New York Homes Most Exposed to Hurricane Risk, Beating Miami

More than 3 million New York metropolitan-area homes are vulnerable to hurricane winds, the most of any region in the country, according to a report from Cotality, a property analytics firm.

Roughly 3.27 million homes in the area face moderate or greater hurricane wind risk, representing nearly $1.93 trillion in reconstruction costs, according to Cotality’s 2026 hurricane risk report. Nearly 20% of those homes are also at risk of storm surge.

Houston and Miami rank second and third at risk, according to the number of homes that are exposed to hurricane wind. Those metro areas have about $824 billion and $616 billion in reconstruction-cost values, respectively.

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Big storms hit the Northeast much less frequently than Florida and the Gulf Coast. It’s been 14 years since Superstorm Sandy devastated New York City, and five years since the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded the Northeast. Since such storms are relatively rare in the Northeast, the New York metro area also lags behind its southern counterparts on measures of coastal preparedness and building practices, making residents and property relatively more vulnerable, Cotality said.

“The region’s immense population density and property value mean the stakes are incredibly high,” Maiclaire Bolton-Smith, vice president of insurance product marketing at Cotality, said in a statement.

At the state level, Florida ranks first with the country’s largest concentration of homes at risk of hurricane-wind damage, followed by Texas, North Carolina, New York and New Jersey, Cotality said. Across the 20 states that Cotality tracks, more than 32 million homes are at moderate or greater risk from hurricane winds.

Top photo: The remains of homes amid floods after Superstorm Sandy in the Queens borough of New York in 2012. Bloomberg.