Moving Out of a Flood Zone? That May Be Risky!

Kristian Blickle, Katherine Engelman, Theo Linnemann and Joao Santos

No 20230420b, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: An often-overlooked aspect of flood-plain mapping is the fact that these maps designate stark boundaries, with households falling either inside or outside of areas designated as “flood zones.” Households inside flood zones must insure themselves against the possibility of disasters. However, costly insurance may have pushed lower-income households out of areas officially designated a flood risk and into physically adjacent areas. While not designated an official flood risk, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and disaster data shows that these areas are still at considerable risk of flooding. In this post, we examine whether flood maps may have inadvertently clustered those households financially less able to bear the consequences of a disaster into areas that may still pose a significant flood risk.

Keywords: insurance; floods; flood risk; climate; climate change; flood maps; neighborhood composition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 G2 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-04-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2023 ... e-that-may-be-risky/ Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednls:96026

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().