Rising Seas Are Going to Create a Huge Property Tax Headache for Coastal Communities

People are becoming increasingly worried about how they’ll be impacted when rising seas swallow up coastal properties. For starters, there are the homeowners who live on the threatened land. And then there are the mortgage lenders and home insurers who have a financial stake in those properties. But indirectly, anyone who relies on public education, fire departments, and other municipal services should be concerned when parcels of land fall below the tide line. Because when land disappears, so too, does the property tax revenue that it generates to fund those public services. The threat of this revenue loss to U.S. communities was freshly illustrated in a land risk analysis published Thursday by Climate Central, an organization focused on tracking how extreme climate conditions and rising sea levels are affecting local communities. According to the report, individual properties along the U.S. coast—collectively the size of 75% of New Jersey—are projected to be partly or fully submerged in about 30 years. Billions of tax dollars are likely to wash away with them, which will strain government and school district budgets. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The findings, derived from water boundary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and sea level rise models from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that nearly 650,000 tax parcels totaling 4.4 million acres may be impacted, with 48,000 of them entirely...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized adaptation climate climate change embargoed study extreme weather finance healthscienceclimate Source Type: news