USA Today: 300,000 coastal homes in US, worth $120 billion, at risk of chronic floods from rising seas

Article Posted on June 18, 2018

By: Doyle Rice, USA Today

Hundreds of thousands of homes along U.S. coasts are at risk of devastating coastal flooding over the next 30 years as climate change causes oceans to rise, according to a new study.

About 311,000 coastal homes, worth about $120 billion, are at risk of chronic flooding, the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science advocacy group, said in the report released Monday.

By the end of the century, homes and businesses currently worth more than $1 trillion — including those in Miami, New York's Long Island and the San Francisco Bay area — could be at risk.

"This risk is relatively near-term, well before places go underwater completely, and even in the absence of storms," Rachel Cleetus, lead economist with the group, told Agence France-Presse. "This is a slow-moving disaster."

"In contrast with previous housing market crashes, values of properties chronically inundated due to sea level rise are unlikely to recover and will only continue to go further underwater, literally and figuratively,” Cleetus said.

States with the most homes at risk by the end of the century are Florida, with about 1 million homes (more than 10 percent of the state's current residential properties); New Jersey, with 250,000 homes; and New York with 143,000 homes…


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