"Your house will get wet"

Why aren't coastal home buyers and owners (and renters) told about future flood risk?

Last week, New York State passed a bill requiring home sellers to disclose whether their properties have been flooded in the past. While that's modestly good news, it's important to pay attention to the huge gap in disclosure that this new statute leaves. It's a gap that persists across the US save in Hawaii. 

Here it is: Although scientists are confident that the coasts of the US will experience rapidly accelerating sea level rise over the next several decades (with no end in sight) and that abrupt changes in the velocity of that rise are more than plausible, no level of government is saying this publicly in the form of planning guidance.

This disclosure failure is putting hundreds of communities and millions of Americans at risk, and will play out in miserable ways across this country for many years to come. The gap represents a failure of leadership, stewardship, and common sense, and it's repeated in this brand new New York State statute.

To be sure, the newly-revised statute is a clear improvement over the old one, which allowed home-sellers to get out of making any flood disclosures to prospective buyers as long as the sellers forked over $500 at closing. That zany provision was unique in the US, and led "many sellers to treat the the requirement to provide the disclosure statement as optional, and the $500 credit as merely a cost of doing business," according to the drafters of the revised statute. So far, so good.

The new statute, though, requires only that sellers disclose whether part or all of the property is located in a FEMA-designated floodplain, a FEMA-designated "special flood hazard area," or a 500-year floodplain (again, according to FEMA). The sellers also have to say whether the property is required under federal law to be covered by flood insurance, whether they have ever sought (or are aware of prior owners having sought) any form of federal disaster flood assistance, and whether they themselves have flood insurance. Finally, they have to disclose that HOMES IN COASTAL AREAS MAY BE SUBJECT TO INCREASED RISK OF FLOODING OVER TIME DUE TO  PROJECTED SEA LEVEL RISE AND INCREASED EXTREME STORMS CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE WHICH MAY NOT BE REFLECTED IN CURRENT FLOOD INSURANCE RATE MAPS.

Imagine you are a home-buyer reading that all-caps disclosure. What do you get out of it? What is the projected sea level rise for your new home, the sanctuary you're planning to make part of your estate and pass down to generations to come? You have no idea.

FEMA floodplain maps, whether for floods that have a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year ("100-year" floods), or a 0.25 percent chance of happening in any year ("500-year" floods), are widely understood to greatly underestimate flooding risks. The eleven New York residents who drowned in flooding caused by Hurricane Ida in 2021? Their homes were outside FEMA 100-year flood zones. About half of flooding claims made in Houston before Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017 came from homeowners whose houses were outside FEMA's flood zones. 

The problem is that FEMA's maps don't take into account future flood risks due to climate change, including risks from precipitation and urban flooding from development. Although FEMA is required by law to include the "best available science" from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) "regarding future changes in sea levels, precipitation, and hurricane intensity," when updating its maps, it hasn't done so yet. 

Now, in setting the terms of its own federal flood insurance program, FEMA does give credit to communities that adopt an estimate of anticipated sea level rise that is as least as high as NOAA's "intermediate-high" projection for 2100.* So the agency clearly knows that this good science from NOAA is available and that this level of projection is sensible given what scientists are already observing. 

That "intermediate-high" projection by 2100 should be a government-wide formal policy recommendation. It calls for more than five feet of SLR by 2100 on the East Coast of the US, and even that is conservative (watch that sea ice around Antarctica).

Instead, buyers are on their own. There's no guidance as to what level of sea level rise to assume. If they know about all this, they need to go to NOAA's Sea Level Rise Viewer at https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/, click "get started," put in the name of their town (let's use Larchmont, NY), click on "local scenarios," click "intermediate high," see that 4.99 feet of SLR is predicted by 2100, plug in their address, and see where the blue water is predicted to be by then. Who’s going to do that?

Absent any national policy clarity, everyone's defaulting to FEMA's current faulty maps—including the New York State legislature. To avoid scaring the public, lots of planners keep blinders on, looking only at 2050 rather than 2100, and often focusing on even lower levels of sea level rise than NOAA's "intermediate high." There's lots of inconsistent and short-sighted planning going on at the community level as a result. 

The consequences of this gap are profound. Buyers don't know what they're getting into. Communities are avoiding planning for a very-quickly-changing future, and as a result may be losing options with each passing day.

It will take decades to plan and then remove infrastructure along the coasts (roads, communications lines, sewage, water, power). It will take decades to plan and build new, safer places for people to live. Cities, states, and the federal government need to put buyers on notice of the risks both to avoid having more people crowding into increasingly risky places and to avoid legal claims in the years to come that nothing is allowed to change. We have to start now. 

Hawaii, to its credit, does this to a limited extent. There, beginning last year, sellers have to disclose whether their property lies within the Sea Level Rise Exposure Area, which is the area of shoreline that could be impacted by 3.2 feet of sea level rise. That's the NOAA "intermediate high" level for Honolulu by about 2075. It's forward-looking. It's helpful. 

New York State's new statute is a good start. When she signed the bill into law last week, NY Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that "Today marks a monumental step forward in our mission to protect New Yorkers from the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events." It's a step, surely, but it’s not monumental. In a world in which so much depends on putting all the risks on the table and facing them as a society, it falls far short of what's needed.

* You can find this FEMA “intermediate-high” requirement in the National Flood Insurance Program Coordinators' Manual Addendum from 2021, page A-43, second paragraph: “For information, outreach, and planning elements (including those under Activities 410, 450, and 510) and meeting CRS Class prerequisites, the community must project out at least to the year 2100 using the intermediate-high projection from the latest-available National Climate Assessment projection at the time of its planning process.”