Who owns the flood plain? A parcel-level analysis of organizational form and flood risk

Abstract

Regulatory flood maps define the geography of hazard but obscure the organizational structure of exposure. This study examines how regulatory flood exposure is distributed across owner-of-record forms and local portfolio footprints using the complete 2022 inventory of single-family residential parcels in Douglas County, Nebraska (N = 183,313). We classify owners into five organizational forms (including Individuals, LLCs, and Corporations) and distinguish between single-parcel and multi-parcel local portfolios. While only 1.10% of parcels fall within FEMA Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHAs) in aggregate, prevalence varies sharply by ownership structure. Unadjusted SFHA rates are highest among single-parcel Limited Liability Companies (4.83%) and single-parcel corporations (4.07%), compared to 0.81% for single-parcel individuals. In modified Poisson models with neighborhood fixed effects, LLC-owned parcels retain elevated exposure relative to individuals (adjusted Risk Ratio for single-parcel LLCs = 1.67; 95% CI: 1.31–2.13). Multi-parcel individuals and trusts also exhibit elevated prevalence. These findings demonstrate that flood exposure is not just a spatial attribute but an organizational one, concentrated within specific legal structures. Consequently, effective flood governance requires implementation strategies capable of navigating diverse legal forms and portfolio scales for mitigation and compliance.

Keywords

flood exposure ownership structure urban analytics limited liability companies (LLCs)floodplain management

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Jakabovics

Orlando

, et al. (2024) Who owns America? A methodology for identifying landlords' ownership scale and the implications for targeted code enforcement. Journal of the American Planning Association 90(4): 627–641.

Andrews

Lee

Mason

, et al. (2025) Associations between owner proximity and parcel-level flood exposure: evidence from Douglas County, Nebraska. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 129: 105795.

Anselin

(1995) Local indicators of spatial association—LISA. Geographical Analysis 27(2): 93–115.

Arimond

Molteni

Jany

, et al. (2023) Transformer-based entity legal form classification. arXiv.

Atreya

Ferreira

(2015) Seeing is believing? Evidence from property prices in inundated areas. Risk Analysis 35(5): 828–848.

Benjamini

Hochberg

(1995) Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Methodological) 57(1): 289–300.

Bin

Polasky

(2004) Effects of flood hazards on property values: evidence before and after Hurricane Floyd. Land Economics 80(4): 490–500.

Burby

(2001) Flood insurance and floodplain management: the US experience. Environmental Hazards 3(3): 111–122.

Colburn

Walter

Pfeiffer

(2021) Capitalizing on collapse: an analysis of institutional single-family rental investors. Urban Affairs Review 57(6): 1590–1625.

10.

Conley

(1999) GMM estimation with cross sectional dependence. Journal of Econometrics 92(1): 1–45.

11.

Cook

Rongerude

Mueller

, et al. (2024) Providing rental housing: a systematic literature review of residential rental property owner decision making. Journal of Planning Literature 39(4): 535–547.

12.

Demers

Eisfeldt

(2022) Total returns to single-family rentals. Real Estate Economics 50(1): 7–32.

13.

Ding

Zhang

Diep

(2025). Ownership Profile of single-family Residence Properties in Philadelphia: A Focus on Large Corporate Investors. Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. https://www.philadelphiafed.org/community-development/housing-and-neighborhoods/ownership-profile-of-single-family-residence-properties-in-philadelphia-large-corporate-investors

14.

Fields

(2022) Automated landlord: Digital technologies and post-crisis financial accumulation. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 54(1): 160–181.

15.

Goodman

Zinn

Reynolds

, et al. (2023) A Profile of Institutional investor–owned single-family Rental Properties. Urban Institute. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/profile-institutional-investor-owned-single-family-rental-properties

16.

Gourevitch

Kousky

Liao

, et al. (2023) Unpriced climate risk and the potential consequences of overvaluation in US housing markets. Nature Climate Change 13(3): 250–257.

17.

Griffith

(2003) Spatial Autocorrelation and Spatial Filtering: Gaining Understanding Through Theory and Scientific Visualization. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24806-4

18.

Hangen

O’Brien

(2025) Linking landlords to uncover ownership obscurity. Housing Studies 40(4): 940–965.

19.

Harrison

Immergluck

Walker

(2025) Single-family rental (SFR) investor types, property conditions, and implications for urban neighbourhoods: evidence from Memphis, Tennessee. Housing Studies 40(2): 466–486.

20.

Hwang

(2019) Racialized recovery: postforeclosure pathways in Boston neighborhoods. City & Community 18(4): 1287–1313.

21.

Immergluck

Law

(2014a) Investing in crisis: the methods, strategies, and expectations of investors in single-family foreclosed homes in distressed neighborhoods. Housing Policy Debate 24(3): 568–593.

22.

Immergluck

Law

(2014b) Speculating in crisis: the intrametropolitan geography of investing in foreclosed homes in Atlanta. Urban Geography 35(1): 1–24.

23.

Jesse

RA.

(2026). jrandre2/who-owns-the-floodplain: Who Owns the Flood Plain?. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18146985

24.

Kousky

(2018) Financing flood losses: a discussion of the National Flood Insurance Program. Risk Management and Insurance Review 21(1): 11–32.

25.

Kruse

Awick

Gómez

Loos

(2021) Developing a legal form classification and extraction approach for company entity matching: Benchmark of rule-based and machine learning approaches. Business Information Systems 47: 13–26. Available at: https://doi.org/10.52825/bis.v1i.44

26.

Lim

Skidmore

(2019) Flood fatalities in the United States: the roles of socioeconomic factors and the National Flood Insurance Program. Southern Economic Journal 85(4): 1032–1057.

27.

Lore

Harten

Boeing

(2024) A hybrid deep learning method for identifying topics in large-scale urban text data: Benefits and trade-offs. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 108: 102061. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2024.102131

28.

Moran

PAP

(1950) Notes on continuous stochastic phenomena. Biometrika 37(1–2): 17–23.

29.

Ortega

Petkov

(2024) To Improve is to Change? the Effects of Risk Rating 2.0 on Flood Insurance Demand (IZA Discussion Paper No. 17021). Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). https://docs.iza.org/dp17021.pdf

30.

Petrzelka

Buman

Ridgely

(2013) Engaging absentee landowners in conservation practice decisions: a descriptive study. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 68(1): 1–9.

31.

Rose

Harris

(2022) The three tenures: a case of property maintenance. Urban Studies 59(9): 1926–1943.

32.

Shelton

Seymour

(2024) Horizontal Holdings: Untangling the Networks of Corportate Landlords. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 114(8): 1819–1831. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2023.2278690, In this issue.

33.

Strauch

Hoefer

(2025) Flood-Inundation Maps for 14.8 Miles of Little and Big Papillion Creeks in Omaha, Nebraska, 2023 (Scientific Investigations Report 2025–5032). U.S. Geological Survey. https://doi.org/10.3133/sir20255032

34.

Thomas

Ramiller

Ren

Toomet

(2024) Toward a national eviction data collection strategy using natural language processing. Cityscape 26(1): 241–260. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/48766080.

35.

Torres

(2024) Who owns our homes? Methods to group and unmask anonymous corporate owners. Cityscape 26(1): 339–362. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/e48515632.

36.

Travis

(2019) The organization of neglect: limited liability companies and housing disinvestment. American Sociological Review 84(1): 142–170.

37.

Ulrich-Schad

Babin

, et al. (2016) Out-of-state, out of mind? Non-operating farmland owners and conservation decision making. Land Use Policy 54: 602–613.

38.

U.S. Census Bureau (n.d.) Quickfacts: Douglas County. Nebraska. Retrieved December 18, 2025, from. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/douglascountynebraska/HEA775224

39.

U.S. Government Accountability Office (2024) Rental housing: information on institutional investment in single-family homes. (GAO-24-106643). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106643

40.

Zou

(2004) A modified Poisson regression approach to prospective studies with binary data. American Journal of Epidemiology 159(7): 702–706.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.91 MB