The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Main Topic: Home Prices on a Warming Planet
Dear Diary. It makes logical sense that across coastal areas of the U.S. and elsewhere house prices will be falling for the rest of this century due to sea level rise and in the case of the Gulf and East Coasts, stronger hurricanes. Not many will buy a house if they know that within a couple of decades it will be under water and succumb to ocean waves.
Also, home prices will dip fast in fire prone areas that have become distinct across California and wooded areas mainly dotting the West. We have already delved into insurance rates, which have nearly become prohibitive for building homes in disaster prone areas.
A recent New York Times article delves into this aspect of the climate crisis. Personally, I’m glad that I don’t own a home near the seashore, but I feel for people who do.
Home Prices on a Warming Planet – The New York Times
Home Prices on a Warming Planet
New research shows that climate change is beginning to erode home prices in the most disaster-prone areas of the United States. Here’s what to know.
Flooding in Lafitte, La., after Hurricane Ida in 2021. Places that are most vulnerable to climate-related disasters like hurricanes, fires and hail are seeing some of the largest premium increases. Credit…Johnny Milano for The New York Times
By Claire Brown and Mira Rojanasakul
Nov. 20, 2025
Over the last few years, we’ve written about how climate change has driven home insurance prices way up for many Americans. And we’ve reported that insurers are losing money and dropping homeowners in a home insurance market that’s wildly distorted.
But now these high insurance costs are cascading into the broader real estate market, suppressing home values by an average of $44,000 in the top 10 percent of U.S. ZIP codes most vulnerable to hurricanes and wildfires.
That’s according to first-of-its-kind research that we reported on yesterday.
The researchers Benjamin Keys and Philip Mulder analyzed more than 74 million housing payments made between 2014 and 2024 to understand how much people are paying for home insurance and how insurance prices are affecting the rest of the real estate market.
They turned up some of the best evidence yet that chaos in the insurance market is starting to eat into the real estate market in some places, a scenario that experts have dreaded for years.
Read our article here and explore what’s happening with insurance costs in your area.
If you’re willing, we’d love it if you’d tell us about your home insurance experience on home insurance to help us figure out where to look next. (You can also write to us at climateforward@nytimes.com or respond to this email.)
Here’s what else you need to know.
Insurance costs are increasingly eating into household budgets
In some areas of the country that are exposed to disasters, homes are not selling because prospective buyers can’t afford both the mortgage and the insurance. Owning a home is thought of as a way of locking in predictable housing costs. But some of the homeowners we spoke to had seen insurance rates double or quadruple, making them wonder if they can afford to stay in homes they’ve lived in for decades.
Source: Keys and Mulder (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2025). Credit…The New York Times
In parts of the hail-prone Midwestern states, for example, insurance now eats up more than one-fifth of the average homeowner’s total housing payments, including mortgage costs and property taxes. In Orleans Parish, La., that number is nearly 30 percent.
Insurance costs have soared in areas exposed to higher climate risk
Nationally, insurance rates have risen by an average of 58 percent since 2018, outpacing inflation by a substantial margin. But that growth has been highly uneven across the United States.
Places that are most vulnerable to climate-related disasters like hurricanes, fires and hail are seeing some of the largest premium increases. They include parts of Colorado, coastal Louisiana and Oklahoma.
Still, it’s not always the case that the highest climate risk translates into the highest insurance costs. Local policies and regulations have helped keep prices lower in high-risk places, like parts of California. Other factors, like a homeowner’s credit score, can affect premiums, too.
What’s driving up insurance prices?
Since 2017, an obscure part of the insurance market, known as reinsurance, has helped push up premiums. Insurance companies buy reinsurance to help limit their exposure when a catastrophe hits. Over the past several years, reinsurance companies have experienced what the researchers who led the new study call a “climate epiphany.” As a result, the rates they charge to protect home insurance companies against catastrophic losses have roughly doubled since 2017.
Insurance providers have, in turn, passed these costs on to homeowners. The rapid repricing of climate risk is responsible for about 20 percent of home insurance premium increases since 2017, according to Dr. Keys and Dr. Mulder.
What else is contributing to high rates? Rebuilding costs are responsible for about 35 percent of the recent changes, the research found. Population shifts and inflation are factors, too.
High insurance rates are weighing down home values
Since 2018, this financial shock in the home insurance market has meant that homes in the ZIP codes most exposed to hurricanes and wildfires sell for less than they otherwise would have, the research found. The top 25 percent of ZIP codes exposed to disasters have seen home values decrease by an average $21,000, and the estimate for the top 10 percent is $44,000.
In many places, insurance has been a relatively small part of the home-buying equation. Now, for many, it’s a major consideration, and it’s even stopping some from buying a home.
For several homeowners we interviewed in Louisiana, monthly insurance costs are now higher than their home loan payments.
This chart shows change in the Zillow Home Value Index since 2018. Credit…The New York Times
This is the scenario some real estate experts have been warning about for years. They worry that climbing insurance costs will have a domino effect, causing local real estate markets to freeze up, housing prices to decline and government services to shrink as property tax revenue falls.
Policymakers like Michael Conway, Colorado’s insurance commissioner, are trying to come up with fixes to prevent this from happening.
“We don’t want a situation where the insurance market is effectively decimating the real estate market,” he said.
Here are some “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Sunday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)