Austin ties with Houston for most disaster-prone place to live in Texas

Austin is tied with Houston for the most natural disaster-prone major metro area in the state of Texas, according to a new study by real estate brokerage Redfin.

Redfin analyzed the frequency of five major types of natural disasters–earthquakes, fires, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes–in the country’s 50 most populous metro areas using Disaster Declaration Summaries data from FEMA going back to 1953. These were converted to a scale from one to 100 and the overall “Natural Disaster Hazard Score” was the average of the five scores….

How natural disasters can increase inequality

Natural disasters and subsequent recovery efforts consistently exacerbate economic inequality, according to a growing body of research about how extreme weather can affect Americans’ finances over time.

The latest report on the issue, released Thursday by the Urban Institute, shows that low-income Americans experience the biggest drop in their credit scores following “medium-sized” disasters, or those that caused less than $200 million in damage. The sample size was based largely on a group of people who were hit by storms and flooding in 2014 in the Detroit region.

Researchers found that after one year, people who had poor credit scores — from 300 to 649 — before the storms saw their scores drop 15.5 points, compared to a 4-point drop for people who started with good credit scores–between 700 and 850. And after four years, the gap widened. Nearly 29 points dropped off the scores of people with poor status before the disaster, compared to an 8.4-point drop for people who started in good standing….