Zillow had climate risk scores on property listings. Then the real estate industry complained. Now they're gone.

But one climate scientist isn't letting that information disappear.

For those who missed it: Zillow briefly displayed climate risk data on listings, showing flood risk, wildfire danger, heat exposure, and other climate-related hazards. This is arguably the most important information you could have when making the biggest financial decision of your life.

The California real estate industry didn't see it that way. They saw it as a threat to property values and sales velocity. After pressure from brokers, Zillow removed the data.

Now a climate researcher is working to restore that information and make it publicly available, bypassing the real estate industry's preference for information asymmetry.

This is a pattern we see constantly in tech: valuable public interest data gets buried because it threatens someone's business model. Climate risk affects insurance rates, resale value, long-term livability, and whether your home will be habitable in 20 years. But sure, let's hide that so the sale goes through smoothly.

The real estate industry's position is essentially: "Buyers don't need to know their house is in a flood zone until after they've signed." That's not a market failure—that's the market working exactly as designed, optimizing for broker commissions instead of informed decisions.

Here's what makes this particularly frustrating: the data exists. FEMA has flood maps. NOAA has climate projections. CalFire publishes wildfire risk assessments. The information is public. Zillow just made it convenient to access, and that convenience was apparently the problem.

The scientist restoring this data is doing what open-source developers have done for decades: routing around the roadblocks that corporations put up when transparency threatens profits. Climate risk isn't a nice-to-have feature for homebuyers—it's material information that affects whether you can get insurance, whether you can sell the property later, and whether you're making a sound financial decision.

We spent the 2000s fighting for transparency in software. Turns out we need the same fight for housing data. When companies remove information that helps people make better decisions, somebody needs to put it back.

Good on this researcher for doing exactly that.