This is a guest post from Wellington-based Kasey McDonnell, which originally appeared on their blog threesixtysix,. It is republished here with kind permission.
Kasey’s story is grounded in Whanganui-a-Tara examples, but of course we’re keen to hear from our readers with similar experiences in Tåmaki Makaurau. What are you hearing and encountering out there, if you’re currently looking to buy a climate-resilient home.
Buying a home is one of the biggest choices you’ll ever make.
Bundled in that one decision is a thousand factors that define your life. Your community, your bills, and who you’ll depend on in an emergency. In a changing climate, house buying comes with new risks.
Climate change might feel far away, but it’s affecting us now. The seas might not eat the shore for decades, but pollution-powered floods and storms are already destroying Kiwi homes.
We bought a house this year and all this was swimming through my mind. What risks should we consider? Which homes are safer in a warming world?
The Ministry for the Environment estimates that nearly 15,000 homes across the motu could be seriously damaged by storm surges or floods by 2060. The repair bill could be around $4.8b. We don’t know that for sure, though. It could be anything from $1.8b to $12.9b.
In the first of a two part series, I want to delve into climate and housing. Then, we’ll explore how our housing choices can solve the pollution problem. Today, we’re going to learn about what you should look out for if you’re looking to buy.
High temperature living
It was a muggy afternoon at a Mount Cook open home. Early on, I asked the real estate agent if it was possible to install a heat pump. She replied that we shouldn’t worry, because the place got quite warm.
That’s what I worried about – heat waves. After a year living in an overheated apartment, we didn’t want to risk heat exhaustion in sweltering summers. Heat pumps are a fantastic way to keep cool.
She retorted with a patronising tone. “You know we’re in Wellington, right?”
Wellington’s summers will continue getting warmer. It’s important to have somewhere that stays cool. We… didn’t buy from that real estate agent.
It’s unnerving how many in property have no knowledge or interest in how a warming world affects their product.
Like I covered last year, many townhouses and apartments are poorly designed for hotter summers. Badly designed homes trap heat and bodycorps can flat out deny owners from installing a heat pump.
Whenever we looked at a house, we always checked how easy it was to heat and cool. We always asked:
- How hot does it get here in summer?
- What’s the body corporate process for installing a heat pump?
- What’s the ventilation like?
The uncertainty of natural hazards
Many real estate agents know the earthquake risk of a house like the back of their hand. It’s harder to get information about disaster risk from storms, floods, and slips.
Wellington’s geography means there are many risks to consider. In Lyall Bay, some homes are low lying and at risk of storm surges. Some places in Tawa are vulnerable to extreme flooding. Homes on our steep hills could slip in a downpour.
To get some broad idea on risky areas, Greater Wellington offers a map which shows which areas are vulnerable to natural hazards. Unfortunately, it’s hard for normal people to understand. Seriously, who is expected to understand the meaning of a 0.23% AEP flood? (It means once in a 440 year flood. Now you know!)
Without clear insights for people seeking to buy, it’s easy to fall into being way too chill about it or crashing out. More home buyers need to have easy ways to know the risk and understand what those risks mean.
People have different risk tolerances. The main thing we avoided was flood prone areas. To gauge the risk, we always checked:
- local flood maps
- storm surge maps
- sea level elevation.
The hazard of insurance
Most banks won’t give you a mortgage without house insurance. As the climate changes, so does the math on whether a house is worth insuring. The risk of disasters is increasing, which means that homes at greater risk of climate disaster will get more expensive to insure.
Tower Insurance is the first to respond to growing climate risk. They now decide the cost of content and home insurance based on how at risk your home is to natural hazards. A home might be a bargain because the insurance bill is eye-watering. Sometime soon, the most at risk homes could be refused insurance entirely.
At least 10,000 New Zealand homes in our biggest four cities sit in the once in a century flood zones alone. Some of those homes are in places like Tawa or Upper Hutt. It’s unclear how expensive it’ll get to insure them.
This is one of the constant challenges with a warming world. Things we understood as solid ground become quicksand. We, understandably, take for granted the foundations of a stable climate. We can’t assume it will stay the same any more.
To manage the risk of skyrocketing insurance, we checked:
- if there have been any insurance claims on the property before
- the cost of body corporate or insurance to see if there was something to be nervous about.
Our death rate from disasters is low. The most fatal years (2011 and 2019) were from the Christchurch Earthquake and Whakaari White Island’s eruption. Cyclone Gabrielle killed 11 people, a death rate of 0.22 people per 100,000.
Why this all matters
We live in a paradoxical world: even as our weather events become more chaotic, our disaster death rate remains remarkably low. Our improved emergency alerts and civil defence education probably make a huge difference.
Deaths from climate disaster are personally devastating. What gives me hope is that our emergency services have shown they can keep so many of us safe from volatile weather. What I’m far more nervous about is whether we’ll be able to protect some families’ livelihoods with the same effectiveness.
Many Kiwi families bet their fortune on housing. It’s common to use KiwiSaver to reach the 20% deposit to buy a house – missing out on hundreds of thousands in compound interest to have a secure place to lay down roots. Is that tradeoff worth it if they buy a climate risky home?
Imagine a young family who threw their entire KiwiSaver into their first home. If their house gets destroyed by a storm or flood, they’ve lost their biggest key to a comfortable retirement. There aren’t many who would buy the land, or loan them money to rebuild in a risky area.
When a big disaster like Gabrielle happens again, it’s not clear the Government will help. The Coalition is already making murmurs that they won’t offer recovery money forever. If a flood devastates the Wellington region, will the government shell out?
Without clear information, without many cheap options in safe areas, without a coordinated response from government to cut pollution or stop housing being built in risky areas – how do we fairly decide who loses their livelihoods to these disasters? When is it the responsibility of the system versus the individual?
I have no good answer to these questions. As a society, we need to decide what’s fair. In my view, we should also do everything we can to reduce the risk by polluting far less, far faster.
The most we could do as a couple house hunting was to know the risks and, more importantly, choose housing that can be part of the solution.
There are a thousand layers of uncertainty, but we’re not powerless. To protect the places we call home, we can choose to live differently.
By understanding the risks, you can do more than weather the storms. You can be empowered to live a fulfilling, low pollution life.
Next time, we’ll explore how instead of only worrying about our homes, we can use them to protect our place from a warming world.
This post, like all our work, is brought to you by the Greater Auckland crew and made possible by generous donations from our readers and fans. If you’d like to support our work, you can join our circle of supporters here, or support us on Substack.
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Finding a suitable house in Wellington is a huge undertaking. Everyone is looking for a home outside of the 100 year flood maps, outside the 10m Tsunami map, that sees the sun sometimes and isn’t on a cliff edge or below a cliff edge. Add to that drive on access and they are like hens teeth. We have just been through the exercise and it took well over a year. The trick is to look for a good site and don’t worry too much about the house, you can sort that out over time. The mfwic family is heading for Island Bay in the new year. (I will even be able to use a cycle way.)
Congratulations on escaping the world’s largest suburb. Hopefully you will continue to contribute to this blog in the manner to which we have become accustomed.
Thankfully our criteria in the Waikato weren’t that stressful, we just overshot the “at least 10m above sea level” requirement we had by about a factor of 20 😉 No cycleways close by though 🙁
Of course the main problem that Kasey briefly touched upon and you mentioned too, is that many people haven’t got the option to be picky. And in some ways, more people being informed will make the safe houses more expensive… so the people who can least afford a disaster will be stuck with what’s left when the well-heeled well-informed like us have chosen…
Although to be honest the biggest driver of Insurance costs in Wellington isn’t climate change , its Seismic risk…
The CHC and Kaikoura earthquakes caused the global reinsurers to take a dep breath and say hmm.. and this has seen household policies in Wellington now costing 40% more than the rest of the country, and 60% more than Auckland and 40% more than Christchurch
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/insurance-divide-why-wellingtonians-are-paying-more-for-their-premiums/2WI2ZDEGFJAXNKQH23YUE64IBY/
Agree, if you want a low risk house, you should rule out Wellington.
Or just make sure you pay ~$50000 less for the house in Wellington to allow for higher insurance premiums. The market will likely sort this out (and probably already is).
Good point. Although you also need to be careful of the property value decreasing if risk increases. And it may need to be way more than $50k if you need a mortgage and have a fixed maximum for repayments and insurance.
At least (AFAWK) earthquake risk is “static” (bad choice of words, I know). It isn’t affected by climate change. It will “only” increase when, as you say, the insurers consider that their metrics were bad due to lack of sufficient data – they aren’t on a fixed trajectory essentially certain to get worse.
The risk is static, but the appetite to accept the risk reduces over time (people expect higher safety standards), and the cost to replace is going up faster than inflation. In saying that people seem to be flocking to ChCh so maybe it doesn’t matter.
Have daughter that lives on top of a Wellington hill. Very windy when it blows! … great view though.
An unexpected gain from putting solar panels on the roof is that it has cooled the house in summer as rather than warming the roof and overheating the house we harvest the photons and sell them instead.
I believe as the writer gets older he won’t be so interested in staying cool I can’t stand air conditioning it’s not as though it’s every going to be 50 degrees in Wellington.
A heatwave in Wellington is defined as when people have to open their windows.
Finding the right location in Wellington is especially challenging.
The cooler temperatures make winter sun especially important but the steep hills cuts this off for many.
I used to take a compass with me, and with my arm, scribe an arc representing the passage of the sun on a midwinters day. If my hand never got above the skyline, zero winter sun. One land agent said it was only for six weeks, for the house they unsuccesfuly showed us. And then Wellington’s terrain imposes huge challenges to access.
And if the vegetation looks wind stressed, it will be, and most likely, the occupants as well.
Micro climates are very important in Wellington and the vegetation is a clue here.
For the same money you will get more house, then in Auckland, but insurance and rates are far more expensive. And heating costs too on account of it’s cooler and windier climate.
And then there are Earthquakes!!
Kapiti Coast.
Always remember that banks and real estate agents make their living out of your personal debt. Property investors are looking for capital gain, or at least breaking even on altruistic rental. Insurance against loss of collateral against that debt is a gamble. The best insurance is to minimise risk.
We talk about Annual Exceedance Probability (AEP) rather than 1 in 200 yr events because people don’t expect a 1 in 200 yr event to happen next year and are surprised when it does, like in parts of Auckland in 2023.
In addition to flood maps etc. you should always take a good hard look at the surroundings of a potential new home, preferably with a pessimistic engineer friend, to spot the risks that are not covered by the maps. For example, does the driveway funnel any flood spills through the garage and into the kitchen? Is there a looming slope above the house, and can floods spill from a flow path towards it? Will it saturate in a wet spell?
Thank you Kasey McDonnell for raising this important issue. I look at some of the resource consents and I am always cross-refencing with the natural hazards map (mainly flooding and coastal erosion) and emphasizing that builds should not put future residents at risk of loss of life (or property). I am delighted that LIMs now have to more clearly note hazard risks and that councils are now able to downzone areas at risk (and are encouraged then to enable more capacity away from risk). the link to the Auckland Natural Hazard map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=81aa3de13b114be9b529018ee3c649c8