Interrupted rhythms and uncertain futures

Interrupted rhythms and uncertain futures: Mortgage finance and the (spatio-) temporalities of climate breakdown

Knuth, Sarah (Durham University)
Cox, Savannah (University of Sheffield)
Zavareh Hofmann, Sahar (University of Trier)
Morris, John (University of Nottingham)
Taylor, Zac (TU Delft Urban Development Management)
McElvain, Beki (University of California)

2023

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.”.

climate risk
Finance
financial disclosure
hazards
housing
mortgage finance
United States

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:c207a1a3-4135-47da-897c-6828b80b254b

https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2023.2229462

0735-2166

Journal of Urban Affairs, 1-18

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 Sarah Knuth, Savannah Cox, Sahar Zavareh Hofmann, John Morris, Zac Taylor, Beki McElvain