PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Stanford researchers reveal that homes in floodplains are overvalued by nearly $44 billion

Stanford researchers reveal that homes in floodplains are overvalued by nearly $44 billion
2021-04-26
(Press-News.org) Buyer beware: single-family homes in floodplains - almost 4 million U.S. homes - are overvalued by nearly $44 billion collectively or $11,526 per house on average, according to a new Stanford University-led study. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, suggests that unaware buyers and inadequate disclosure laws drive up financial risks that could destabilize the real estate market. The threat is likely to grow as climate change drives more frequent extreme weather. (WATCH VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n18s5kcE0So)

"The overvaluation we find is really concerning, especially given the increases in climate risk that are coming our way," said study lead author Miyuki Hino, who was a PhD student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth) at the time of the research and is now an assistant professor in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's department of city and regional planning. "Improving how we communicate about flooding is an important step in the right direction."

Water hazard In some states, such as Florida, as many as one in six homes are in floodplains. As more people have built more homes in areas exposed to cyclones, sea-level rise and other inundation hazards, flooding damage costs have skyrocketed. Since 2000, overall flood damages have quadrupled in the U.S.

More frequent extreme weather could magnify the trend. In the next 30 years, flood damages to U.S. homes are projected to rise more than 60 percent, from $20 billion to nearly $32.2 billion a year, according to nonprofit research group First Street Foundation.

While some states, such as Louisiana, require detailed flood risk disclosures, others require no risk disclosures of any kind. Only two states require that sellers disclose the cost of their insurance policy - an additional cost burden for the buyer. Most states only require disclosures by the time the contract is signed, making them unlikely to inform buyers' decisions.

Unlike many past studies, which focused on single counties or cities in only a few states, the new analysis casts a nationwide net to paint a clearer picture of whether markets effectively account for publicly available information about flood risk. Hino and study senior author Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science in Stanford Earth, pored over historical and current floodplain maps as well as detailed real estate transaction data to estimate the effect of regulatory floodplain maps on property values or what the researchers call the flood zone discount.

To better understand the drivers of flood zone discount, the researchers examined what happened to property values when floodplain maps were updated, causing some houses to be rezoned from outside to inside the floodplain.

Getting soaked The analysis revealed that single-family homes zoned into a floodplain lose roughly 2% percent of their value, which works out to $10,500 for a $500,000 home or $21,000 for a $1 million home. In contrast, had buyers factored in the cost of fully insuring the floodplain home against damage, it should have pushed prices down 4.7 percent to 10.6 percent ­- as much as $53,000 for a $500,000 home or $106,000 for a $1 million home, according to the researchers.

"We like to think that markets work efficiently and incorporate all known information about risk," said Burke. "But here we find clear evidence, in an incredibly valuable market, that the market is underpricing flood risk."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the results suggest that a buyer's flood risk awareness shapes the value they perceive in a property. This awareness is likely informed by a combination of disclosure laws and the extent of flood risk within the community measured by the percentage of homes located in floodplains. More sophisticated commercial buyers, such as corporations that rent out single-family homes, discount flood zone properties by about 5 percentage points more than other buyers.

The urgency of informing homebuyers about hazards from floods and other climate change-driven hazards will only grow. This past year was the tenth in a row with eight or more billion-dollar disasters in the U.S.

Policymakers can help by passing legislation that promotes access to information about the extent of past flood events and strengthens real estate disclosure requirements, according to the researchers. Broader risk communication efforts - requiring sellers to disclose flood risks and insurance costs before buyers make offers, for example - could help rebalance real estate markets and significantly increase buy-in for flood insurance coverage, something the National Flood Insurance Program has failed to do.

"We spend a lot of time and energy trying to map climate hazards and how they are changing, and we need to make sure that people can access and understand that information when they need it," said Hino.

INFORMATION:

Burke is also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

The research was funded by the Sykes Family Fellowship in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources.


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Stanford researchers reveal that homes in floodplains are overvalued by nearly $44 billion

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Results of study could be biggest rehab advance in decades for patients after stroke

Results of study could be biggest rehab advance in decades for patients after stroke
2021-04-26
Results of a study co-authored by MGH Institute of Health Professions researcher Teresa Kimberley, PhD, PT, have the potential to be one of the most impressive advances in decades to help improve the lives of patients who have had a stroke with resulting arm weakness. In an article published April 22 in The Lancet, "Vagus Nerve Stimulation Paired with Rehabilitation for Upper Limb Motor Function After Ischaemic Stroke (VNS-REHAB): A Randomised, Blinded, Pivotal, Device Trial," the study reports that patients who incorporated vagus nerve stimulation during physical or occupational therapy showed 2 to 3 times the improvement in arm and hand function compared to those who received intense rehabilitation with sham stimulation. "How ...

What spurs people to save the planet? Stories or facts?

What spurs people to save the planet? Stories or facts?
2021-04-26
With climate change looming, what must people hear to convince them to change their ways to stop harming the environment? A new Johns Hopkins University study finds stories to be significantly more motivating than scientific facts-- at least for some people. After hearing a compelling pollution-related story in which a man died, the average person paid more for green products than after having heard scientific facts about water pollution. But the average person in the study was a Democrat. Republicans paid less after hearing the story rather than the simple facts. The findings, published this week in the journal ...

Chinese hazelnut: The newest piece in the hazelnut genome puzzle

Chinese hazelnut: The newest piece in the hazelnut genome puzzle
2021-04-26
Humans have been breeding plants for their economic value for thousands of years. Traditionally, plant breeding techniques included cumbersome and time-consuming techniques like grafting and hybridization to enhance traits of economic value like disease resistance and high nutrition content. Now, with the ability to edit plant DNA using revolutionary gene-editing tools, particularly the CRISPR-Cas9 system, it is possible to enhance traits of economic value in plants easily and more efficiently than by using traditional techniques. But for that, it is necessary to sequence whole ...

Nondestructive characterization technique helps gallium nitride crystal developments

Nondestructive characterization technique helps gallium nitride crystal developments
2021-04-26
Osaka - Gallium nitride (GaN) is a semiconductor material whose wide band gap may one day lead to it superseding silicon in electronics applications. It is therefore important to have GaN characterization techniques that are able to support the development of GaN devices. Researchers at Osaka University have reported a nondestructive method for characterizing the crystalline quality of GaN. Their findings were published in Applied Physics Express. GaN power switching devices offer numerous advantages including high-speed switching, high-power operation, low on-resistance, and high breakdown voltage. To take advantage of these properties, the defect density of GaN crystals must be low. Threading dislocations ...

Netflix commits to local productions to continue leading the streaming platform market

2021-04-26
The various methods that Netflix employs when premiering its content favour the international success of original local productions and, at the same time, act as a safety net for these films in an audiovisual industry in constant evolution. A study conducted by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) researchers Antoni Roig, Judith Clares and Jordi Sánchez, published in the open access journal Communication & Society, has analysed the various systems and schedules implemented by the American entertainment platform in recent years in relation to its original feature films, which have allowed it to become the leader in the distribution of on-demand audiovisual content. According to the authors, the approaches adopted by Netflix form part of a global expansion plan to consolidate ...

Airports could generate enough solar energy to power a city: Study

Airports could generate enough solar energy to power a city: Study
2021-04-26
A new study has found Australia's government-owned airports could produce enough electricity to power 136,000 homes, if they had large-scale rooftop solar systems installed. Researchers at RMIT University compared electricity generated by residential solar panels in a regional Australian city to the potential green energy production of 21 leased federal airports. They found if large-scale solar panels were installed at the airports, they would generate 10 times more electricity than the city's 17,000 residential panels, while offsetting 151.6 kilotons of greenhouse gasses annually. Researcher Dr Chayn Sun said the analysis showed the value ...

Against presbyopia

Against presbyopia
2021-04-26
As a result of the work of five years of research, they have created the first trifocal corneal inlay that is also fully transparent. Such an inlay would allow good eyesight to presbyopic people of objects located at several distances: far, intermediate (computer, mobile devices) and near. Their work has been published in Nature group's Scientific Reports journal. "This inlay could be an alternative for those suffering from presbyopia who would rather not use glasses or contact lenses. Furthermore, it would be fully compatible with laser refractive surgery in myopic and hyperopic patients, as well as possible subsequent cataract interventions. We are suggesting something totally new that is also not ...

Toward painless oral insulin administration

Toward painless oral insulin administration
2021-04-26
Researchers from Kumamoto University, Japan have found that DNP peptide, a small intestine-permeable cyclic peptide originally used as an insulin additive to improve absorption into the small intestinal, lowers blood glucose levels in mice. They also found that insulin can be administered orally by simply adding D-form DNP peptide (D-DNP) peptide to injectable insulin used in clinical practice. This study is expected to provide a basis for the development of oral insulin using DNP peptides. Insulin therapy by self-injected insulin is currently the best way to control ...

Researchers have identified a novel autoantigen in narcolepsy, a mimic of a protein from H1N1 virus

2021-04-26
Narcolepsy with cataplexy, or narcolepsy type 1 (NT1), is a rare and chronic neurological disease whose prevalence increased in children and adolescents after the administration of Pandemrix swine flu vaccine in 2009-2010. It is an autoimmune disease to which a specific inherited tissue type (HLA-DQB1*0602) predisposes people. The disease mechanism of NT1 was investigated in a collaborative study carried out by PhD student Arja Vuorela and university researcher Dr. Tobias Freitag, working in the research groups of Prof. Outi Vaarala and Prof. Seppo Meri. The study analyzed the cell-mediated immune response targeting ...

Researchers solve puzzle of origin and formation of specialized body plan in flatfishes

Researchers solve puzzle of origin and formation of specialized body plan in flatfishes
2021-04-26
The colonization of the seafloor is one of the most important events in evolutionary history, leading to an explosive radiation and large-scale morphological diversification of marine phyla. Flatfishes are one of the most successful groups of seafloor colonizers and have evolved the most specialized body plan (i.e., flat and asymmetrical) among the teleosts. However, the origin and formation mechanism of the peculiar morphology of flatfishes had long been unclear. Now, researchers from the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Multi-resistance in bacteria predicted by AI model

Tinker Tots: A citizen science project to explore ethical dilemmas in embryo selection

Sensing sickness

Cost to build multifamily housing in California more than twice as high as in Texas

Program takes aim at drinking, unsafe sex, and sexual assault on college campuses

Inability to pay for healthcare reaches record high in U.S.

Science ‘storytelling’ urgently needed amid climate and biodiversity crisis

KAIST Develops Retinal Therapy to Restore Lost Vision​

Adipocyte-hepatocyte signaling mechanism uncovered in endoplasmic reticulum stress response

Mammals were adapting from life in the trees to living on the ground before dinosaur-killing asteroid

Low LDL cholesterol levels linked to reduced risk of dementia

Thickening of the eye’s retina associated with greater risk and severity of postoperative delirium in older patients

Almost one in ten people surveyed report having been harmed by the NHS in the last three years

Enhancing light control with complex frequency excitations

New research finds novel drug target for acute myeloid leukemia, bringing hope for cancer patients

New insight into factors associated with a common disease among dogs and humans

Illuminating single atoms for sustainable propylene production

New study finds Rocky Mountain snow contamination

Study examines lactation in critically ill patients

UVA Engineering Dean Jennifer West earns AIMBE’s 2025 Pierre Galletti Award

Doubling down on metasurfaces

New Cedars-Sinai study shows how specialized diet can improve gut disorders

Making moves and hitting the breaks: Owl journeys surprise researchers in western Montana

PKU Scientists simulate the origin and evolution of the North Atlantic Oscillation

ICRAFT breakthrough: Unlocking A20’s dual role in cancer immunotherapy

How VR technology is changing the game for Alzheimer’s disease

A borrowed bacterial gene allowed some marine diatoms to live on a seaweed diet

Balance between two competing nerve proteins deters symptoms of autism in mice

Use of antifungals in agriculture may increase resistance in an infectious yeast

Awareness grows of cancer risk from alcohol consumption, survey finds

[Press-News.org] Stanford researchers reveal that homes in floodplains are overvalued by nearly $44 billion