Extreme Weather Is Making It Even Harder to Buy a Home in America

Housing affordability issues are plaguing the United States. The inflation of property values and taxes on homes largely stems from environmental disasters caused by extreme weather conditions, which themselves are often an offshoot of climate change.

Whether it’s a fire in Colorado or hurricanes in the Gulf Coast and Atlantic, extreme weather is pushing the lower and middle classes out of their homes, who are then replaced with opportunistic rich people.

CNN reports that the housing market has seen a rapid increase in prices, a lot of which can be attributed to the skyrocketing costs of insurance premiums, which affected both the home-buying market and the rental market. Some of this can also be attributed to price gouging and a lack of accessible disaster funding.

The aftermath of the December 2021 Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado, offers a glimpse into how pre-existing issues in the US housing market are being compounded by disasters. The fire destroyed over 1,000 homes, and caused over $2 billion in damages, making it the state’s costliest wildfire.

In the aftermath, many residents found themselves unable to return to their homes due to outrageous rebuilding costs and gentrification. Many residents left their lower-middle-class homes ruined by fire only to return to find them replaced with lavish, multimillion-dollar houses, a sign that their former neighborhood was no longer for them.

With that kind of money flowing into neighborhoods came with it the NIMBYs, the not-in-my-backyard attitudes from wealthy gentrifiers who are resistant to affordable housing out of fear that it will lower their own property values and bring undesirables into their neighborhoods

This is, of course, not an issue specific to Boulder, Colorado. Replace grass fires with hurricanes and you get the same issue in Florida and Louisiana. Wherever disaster strikes, you can bank on the poor getting pushed out and the rich swooping in to scoop up the lower-valued properties.

One way to solve this problem would be with legislation protecting renters and lower-income homeowners. There are a series of other solutions like community land trusts, better-targeted disaster assistance, and eviction moratoria post-disaster.

All of it could ensure more equitable recovery after disasters, but that means state and federal politicians would actually have to care about people in the lower middle classes instead of kowtowing to the whims of the rich, so there’s very little chance of any of that happening.