The physical and financial effects of climate change on housing are simultaneously reshaping financial markets and urban policy and practice. In this roundtable discussion, Savannah Cox interviews five experts working on housing, climate adaptation, and finance in a wide range of urban contexts: Zac Taylor, Isabelle Anguelovski, Alex Fella, Zachary Lamb, and Linda Shi. Participants illuminate how these domains collide in multiple and complex ways in the frontline communities where they do research and capacity-building. Physical climate risks like flooding or heat stress, housing characteristics like tenure, property and land regimes, as well as public and market-led planning and finance approaches collectively shape local housing and adaptation trajectories. This complexity calls for more than simply scaling up the volumes of capital to address housing adaptation finance “gaps” in citie—as commonly advocated for by urban climate policymakers. Even well intentioned and proactive investment approaches can lead to unequal outcomes like climate gentrification. Urban policymakers, financial institutions, civic groups, and other stakeholders must build local capacity to understand and address these dynamics. Climate risk assessment tools, technical support, ownership structures, and other interventions offer potential routes to foster agency and mobilize resources to balance housing and climate goals in cities.

This special issue explores the centrality of finance, risk rating, and valuation in driving urban adaptation pathways and outcomes. The articles in this issue do so through a vast set of sites. These include adaptation efforts underway in high- and low-income cities in Mexico, Portugal, India, the United States, and Taiwan, as well as novel climate risk governance experiments in large and small cities in the Caribbean, the Netherlands, and the Philippines. The articles also look beyond the boundaries of the city and explore the risk rating and valuation practices of increasingly climate-exposed insurance companies and water utilities in Australia and the United Kingdom. All the articles trace the complex and consequential interplay of risk, finance, and adaptation in cities with a specific goal in mind: to consider how urban policies, financing, and planning measures can be repurposed to advance equitable, transformative adaptation.

Credit rating agencies like Moody's have amassed vast datasets about scale and distribution of climate risk. The proprietary "expertise" derived from this data increasingly guides how both governments and financial institutions respond to the crisis.

As intensifying climate-related disasters strike cities across the United States, they are provoking rising concern for the stability of the U.S. housing market and broader financial system. How homeowners, mortgage lenders, federal institutions/regulators, and investors will variously encounter and manage climate risk is an urgent question for urban scholars, as is who might bear the costs of restabilizing mortgage finance under new breakdowns. This paper’s multi-scalar intervention draws on financial “following” methods to explore how climate risks are being experienced and governed at multiple illustrative moments of U.S. mortgage finance: (1) working households at the front line of urban climate impacts, (2) mortgage professionals brokering loans to them, (3) government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) negotiating incoming federal climate risk disclosure requirements, and (4) capital markets off-taking GSE risks through financial derivatives like credit risk transfers. Emerging concerns include ruptures between household risks and financial system-preserving responses and new dangers of “climate redlining.”.