Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Lifestyle

How Will These Stone Houses Fare In a Warming World?

This week's hottest real estate listings, ranked by climate risk

A stone house and sun.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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 understand the climate risk of the many castles or homes built from stone, including an actual rock house in Palm Springs.

1. ‘I had a castle in Buffalo ...’

Historical castle home in Buffalo, NYZillow

A Castle in Buffalo, New York? Dream or your worst nightmare? This historic family home built in 1880 with five bedrooms and five baths is for sale in climate-safe Buffalo (must love snow). The Castle at Mayfair Lane comes with requisite stone and brick everywhere, cannons (yes!) and carved Gothic ceiling brackets. It’s probably filled with ghosts, but even so, the house will be around for hundreds more years and the climate risk is so low. Unfortunately there’s no moat, but still it’s very safe.

Featured @zillowgonewild and listed for $1,500,000.


2. Charles Schulz did not go wrong.

Charles Schulz\u2019s among ponds and redwoodsZillow

Peanuts-creator Charles Schulz’s California home went up for sale this week. Sculpted into rocks with rock walls and fireplaces and landscaped among towering redwoods, it contains many references to our most beloved characters. Yes, there are tranquil ponds, but there are also benches with carved images of Snoopy. The property features a four-hole golf course that, like the house, is fortunately free of climate risk.

Featured in NYPost and listed for $3,950,000.


3. The Astor family castle is climate friendly.

New Jersey estate on 32 acres

In Bernardsville, New Jersey, this stone-clad estate on 32 acres is castle-like but the wraparound porch makes it more of a liveable family home. There is minimal climate risk and the place is build like a fort — definitely keeping out the heat.

Featured on Mansion Global and listed for $13, 750,000.


4. School’s out in Pennsylvania.

Previously Franklin Public School in Pennsylvania until 1970Fox & Roach Realtors

This stone building was the Franklin Public School and library in Honeybrook, Pennsylvania, until 1970. The castle-like building has 10-foot ceilings and will need some renovating to make it a home, but it’s got a great future. No flood, barely a fire risk. Some risk for drought and a high heat risk, but the stone structure keeps the inside cool and habitable.

Featured in Circa Save This House and listed for $398,000.


5. Flip this castle?

Waco, Texas castle featured on show "Fixer Upper"Lisa Petrol/Concierge Auctions

This “probably-haunted” castle in Waco, Texas, was recently renovated by Chip and Joanna Gaines and documented in six episodes on their show Fixer Upper: The Castle.

The Gaineses purchased the Waco castle in 2019 and gave it a top-to-bottom face-lift. It will sell at auction later this month. Unfortunately the heat risk for this Waco gem is 10/10. And the high risk of drought makes this place not very habitable.

Featured on @WSJrealestate. Auction bidding opens July 20, 2023.


6. Between a rock and a hard place

Rock House in San Jacinto built by Bank of America foundersPatrick Stewart Properties

In 1926, five rock homes were built in Araby Cove, the first and oldest subdivision in Palm Springs. The Giannini Family, who founded Bank of America built and owned this Rock House which sits at the bottom of a rockface in the San Jacinto mountains, 10 minutes outside Palm Springs. You are literally surrounded by stones: Inside, outside, all around you everywhere you look STONES! While the good news is that the house won’t flood, the drought, heat and fire risk is high.

Featured in Mansion Global and listed for $2,495,000.

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Podcast

The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

Lee Zeldin.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

Keep reading...Show less
Adaptation

Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

A barn.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

Keep reading...Show less
Green