Will Blackouts Be America’s Next Housing Emergency?

Nearly two weeks after severe storms ripped through Northwest Indiana, thousands of homes and businesses were still waiting for the lights to come back on.

The delay prompted Gov. Mike Braun to call for a state investigation into the utility provider’s storm preparation.

“NIPSCO is a monopoly utility that Hoosiers pay every month with the expectation that it will use its considerable resources to maintain its system, prepare for severe weather, and restore service as quickly as possible when disaster strikes,” Braun said in a news release on Monday. “NIPSCO has failed to keep its end of the bargain.”

In nearby Ohio, regulators were conducting a similar reckoning after more than 18,000 customer outages coincided with unseasonably hot temperatures this summer.

“These are life-and-death matters that also cost our residents and businesses thousands of dollars when our power fails at the times we need it the most,” Lakewood Mayor Meghan George said, according to the Lakewood Observer.

George’s warning captures what’s pushing the issue beyond the electric grid. When service stays out for days, households can lose the use of homes they are still paying for, and face the sudden and unexpected expense of figuring out somewhere else to stay.

A blackout can take a home out of use

Part of what's driving the emerging housing risk is the fact that blackouts are lasting for longer than ever before.

U.S. electricity customers averaged 11 hours without power in 2024—nearly twice the annual average during the preceding decade, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Severe weather events drove most of that increase. 

Outages tied to hurricanes and other major weather events averaged nearly 9 hours per customer in 2024, up from an annual average of just under 4 hours from 2014 through 2023. Outside those events, customers continued to average about 2 hours without power a year.

It’s a significant difference for housing, because the likelihood that a household leaves rises sharply with duration.

During a hypothetical one-day outage, 33% of residential customers said they would temporarily relocate. Extend it to 14 days, and 83% said they would leave, according to a 2025 Nature Communications study.

A two-week outage is far beyond the national average, but the recent outage in Gary, IN, shows how a major event can push some households toward that extreme. Twelve days after severe storms began, nearly 22,000 NIPSCO customers were still without power.

In the Nature study, modeled residential losses climbed from $2.2 billion during a one-day outage to $6.9 billion during a 14-day outage. Food and housing costs rose 34-fold as more households relocated and began paying for meals, transportation, and lodging elsewhere.

Then there is the physical risk to a home, as long outages can leave structures vulnerable to damage.

Winter Storm Uri is a good example. Freezing temperatures caused close to 70% of Texans to lose electricity, while 49% lost water service. 

By June 2022, insurers had received more than 434,000 residential property claims from the storm and paid about $4.6 billion, according to the Texas Department of Insurance. The average incurred residential loss was about $17,800. 

Some households get pushed out faster

Those added costs are easier for some households to absorb than others, too.

Only 12% of residential respondents in the Nature study had backup generation, and lower-income respondents were less likely to have it.

They also faced a steeper cost if they left. In the researchers’ 14-day scenario, meals and lodging could consume as much as 10% of a low-income household’s total expenditures over three months.

That double bind—invest in resilience before a blackout happens or absorb the cost of leaving when it does—is arriving at a time when housing affordability is at an all-time low. A record high of 1 in 3 households (43.5 million) is cost-burdened nationwide, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Now, agents say that financial calculus is beginning to shape conversations with homebuyers.

“Buyers are wanting specifics,” Florida-based agent Jim Chamberlin says. “How long was the power out after the last hurricane? Did the internet and cell service come back quickly? How quickly did grocery stores and gas stations nearby reopen?

“What they are trying to do is get a bigger picture of what living there actually looks like after a storm and not just on a sunny Saturday afternoon,” he adds.

Research suggests those concerns can eventually reach what they are willing to pay, too.

What could turn this into a housing emergency?

More frequent power interruptions were associated with lower home prices, according to a July 2026 study in the Southern Economic Journal.

Researchers estimated that a one-standard-deviation increase in interruptions could translate to about $113 billion in lost U.S. home value and $1.2 billion less in annual property tax revenue. In counties more exposed to natural hazards, the losses are bigger.

It’s the national risk hiding behind a problem that has largely played out locally: What happens if prolonged outages become common enough in enough places to affect housing values at scale?

This summer has offered a glimpse of what that could look like. In addition to Indiana and Ohio, more than 250,000 Hawaiian Electric customers lost power after being battered by Tropical Storm Lala. In Memphis, TN, a severe storm knocked out more than 140,000 customers, with some warned to prepare for days without electricity.

There's good reason to watch that pattern. Electricity demand is projected to rise sharply through 2035, with data centers accounting for most of the expected growth, according to NERC. At the same time, major weather events are also predicted to become more frequent and severe.