When Miyuki Hino bought a house in Chapel Hill, N.C., in 2020, she checked an online map that showed the damage caused by Hurricane Matthew in 2016 to evaluate the neighborhood.
“We wanted to know our flood risk before buying, although we’re aware that every storm is different and they can be hard to predict,” says Hino, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We had to make an offer quickly, so we looked at the map and we asked neighbors about which houses nearby had flooded. We found out that our street is on a slight hill and the homes at the bottom of the hill had more trouble from that hurricane.”