You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
This week's hottest real estate listings were all about over-the-top sports fandom and over-the-top climate risks.
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 houses in the news this week that are notable for over the top sports amenities. The properties feature soccer fields, golf courses, pickleball courts, and so many basketball courts.
Read on to see if the properties of this competitive set are habitable.
Nestseekers
The 7-acre Spring Ivy Estate in Old Westbury, New York, is on the market for $50 million. It’s not a house, it’s a resort. Amenity rich, the house is 25,000 square feet with grand luxurious rooms. There are soaring ceilings, a formal dining room, seven bedrooms, 13 bathrooms and an indoor-outdoor kitchen. It may not seem worth the price tag until you reach the lower level entertainment ‘complex.
Nestseekers
There’s a game room, gym, indoor pool, billiards room, a bowling alley, 12-seat movie ‘complex’ with a real sports bar — including three screens over the bar. But what makes it worth the ticket price is the professional NBA-grade basketball court and an indoor golf simulator. The property scores well for climate risk, so let the games begin.
Featured in Mansion Global and listed for $50 million.
Douglas Elliman
The co-owner of the Boston Celtics listed his suburban estate in Weston, Massachusetts, for sale as he downsizes. On 4 acres, it’s 15,000 square feet with seven beds, seven bathes, not one, but 2 basketball courts (one indoor, one outdoor), along with a spa, gym, courts, and a pool. For ultra wealthy, climate-concerned, basketball-crazed buyers, it’s a slam dunk: The house has no risk for flood, barely a risk for drought or fire, and moderate heat risk. There will be years to practice foul shots all day long, year round, in any weather.
Featured in WSJ for just under $9 million.
Zillow
Super Bowl-winning quarterback Patrick Mahomes has put his Kansas City, Missouri, home on the market for $2,900,000. It’s a small house in a chic neighborhood (near the country club!), but it doesn’t lack amenities. The house has a closet that fits Mahomes’ entire collection of 180 pairs of Adidas sneakers, plus a putting green in the backyard. Habitable checked: The climate forecast, while HOT, is also a winner.
Featured in The Kansas City Star and listed for $2.9 million.
French King Fine Properties
This seven-bedroom, eight-bath stone house in Nashville, Tennessee, has all the amenities of a luxury hotel: two pools, a spa, and a full gym that you won’t have to share with other guests. Perfect for a multi-sport family, there’s lots to do here — gardening, cooking at the indoor-outdoor kitchen, swimming laps, and working out at the gym along with playing tennis, pickleball, volleyball, or basketball on the multi-sport court. The only drawback is the boiling heat — hopefully any exercise-loving buyer likes to sweat.
Featured in Mansion Global and listed for just under $10 million.
Douglas Elliman
He’s not Liberace, but Rod Stewart's house decor will make you wonder. For $70 million, his just-listed, 28,000-square-feet Beverly Hills mansion offers a professional soccer field with two full-size gyms and the most luxurious workout yet.
Douglas Elliman
But hydration will be a problem with extreme flood and fire risk forecasted for the property. Run. Run. Run. Fast.
Featured in The Real Deal and listed for $70 million.
DPP Real Estate
This sprawling house in Rancho Mirage in the desert of Coachella Valley looks lush as you drive up the long, gated drive lined with old-growth carob trees. Amenities and activities abound here. Where to start the workout? Try the gym housed in a former stable, then jump in the 80-foot pool before sweaty games on the tennis court, basketball court, putting green, and bocce ball and competitive horseshoe court. Only then are you allowed to check out the hammock. The punishing schedule is no more punishing than the climate here. A full menu of possibilities await but habitability is not one of them. There’s extreme risk of drought, and medium risk for heat, floods, and fires. Yikes.
Featured in Dwell and listed for $4 million.
James Edition
Outside of Salt Lake City Utah, this 50,738-square-foot home is one of the largest homes in the United States (it’s apparently as big as the White House). The theater here has 27 seats! There are 20-foot ceilings and two staircases out front. There are hundreds if not thousands of chandeliers. Sculptures, ornamental window hangings, bathtubs for two! It’s all here for you.
And then some. The pool is not just a pool! It’s a water slide, with a lazy river and rope swings. There is a basketball court, a two-lane bowling alley, a 27-seat theater room, an exercise room, a game room. There is a pirate ship and slide in the children’s play room. And that is just inside.
James Edition
Outside are trails for hiking, biking, camping, hunting, horseback riding, ATV riding, snowmobiling, and cross-country skiing.
Jam packed, but habitable? Sadly, no, because this $17 million house, the pool, the chandeliers, all of it are at extremely high risk of being eventually lost to floods, fire, heat, and drought. Enjoy it while you can.
Featured at Mansion Global and listed for $17 million.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
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.