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Rising seas: California’s affordable housing faces worse floods

For low-income Americans, the number of homes at risk of flooding could triple by 2050, researchers say. Three Bay Area cities are among the top at-risk communities.
Credit: Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters
A man walks along a pathway closed due to levee construction in Foster City on Dec. 2, 2020. In 2018, Foster City passed a bond measure to fund levee repair in order to avoid residents having to pay for flood insurance in the future. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters

CALIFORNIA, USA — California’s crisis of affordable housing appears to be running smack into another intractable problem: sea level rise

A new study published this week projects that the number of affordable housing units at risk of flooding in the United States is projected to more than triple by 2050.

“In terms of the absolute number of units exposed….threats are primarily clustered in smaller cities in California and in the northeastern United States,” the study found. 

Three Bay Area cities are included in the top 20 at-risk cities in the United States identified by the researchers: Corte Madera in Marin County, Foster City in San Mateo County and Suisun City in Solano County. 

Affordable housing has a greater chance of flooding than general housing “in nearly all of the top-ranked cities,” according to the researchers.

In California, the number of affordable housing units in danger of flooding is expected to increase 40% by 2050, the analysis found. 

Scientists say floods have worsened in recent decades along the nation’s coasts, and they project that rising seas triggered by climate change will increase the frequency of routine tidal flooding as well as extreme floods.

Conducted by environmental scientists and the non-profit research group Climate Central, the findings shine a light on a harsh truth about climate change: The impacts fall most often on the less fortunate.

“Climate impacts are not evenly distributed,” said Lara Cushing a UCLA environmental health scientist and one of the report’s authors. “We know that low income communities and communities of color are more vulnerable.

“Affordable housing units may be physically more vulnerable to climate impacts if they are built to older housing codes, and less structurally sound,” she said.

“And the people living in affordable units—the disabled, single parents, seniors, people of color—have fewer resources to cope with flooding impacts, they tend to have less political influence on where government invests resources on flood mitigation and are less likely to be insured.”

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