Why environmental risk matters for housing & home loans
Environmental hazards can undermine collateral value through physical damage and diminished rebuild potential, while also driving up ownership costs via higher insurance premiums, costly mitigation measures, and recurring losses. They may amplify income and payment shocks by causing business interruptions or displacements, and can ripple through markets by constraining liquidity, slowing transactions, and tightening underwriting standards. Integrating hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and historical loss data enables more precise quantification of tail risks, regional pricing dynamics, and portfolio sensitivities.
- Flood & surge: NFHL maps, NFIP policies/claims, sea-level & tidal flooding rasters.
- Severe weather: Storm Events (hail, wind, tornado, etc.) and billion-dollar disaster tallies.
- Wildfire: Current/archived perimeters, burn severity (MTBS), wildland-urban interface (WUI).
- Earthquake: USGS event catalogs and feeds for historical frequency/severity.
- Drought & heat: U.S. Drought Monitor time series & GIS for agricultural/structural stress.
- Exposure & vulnerability layers: Land cover/imperviousness, soils, social vulnerability, air quality.
Datasets (official sources)
FEMA & Flood Risk
- National Flood Hazard Layer (NFHL) overview
- Flood Map Service Center (NFHL downloads by area)
- NFHL web services (WMS/WFS)
- National Risk Index (county/tract CSVs & geodata)
- OpenFEMA — NFIP Redacted Claims (v2)
- OpenFEMA — NFIP Redacted Policies (v2)
- OpenFEMA — Disaster Declarations Summaries (v2)
- OpenFEMA — Hazard Mitigation Assistance Projects (v4)
- OpenFEMA — Mitigated Properties
- OpenFEMA — Public Assistance Funded Projects (v2)
- OpenFEMA — IHP Valid Registrations (v2)
- FEMA Hazus (software & Loss Library)
- Hazus software details
- Hazus Inventory National Database (fact sheet)
NOAA — Flooding, Sea Level, Severe Weather
USGS — Earthquakes & Water
Wildfire — NIFC, MTBS & WUI
Drought & Heat Exposure
Air Quality (chronic exposure)
Exposure, Vulnerability & Land/Soils
How to use these in housing market & credit risk workflows
- Property-level overlays: Intersect parcels/lat-lon with NFHL zones, WUI, burn severity, flood depth rasters, storm paths.
- Neighborhood roll-ups: Aggregate hazard exposure to census tract/ZIP/county to explain price dispersion, DOM, listings, and rent growth.
- Portfolio stress: Shock insurance costs, event frequencies, and repair cost inflation using Storm Events & historical losses.
- Underwriting flags: Combine SVI, NLCD imperviousness, soils (gSSURGO), and USDM drought levels to identify chronic-risk hotspots.
Notes
- Most links provide CSVs, APIs, or GIS layers suitable for automation in ETL pipelines.
- OpenFEMA datasets refresh on rolling schedules; check each page for cadence and versioning.
- NOAA’s Billion-Dollar Disasters dataset remains accessible but is not being updated beyond 2024; for current loss accounting, rely on primary hazard datasets and agency reports.