Hurricane Harvey, the worst storm to hit the nation in a decade, pummeled the Gulf Coast over the weekend, claiming at least five lives and injuring more than a dozen. News channels and websites were filled with images of city streets turned into waterways; hundreds of thousands of homes could be left devastated as a result of the storm. And with torrential rains and record floodwaters battering southeastern Texas, the suffering is expected to continue long after the waters have receded.
Nearly 233,000 Texas homes are at risk of storm damage from Hurricane Harvey, according to a CoreLogic analysis. That could bring the total cost of devastation to almost $40 billion, according to the real estate information and analytics company.
“Hundreds of thousands of people are going to be displaced for weeks,” says Tom Larsen, CoreLogic’s director of content strategy. “There’s going to be a significant disruption.”
Making it even worse is that typically, about 9 out of 10 of those whose homes are damaged in big storms don’t have flood insurance, he says.
Much of the damage is expected to occur in the Houston metropolitan area, where about two-thirds of all residential and commercial properties suffer from moderate to extreme risk of flooding, according to a separate CoreLogic analysis. That could cost homeowners about $20.8 billion to rebuild.
The property information company predicts that nearly 11.5% of those Houston-area properties are at very high or extreme risk. Another 52% of properties that are not in a special flood hazard area, which means their owners aren’t required to carry flood insurance if they received a federally issued mortgage, are at moderate or high risk.
For other metro areas in Texas, CoreLogic expects that 57% of properties in Bay City, 55% in Beaumont, 35% in both Corpus Christi and Victoria, 22% in College State, and 18% in Austin are at moderate to high risk of flooding.
If the aftermath of Harvey is anything like the aftermath of Katrina, many homeowners may walk away from their properties at a loss, says real estate appraiser Randall Bell, CEO of Landmark Research Group, a firm based in Laguna Beach, CA, that specializes in disasters. Others will sell at a loss. Those determined to stay may be forced to fight with their insurance companies over whether their home damage was caused by wind or water—which determines whether the homeowner insurance company or the flood insurance company is on the hook for the damages.
And once a home is damaged in a storm, that could depress its value in future.
“There’s the perception that if it can happen once, it can happen again,” Larsen says.
The timing of Hurricane Harvey is particularly problematic because the National Flood Insurance Program, which is expected to receive an onslaught of new claims as a result of Harvey, is set to expire on Sept. 30. Plus, the program can only borrow up to $5.8 billion from the U.S. Department of the Treasury for new claims, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“This uncertainty of paying for your repairs adds a lot of stress and delays,” says CoreLogic’s Larsen. “It slows down the recovery.”
