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Scientists are mapping landslide risk in Alaska

toomuchtodo

> Scientists Are Mapping Landslide Risk in Alaska. Some Homeowners Don’t Want to Know.

As long as insurance companies and risk raters for mortgage backed securities know, that should be enough.

drivingmenuts

People need to know it so they can determine the veracity of mortgage companies and insurance companies, etc. Those companies might not lie, but they might fudge the numbers a bit and people need to know how much they’re being fudged. it might also help people just avoid an area where the landslide risk is too great, which they might not do if they didn’t know the risk.

toomuchtodo

Strongly agree, excellent point. Zillow now surfaces climate risk data from First Street to users. The same should be done for landslide maps, to workaround stakeholders trying to avoid and hide the risk data to prop up valuations. Current landowners are simply pretending the value destruction has not yet occurred if they can ignore the data.

Climate change isn’t simply forward looking expensive, it has already destroyed substantial value across various asset classes; markets just haven’t caught up yet with regards to price discovery. Very similar to the condo crisis in Florida. It’s always “extend and pretend” disappointingly.

https://investors.zillowgroup.com/investors/news-and-events/...

https://firststreet.org/

malshe

> Residents of Juneau, the state capital and the region’s biggest city at just over 31,000 people, convinced assembly members in the city to vote against adopting the maps, claiming they could lower their property values. “You have something that for many people is their biggest investment,” said Shawn Eisele, a Juneau resident, referring to homeowners in his neighborhood. “If you create a landslide zone, that’s a huge impact on those people.”

Market for lemons(1), indeed

(1) https://www.jstor.org/stable/1879431