New US Home Construction Rates Since 2009 Higher In Top Coastal Flood Risk Zones Than Outside
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In what we believe to be the first country-wide analysis of its kind, Climate Central and Zillow have isolated the number of new homes in low-lying coastal areas in all 24 coastal states, projecting how many will become exposed to chronic ocean flooding over the coming decades — depending on what choices the world makes around greenhouse-gas pollution today.
The results are clear. If the world makes moderate cuts to greenhouse-gas pollution — roughly in line with the Paris agreement on climate, whose targets the international community is not on track to meet — some 10,000 existing homes built after 2009 will be at risk of flooding at least once per year, on average, by 2050. The figures for 2100 are about three times higher — and five times higher if pollution grows unchecked.
Over the last decade, public interest in sea level rise has grown, tidal flooding has increased in many coastal communities, and global attention has coalesced around the dangers of climate change in international negotiations in Copenhagen and Paris. And yet in the years after 2009, the percentage growth rate at which new homes were added inside of America’s highest coastal flood-risk zones outpaced the percentage growth rate outside of those areas — in more than half of the country’s coastal states.
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Take the state of New Jersey. After 2009, the housing growth rate was more than three times higher in the coastal flood risk zone than in safer areas. Around 2,700 new homes, worth some $2.6 billion, were put up in the flood-risk zone after that year — most likely driven by reconstruction following Sandy. In Mississippi and Delaware, meanwhile, the ratio of risky growth to less risky growth was around 2.5. And in Florida, where the recent risk zone growth rate has just slightly outpaced the growth rate in safer areas, 908 newly built homes are nevertheless in locations at risk of flooding at least annually by 2050. Nine other coastal states likewise saw their construction growth rates in the risk zone outpace their growth rates in safer areas. (In addition to the states listed in Table 1, these include Alabama, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.) More than half of the country’s coastal states, in other words, have recently seen higher housing growth rates inside the flood-risk zone than outside of it.
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http://www.climatecentral.org/news/ocean-at-the-door-new-homes-in-harms-way-zillow-analysis-21953