Austin, TX

Austin's flood score of 68, at the 78th national percentile, understates the hazard that creek and watershed geography actually presents in central Travis County. The Memorial Day flood of May 2015 and the Halloween flood of October 2015 both demonstrated that Barton Creek, Onion Creek, and related tributaries can produce severe flash flooding with minimal warning—affecting neighborhoods that do not market themselves by flood zone status. Heat at the 88th national percentile is the city's top-ranked hazard: the record 2023 summer extended triple-digit temperatures over weeks, raising grid-reliability and cooling-cost questions that a fast-growing city with aging suburban housing stock cannot easily absorb. What we noticed: the Westlake area's hillside wildfire and drainage conditions create a different risk mix from the central creek corridors. South Austin's creek and infill drainage in 78704 can produce localized flooding that comparables in the same zip code do not share. Creek-adjacent homes in Austin underwrite meaningfully differently from properties 200 meters away—a parcel-level distinction that buyers using broad neighborhood searches systematically miss. Annual premiums range from $1,800 to $4,300. Flood insurance is not universally required, but the 2015 creek event history argues for pricing it on creek-adjacent properties regardless of mandatory zone status. Heat resilience is increasingly an operating-cost issue: cooling loads in a 2023-style summer push electricity bills into territory that changes the total cost of ownership for older, less-efficient housing. The wildfire score at the 60th national percentile is moderate but real at the hill-country fringe. Austin's climate risk is a creek-flooding and heat story, and those two hazards compound—not alternate—in the worst event scenarios.

— Open Data Collective