2023/08/03 by Sarah Knuth, Savannah Cox, Sahar Zavareh Hofmann +3 · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Decision Sciences · #Housing Market and Economics #demographic modeling and climate adaptation #Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/07352166.2023.2229462
openalex publication_date 2023/08/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
As intensifying climate-related disasters strike cities across the United States, they are provoking rising concern for the stability of the U.S. housing market and broader financial system. How homeowners, mortgage lenders, federal institutions/regulators, and investors will variously encounter and manage climate risk is an urgent question for urban scholars, as is who might bear the costs of restabilizing mortgage finance under new breakdowns. This paper’s multi-scalar intervention draws on financial “following” methods to explore how climate risks are being experienced and governed at multiple illustrative moments of U.S. mortgage finance: (1) working households at the front line of urban climate impacts, (2) mortgage professionals brokering loans to them, (3) government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) negotiating incoming federal climate risk disclosure requirements, and (4) capital markets off-taking GSE risks through financial derivatives like credit risk transfers. Emerging concerns include ruptures between household risks and financial system-preserving responses and new dangers of “climate redlining.”