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This week's hottest real estate listings, ranked by climate risk.
Glued to real estate posts on The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Dwell, Spaces, The Modern House, or Architectural Digest and wondering how those gorgeous homes will hold up in the next decades? I have you covered.
Heatmap has partnered with my new climate risk platform, Habitable. Every Friday, we add a climate risk score to the real estate listings featured in the news this week and ask: Could you live here as the climate changes?
Using a model developed by a team of Berkeley data scientists at Climate Check, Habitable scores each property for heat, flood, drought, and fire risk on a scale of 1-10. One represents the lowest risk and 10 is the highest. Our rating for each hazard is based on climate change projections through 2050. (You can check your own home’s climate risk here.)
For today’s edition, I apply the Habitable Index to the many, many mansions that came on the market this week. Will climate denier Tucker Carlson’s house on the hurricane-prone Gulf Coast flood soon? Will Ron Perelman ever sell his climate-safe townhouse? Read on and find out out which are the most Habitable mansions in the news this week, from best to worst.
Compass
As billionaire Ron Perelman downsizes his assets, his upper Eastside townhouse is for sale again after being on and off the market since 2021. The massive 16,000-square-feet home is fantastically safe from future climate impacts —- no flood, drought, or fire risk. Even the 7/10 heat risk will be easily managed — the brick building shouldwill keep the temperatures cool inside. For some, keeping cool and dry might be worth a cool $60,000,000?
Featured in the NY Postand listed for $60 million.
Douglas Elliman
This Long Island mansion was the home base for actor Leonardo di Caprio’s security fraud and drug taking antics in The Wolf of Wall Street film.. The property, however, is surprisingly secure — with minimal risk of flood, fire, or drought. Even the heat risk is minimal. A real hide-away and only 50 minutes to Manhattan.
Featured in the Daily Mail and listed for just under $10 million.
Ginnel Real Estate
Jerome Kohlberg, the late founder of the investment firm KKR, lived in this mansion on 200 acres for more than 30 years. His wife Nancy ran their proper working farm — she raised Scottish Highland cattle, geese, special Black pigs, and even fish (via a professional aquaponics system).
In New York’s Westchester County, the 100-year-old house with an indoor pool and tennis court and a private lake with an old race track will have plenty of water (no drought) and has minimal risk for heat and fire. The flood risk — 6/10 — is a bit high, but with over 200 acres to seep into, maybe a risk worth taking. Featured in WSJand listed for $11.5 million.
Douglas Elliman
The Knoll House is a polymath. The 12,30-square-foot home features two buildings: one old classic home connected by an underground tunnel to another super modern 20,000-foot entertainment center. The entertainment “wing” includes a 46-seat movie theater and a spa. The property also has a putting green, a pub, and Tiki bar along with a little drought, a little fire, a little heat, and a tiny bit of flood. All this … at a price!
Featured in the Daily Mail and listed for $38.5 million.
Zillow
Think Truman Show meets The Matrix. An all white master–planned community in the Florida Panhandle has attracted Americans who desire a homogenous, anesthetized environment. And other than scorching heat, the outside world (i.e.: climate change) is unlikely to threaten this 5,000 square foot property with soaring (white) open-plan modern interiors. It’s at little risk for drought or fire and far enough off the beach to avoid sea-level rise. The one fly in this perfectly manicured landscape, however, is that the Florida Panhandle is the most-prone to hurricanes — more than any U.S. state. Hang on to those coordinated blue and white parasols …
Featured inWSJ and listed for $12.5 million.
Zillow
The waterfront Florida Panhandle property (see above listing for Hurricane forecast for the Panhandle!) once owned by the Rev. Al Green just sold for $13.25 million.
Can the new owners live here? The 6,600-square-foot four-story mansion with two pools has extreme flood and heat risk.ith no sea wall protection, it will also take the brunt of the next hurricane. Enjoy it while you can.
Featured in WSJ and sold for over $13 million.
Zillow
Ousted Fox News host Tucker Carlson just bought the house next door to his home on Gasparilla Island in Florida — also on the Hurricane-prone Gulf Coast — for $5.5m. There is no denying the extreme flood and heat risk of the property. This barrier island is following the trajectory of Carlson himself: sinking fast.
Featured inThe Dirtand sold for $5.5 million.
Tidal Realty Partners
Location. Location. Location. Waterway Drive in Sneads Ferry North Carolina (meaning lower ferry) gives away the ending of this story. It’s a stunning, immaculate home (for now) on four private acres seemingly dropped in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Island living but with a private bridge. We can all call this one: 10/10 for flood and 8/10 for heat as the house sizzles in the North Carolina Sun. Good thing there is a kayak launch. Whoever buys this will need to stock up on inflatables.
Featured on Zillow Gone Wild and listed for $2.4 million.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”