El Paso, TX

El Paso's heat score of 78 sits at the 88th national percentile—the market's defining physical hazard in a Chihuahuan Desert setting where the 2023 Southwest heat season extended extreme temperatures across weeks, raising cooling-system reliability and habitability concerns that aggregate weather data tends to normalize. The 2006 El Paso flash flooding event demonstrated the desert city's specific vulnerability: brief, intense monsoon rainfall overwhelmed urban drainage rapidly, producing major flooding despite the dry regional setting. That pattern—low annual precipitation concentrated in high-intensity bursts—is not improving. Our read: the practical risk split in El Paso is between the valley-floor urban core and the Westside hillside corridor. Downtown's 79901 and Central Eastside's 79925 face heat and aging housing systems as the dominant concerns. Westside in 79912 introduces hillside runoff and wildland-fringe exposure that rises toward the desert edge—grass-fire and slope drainage questions that are absent in the flatter eastern neighborhoods. Far East El Paso's newer construction in 79936 reduces building-risk friction but does not reduce extreme heat exposure. Annual premiums range from $1,300 to $2,700—one of the lowest ranges in this dataset—because the dominant climate cost here is expressed through utility bills and water-system constraints, not insurance shock. Cooling costs and outage resilience matter more than flood mandates in most El Paso neighborhoods. Wildfire at the 39th national percentile and flood at the 37th are genuine low-concern hazards at the city level, with the desert-fringe the only meaningful exception. El Paso's climate risk is about sustained heat and water stress. The insurance premium is not the number worth watching here—the summer electricity bill is.

— Open Data Collective