Climate risk & housing
Are climate risks priced into housing markets?
Housing is local. So is exposure to extreme weather. This project brings those two stories together, exploring how U.S. county housing markets relate to climate risk and how their trajectories look around major events.
The question
Do counties with different climate-risk ratings show different housing-market patterns? And what can we learn by looking at the months before and after extreme weather events?
The project focuses on Redfin’s median sale price per square foot, measured as year-over-year change. That gives the analysis a concrete housing outcome to compare across places and through time.
What I built
- A layered analytical database: raw records remain separate from the tables used for comparisons and publication.
- Event-window analysis: housing observations are aligned before event start and after event end, with distinct three- and five-year post-event views.
- An interactive story: county geography, housing histories, risk-group comparisons, and a Climate Playbook are published as a static D3 experience.
- Supporting notebooks and methodology: quality checks, feature exploration, and event diagnostics sit alongside the final story.
Explore the evidence
Start with county housing histories, compare FEMA risk groups, then examine the event-relative views. The feature analysis asks which economic and demographic characteristics accompany stronger or weaker housing growth within the same risk group.
These views answer different questions and can use different cohorts. The grouped event charts require complete observations across their displayed windows; a five-year view can therefore contain fewer trajectories than a three-year view.
The comparisons describe associations, not causal effects of climate risk on prices. County summaries hide neighborhood differences; event windows may overlap; and today’s FEMA risk snapshot is applied to historical periods. The Climate Playbook’s combined score is a rule-based presentation heuristic, not a validated prediction or calibrated risk estimate.
Why this project belongs here
It connects the engineering work behind an analysis with the experience of exploring it. The database, geography, cohort definitions, and storytelling all have to agree for the final page to be useful.