June 2025, Masters in City Planning at University College London (UCL), awarded Distinction.
Repo for R code files and data. Please see the files Sharable_Langston_A4_Final_Dis.pdf for the final draft of my dissertation and geomob.pdf for the presentation format.
Abstract:
This dissertation focuses on the climate risk of new housing and real estate development. As climate induced natural disasters become more frequent and US population growth concentrates in several vulnerable urban centres, it is pertinent to understand the phenomenon and the government policies managing house building. This research focuses on a case study of Texas to understand the intensity of population growth and housing development at the regional and local scale. Texas has four of the fastest growing urban areas and faces nearly half of the natural disasters that occur in the US. Previous findings establish that real estate across the US is overvalued, failing to incorporate climate risk accurately, and that house building is rapidly occurring in less regulated areas. Government published datasets provide housing unit production counts, population counts, and estimated climate risk. The US Census Bureau publishes demographic data and the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) published a National Risk Index (NRI) used in this study. Through quantitative and geospatial analysis, clusters of house building, population growth, and climate risk are found across Texas. At the local level, city zoning policies and house production are compared to climate risk to understand spatial distributions. Analysis shows that Texas has grown by about one third in population and housing stock since 2000. Calculations discover that Dallas and Houston have high proportions of new housing units built in high-risk areas. In Dallas, zoning policies reserve land for residential development that skews towards low-risk areas. With these findings, policy makers, homeowners, and prospective residents can understand the climate risk of new house building in Texas. Recommendations for policy include disincentivizing the building of housing and infrastructure in these high-risk zones to avoid increasing the amount of people and real estate investments exposed to risk from natural disasters.