Let's talk about Climate Advisories being deleted and your next house.... - Belle of the Ranch

[TexasTowelie]

Well, howdy there Internet people. It's Belle again. So, today we're going to talk about climate advisories being deleted and your next house.

This happened pretty quietly, but it says a lot about the world we live in right now. Zillow, which is one of the biggest real estate platforms in the country, removed climate risk data from its home listings. Now, don't trash Zillow for this. They got complaints about it hurting sales and realistically, from what we've heard, this was a move to cover themselves legally. And while the data is gone from their site, it looks like it's been replaced by a link to First Street, which provides incredibly similar data. Nice.

But this situation tells us far more about money, incentives, and how people actually respond to climate change than most political debates ever will. Because here's the reality, if climate change stayed theoretical, distant, and abstract, it would be easier for any market to ignore. But the moment climate risk starts affecting property values, insurance costs, and investment decisions in real time, well, suddenly it becomes super inconvenient to those with the money. And inconvenient information often doesn't survive long in systems built around profit.

Reporting says the complaints didn't come from scientists. They didn't come from insurers. They came from the real estate industry itself. Agents, brokers, regional listing services. So, in other words, the people whose paychecks depend on sales volume and price stability. That's how these things usually work. This isn't really about Zillow. Zillow is just the latest pressure point where climate reality collided with economic incentive. Because see, we've built an economy where enormous amounts of wealth are tied to assets that assume environmental stability, coastal property, wildfire prone suburbs, river flooded developments, desert cities reliant on shrinking water supplies. If full climate risk were baked honestly into prices tomorrow, a lot of balance sheets wouldn't look very good the next day.

So instead, the risks get delayed, softened, deferred, buried behind optimism and marketing language and vague reassurances about resilience. Again, I'm not even talking about Zillow. I really like the link out to First Street. That's a pretty solid move considering the situation. But this is why climate change is so hard to address systemically. Not because people don't understand it, not because the data is unclear, but because acknowledging it fully would force a massive repricing of reality. And you know, that threatens people who currently benefit from the way things are priced now.

It's much easier to argue about whether sea level rise is really that bad than it is to explain why a million-dollar home might be worth far less in a decade. It's much easier to dispute wildfire projections than to explain why an entire region may become effectively uninsurable.

Here's the uncomfortable part. When climate risk gets hidden, it doesn't disappear. The buyer becomes the risk sponge. The homeowner becomes the last one holding the bill when insurers pull out when disaster relief runs thin and when repairs become unmanageable. And it tells us something else even more uncomfortable about how this phase of the climate era is going to look. The science will keep getting louder, the disasters will keep getting more expensive, and the systems built on short-term profit will keep trying to turn the volume down. Not because the danger isn't real, but because the price of admitting it has become too high.

Anyway, it's just a thought. Y'all have a good day.

[markodochartaigh]

1. First Street uses different data than FEMA.

Maps may be similar or different. Definitely look up your address, or especially the address of a house that you are planning to buy, on both platforms. Lenders may use either or both. Also First Street assesses fire, wind, air, and heat. No map is perfect. First Street seems to use total days above 90° or so. My house 15 miles from the ocean in Florida is hotter than my Dallas house by that metric. But in Florida for at least six months the afternoon heat is cooled by showers after a few hours. In Dallas I remember 12-16 hours above 90° for months on end.


https://firststreet.org/research-library/understanding-fema-flood-maps-and-limitations