisions in their own interests, leaving homeowners with insurmountable costs, or even uninsured. State Farm canceled 72,000 home insurance policies last year, leaving those homeowners unprotected in future disasters. And Hurricane Helene inflicted some $200 billion in damages last year, of which, Grist reported, almost none were covered by insurance. While in some cases insurers are refusing to cover risky homes, in others, they are setting prices so high that millions are going without, or getting cheaper, less comprehensive insurance.

The result of all this, the Senate Budget Committee warned a year ago, will be “a collapse in property values with the potential to trigger a full-scale financial crisis.” Early this year, First Street, the firm that provided climate risk data to Zillow before last month, predicted that over the next three decades, Americans would lose nearly $1.5 trillion in assets due to the damage that climate change would wreak on our homes. For many American homeowners, this is a quick path to financial ruin: Their home is their most valuable asset, with home equity accounting for 45 percent of their net worth. The percentage is much higher for Black and Hispanic homeowners, who tend to have much less wealth overall than white homeowners.

https://newrepublic.com/article/203982/zillow-climate-risk-home-house