Abstract
Flood impacts to residential properties threaten the resilience of
communities and the institutions that support them. These events can
cause negative impacts to property-level balance sheets through
uninsured damage and property value decreases, which in turn can
increase the likelihood of mortgage default and property abandonment. To
date, there have been limited attempts to quantify the magnitude and
distribution of additional financial consequences that could arise from
these processes following flood events. In this work, property-scale
financial data, including property sales, mortgage originations, and
insurance claims, are used within an analytical framework to quantify
flood-related uninsured damages and property value decrease in order to
estimate the financial risk that property owners, mortgage lenders, and
local governments are exposed to via recovery decisions (i.e., default
and/or abandonment). This framework is applied to residential properties
in eastern North Carolina following Hurricane Florence (2018). Within
the study area, Hurricane Florence generated $366M in observed insured
losses and we estimate an additional $1.77B in balance sheet losses
(i.e., uninsured damage and property value decrease). In addition,
property owners, mortgage lenders, and local governments were exposed to
an estimated $562M of risk from the increased likelihood of mortgage
default and property abandonment. Areas with lower pre-event property
values and lower rates of insurance purchase experienced significantly
higher risk of mortgage default and abandonment. The method described
provides more highly resolved estimates of how floods can drive systemic
financial risk, information that can be useful in developing improved
flood resilience strategies.