The Insurance Crisis Is a Housing Crisis

Home insurance markets in the United States are experiencing a mounting crisis. Worsening climate disasters like more intense hurricanes, wildfires, and hailstorms are making multi-billion-dollar payouts an annual occurrence, hitting a broad range of US states. Insurance protections are shrinking and becoming increasingly unaffordable, while private insurers are raising rates or pulling out of some markets entirely. Homeowners left behind face dilemmas like potential mortgage defaults—personal risks which may spiral into broader property market collapses. Meanwhile, renters and other households confront future uncertainties with even more limited protections. How can we more fully understand this mounting housing crisis, and what is to be done about it?Urban Development Managemen

Interrupted rhythms and uncertain futures: Mortgage finance and the (spatio-) temporalities of climate breakdown

As intensifying climate-related disasters strike cities across the United States, they are provoking rising concern for the stability of the U.S. housing market and broader financial system. How homeowners, mortgage lenders, federal institutions/regulators, and investors will variously encounter and manage climate risk is an urgent question for urban scholars, as is who might bear the costs of restabilizing mortgage finance under new breakdowns. This paper’s multi-scalar intervention draws on financial “following” methods to explore how climate risks are being experienced and governed at multiple illustrative moments of U.S. mortgage finance: (1) working households at the front line of urban climate impacts, (2) mortgage professionals brokering loans to them, (3) government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) negotiating incoming federal climate risk disclosure requirements, and (4) capital markets off-taking GSE risks through financial derivatives like credit risk transfers. Emerging concerns include ruptures between household risks and financial system-preserving responses and new dangers of “climate redlining.”.Urban Development Managemen