The Value of Resilience: Flood Risk, Information Disclosure, and Housing Markets in New York City

Abstract

Flood risk increasingly shapes where households live, how much they pay for housing, and how safety is traded off against affordability in U.S. urban housing markets. As climate change intensifies flooding hazards and expands exposure beyond traditionally recognized high-risk areas, many households face constrained choices between safer locations and affordable housing. Historically, housing markets have often failed to fully price flood risk, reflecting limited disclosure, uneven risk communication, and uncertainty about whether public mitigation investments meaningfully reduce risk. As flood risk information becomes more visible and as governments invest in resilience, understanding how households and markets navigate the trade-off between safety and housing costs is critical for equitable urban policy. This dissertation examines how flood risk, information disclosure, and mitigation investments interact to shape housing market outcomes, with a particular focus on New York City. The first study systematically reviews the empirical literature on climate-related hazards and housing prices, highlighting how research has evolved from disaster-focused analyses toward frameworks that examine ongoing risk exposure and household decision-making. The review emphasizes how flood risk introduces a persistent safety-affordability trade-off in housing markets and identifies gaps in how studies account for information disclosure and mitigation as mechanisms that may alter this balance. The second study examines how the evolving flood-risk information environment, including the release of risk data on real estate platforms and new disclosure requirements, affects housing prices over time using an interrupted time series approach. The findings show modest and uneven market responses, with disclosure events shifting housing price trends rather than causing abrupt repricing, suggesting gradual diffusion of flood-risk information in housing markets. The third study evaluates whether community-level flood mitigation activities influence the relationship between flood risk and housing prices using transaction-level hedonic models. The findings show that some mitigation investments can partially offset the negative capitalization of flood risk by signaling improved safety and resilience, although the magnitude of these effects varies across neighborhoods and types of intervention. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that flood risk is not simply capitalized into housing prices but negotiated through trade-offs among safety, affordability, and trust in public action. Risk disclosure can gradually reshape market behavior by increasing the visibility and salience of climate risk, while mitigation investments influence whether households view flood-prone locations as viable long-term housing options. By linking flood risk analytics, market behavior, and public investment, this dissertation provides policy-relevant insights into how cities can manage climate risk while addressing housing affordability and social equity.