SUL research published in the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics

Professor Siqi Zheng published new research, “Annoyed, but Not Alarmed: Sea Level Rise, Chronic Inundation, and Coastal Housing Markets” in the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, contributing to the scholarly conversation on urban real estate markets and investment dynamics.

Coastal communities are projected to experience 50–100 days of high-tide flooding (HTF) annually by the mid-2040s. While such chronic inundation would pose serious threats to livability, surprisingly little is known about how these risks are priced into coastal housing markets. Leveraging plausibly random variation in HTF occurrences, we find that exposure to HTF depresses both rents and home prices, with the impact on rents being three times larger—suggesting that homebuyers anticipate future recovery in rental values. We show that this optimism likely stems from expectations of future adaptation, particularly by governments.