Study shows affordable housing at risk of flooding
A new study published this week projects that the number of affordable housing units at risk of flooding in the United States is projected to more than triple by 2050.
“In terms of the absolute number of units exposed … threats are primarily clustered in smaller cities in California and in the northeastern United States,” the study found.
Three Bay Area cities are included in the top 20 at-risk cities in the United States identified by the researchers: Corte Madera, Foster City and Suisun City.
Affordable housing has a greater chance of flooding than general housing “in nearly all of the top-ranked cities,” according to the researchers.
In California, the number of affordable housing units in danger of flooding is expected to increase 40% by 2050, the analysis found.
Scientists say floods have worsened in recent decades along the nation’s coasts, and they project that rising seas triggered by climate change will increase the frequency of routine tidal flooding as
well as extreme floods.
Conducted by environmental scientists and the nonprofit research group Climate Central, the findings shine a light on a harsh truth about climate change: The impacts fall most often on the less fortunate.
“Climate impacts are not evenly distributed,” said Lara Cushing, a UCLA environmental health scientist and one of the report’s authors. “We know that lowincome communities and communities of color are more vulnerable.
“Affordable housing units may be physically more vulnerable to climate impacts if they are built to older housing codes, and less structurally sound,” she said.
“And the people living in affordable units — the disabled, single parents, seniors, people of color — have fewer resources to cope with flooding impacts, they tend to have less political influence on where government invests resources on flood mitigation and are less likely to be insured.”
The analysis used a new Microsoft mapping tool that outlined the footprint of every building in the continental United States. That allowed for a more granular view of where buildings are located and, using sea level rise projections and le
vee data, how much flooding risk they face. The researchers added an overlay of demographic data to determine who resided in the at-risk buildings.
Sea level rise and flooding are a menace in many of the state’s coastal regions, but only the three Northern California towns made the top 20 list of vulnerable U.S. cities. That’s because of their low elevation and clusters of affordable housing, the authors said.
“In the Bay Area, we built the cheaper housing and low-income housing on the bay side, and the rich people live in the hills,” said Evelyn Stivers, executive direc
tor of the Housing Leadership Council of San Mateo County, which advocates for affordable housing.
Foster City — with the bay at its front door and the Pacific Ocean at its back — was identified as having a remarkable degree of vulnerability: More than 90% of its affordable housing is at risk of flooding or direct impacts from rising seas.
However, the repor t noted that its analysis did not take into account the city’s upcoming flood control measures. Foster City voters in 2018 approved a $90 million bond for levee improvements, parts of which are under construc
tion.
When that project is completed, “The level of exposure of the affordable units will be significantly much less than the previous estimate of 90%,” said Monica Ly, a Foster City assistant planner.
In addition, the city has an ordinance that requires all new private housing developments to set aside 20% of their units for low-income residents. Ly said that Foster City is one of only about two dozen towns in California to have met its affordable housing targets.
Rachel Morello-Frosch, a UC Berkeley environmental health scientist and study co-author, said the analysis can be a critical tool for local policymakers and planners.
“What this paper does is make sure that when we are talking about threats to people who live in affordable housing, we consider sea level rise,” MorelloFrosch said. “If we are going to preserve affordable housing stock in coastal areas, that’s going to require significant investment.”
The researchers used projections that take into account various scenarios about whether planet-warming greenhouse gases will continue to be emitted globally at their current pace.
In nearly all the topranked cities, the report found that the percentage of the affordable housing stock at risk of flooding exceeded that of the general housing stock. Corte Madera and Suisun City were among the communities with the widest disparities between which type of housing faced the greatest risk.
New Jersey was identified as “the most vulnerable state,” facing a fourfold increase in flooding from 2000 to 2050. New York City, Atlantic City and Boston had the highest absolute number of residential units at risk. But in the case of New York City, only 1% of its low-income housing was vulnerable to flooding.
Pen n s ylv a n ia , F lor - ida and South Carolina face the biggest projected growth from 2000 to 2050 in the percentage exposed to flooding, with increases of 792%, 774% and 669%, respectively.
“Nationwide, affordable housing is an increasingly scarce resource,” the study says. “Nationwide, there are only an estimated 35 affordable rental units available for every 100 extremely low-income renters … — a national shortfall of over 7 million units that impacts all 50 largest metropolitan areas. ”
Housing advocates said California can begin to shape a housing policy that addresses future risk if they pay attention to the science of sea level rise.
“It is absolutely not a surprise that low-income people have all these conditions that come together where they are the first and hardest to be hit by crisis,” said Amie Fishman, executive director of the NonProfit Housing Association of Northern California.
“We need comprehensive solutions to housing that take into account sea level rise. The solution is to make sure we are investing in quality and sustainable affordable housing. That is what we are doing in California, but there’s not enough.”