Most Tenants Get No Information About Flooding. It Can Cost Them Dearly
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The remnants of Hurricane Sandy churn up Lake Michigan in Chicago in 2012. Flood risk in the city is increasing as climate change drives more extreme rain, and renters face greater financial peril than homeowners. More than half of Chicagoans are renters, according to 2019 census data.
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«With tenants, people could just be moving around the city and be sitting on sort of a flooding time bomb, and they have no idea of it, says Marcella Bondie Keenan, program director of climate planning and programs for the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a think tank in Chicago that released a recent report on urban flooding.
More than half of Chicago residents are renters, according to 2019 census data. The same is true in other major cities, including Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles and Houston. Nationwide, about a third of Americans rent their homes. People of color are more likely to rent because discriminatory housing, employment and banking policies over the decades have kept many from owning homes. As a result, more than 70% of white Americans own homes, while fewer than 50% of Black and Latinx Americans do.
Bondie Keenan says the total number of tenants being harmed by urban flooding is difficult to ascertain because many people don’t want to speak publicly about flood damage to rental properties. Some fear retaliation by landlords, and others are overwhelmed by the damage and feel they have no recourse to fix it.
«There is definitely a sense of shame and embarrassment, to the point where it kind of kept people from organizing around the issue because no one wanted to admit that they had that problem, Bondie Keenan says.
But the scale of the flooding problem among tenants is clear to Philip DeVon, a Chicago attorney who works with the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, a tenant advocacy group in Chicago. Flooding often comes up on the group’s hotline, which gets about 10,000 calls annually, and most callers say they were not told that flooding was a possibility, DeVon says.
«I’ve never had someone call who expected the flooding or was even told it might happen, he says. The Illinois Rental Property Owners Association confirmed that information about past flooding or future flood risk «is not routinely shared with tenants.
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A 2018 storm caused widespread flooding in Boston, including in the Long Wharf area. Boston is one of many U.S. cities where underground apartments are common, and weather-driven flooding is an increasing threat to them.
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A 2018 storm caused widespread flooding in Boston, including in the Long Wharf area. Boston is one of many U.S. cities where underground apartments are common, and weather-driven flooding is an increasing threat to them.
Michael Dwyer/AP
Exacerbating inequities
The tenants at the highest risk are those whose living space is underground. Many people rent such apartments because they cost less.
In Chicago, for example, some affordable housing includes basement units, Bondie Keenan says. Underground apartments are also among the most affordable options in other cities on the front lines of climate-driven flooding, including Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, D.C.
Renters who lost their belongings in a flood are ineligible for some types of federal assistance available to homeowners. Federal disaster aid programs «end up funneling aid to homeowners rather than renters, the University of North Carolina’s Hino says. So there is less of a safety net available when renters lose their belongings, or when flooding renders their apartments uninhabitable.
As a result, the lack of flood risk disclosure to tenants likely contributes to unequal outcomes after flood disasters. Research after recent floods has found that renters who experience major disasters and do not have savings to fall back on are more likely to go bankrupt and to see their credit scores drop in the years after a disaster. And renters who are not white are even less likely than their white counterparts to receive federal aid after a flood, according to recent research about disaster assistance.
Stalled protections
Congress has both the incentive and the power to improve disclosure of flood risk to tenants and homebuyers. The vast majority of residential flood insurance is provided by the federal government and backed up by taxpayer dollars, including flood insurance policies covering the belongings of tenants. The National Flood Insurance Program is about $20 billion in debt due to increasingly widespread flood disasters.
But repeated congressional efforts have failed to overhaul the program and provide more information about the location and frequency of flood risk. One reason is that elected officials of both parties fear that more flood disclosure could drive down their constituents’ property values.
Kevin Donnelly, vice president for government affairs for the National Multifamily Housing Council, says his group has worked on multiple plans that would give tenants information about past or future flooding. But he says that the «provisions have never been enacted as a result of the congressional stalemate over reauthorizing and reforming the [National Flood Insurance Program].
A handful of flood-prone states, including New York and Virginia, have considered new flood disclosure requirements in recent years. But the proposals haven’t made it through the state legislatures and would only apply to potential homebuyers, not renters.
A new flood disclosure law in Texas, adopted after Hurricane Harvey hit the state in 2017, requires that people selling homes disclose to buyers if the building was damaged by flooding, or if it is in a flood plain or has flood insurance. But landlords or property managers are not required to disclose the same information to renters.
The impact of flooding on tenants is so prevalent in Houston that multiple candidates running for City Council last year advocated for new rules requiring that flood risk be disclosed to tenants. So far, the city has not enacted such a requirement.
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