Climate disaster exposure is driven by housing costs, not random risk

Quality and quantity of direct evidence for or against the claim — RCTs, systematic reviews, natural experiments, large cohort studies.

First Street Foundation flood-risk data and Fussell et al.'s Katrina return-migration study support the cost-driven-exposure mechanism, though coastal waterfront exceptions complicate a uniform pattern.

Whether the proposed mechanism is valid and established — does the how make sense, or are there fundamental flaws in the causal logic?

The mechanism (cheap land is cheap because hazardous, pushing lower-income buyers there) is plausible and supported for inland flood plains and wildfire-urban-interface zones, less clean for expensive coastal flood exposure.

Degree of agreement among domain experts and relevant scientific or policy bodies — depth and quality of consensus, not just majority opinion.

Housing and disaster researchers generally accept the cost-exposure link for inland/exurban contexts, with debate concentrated on how much redlining history versus present-day market dynamics explains the pattern.

Whether findings hold across independent studies, populations, and contexts — resistance to p-hacking and publication bias.

The pattern replicates across Radeloff et al.'s wildfire-urban-interface analysis and redlining-overlay studies, though effect size varies by region and hazard type.