Landslide risk maps reveal socioeconomic inequality
Landslides follow gravity, water, and the geometry of slopes. They are not mysterious events. Yet the tool that could save lives — a detailed map of where they will strike — has become a political battleground. The resistance makes sense only when you consider what the map does to the value of a home sitting directly in the danger zone.
That tension sits at the heart of a new study published in July in the journal Earth’s Future. The research is among the first to break down the socioeconomic factors of landslide exposure in the United States. It does not simply ask where landslides happen. It asks who lives there, what they can afford, and whether they have any realistic path to safety.
The answer is uncomfortable. The people most likely to be in the way of a landslide are the people least able to leave, to reinforce their homes, or to rebuild afterward. The danger is not evenly distributed across the American landscape. It falls hardest on those with the fewest resources to confront it.
The Ground Beneath the Poor
The study’s central finding is stark: at least 6.5 million people in the United States live with high landslide risk. That number, the researchers note, is a conservative estimate. Adding those living with medium risk pushes the total higher, aligning with earlier preliminary estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey.
Appalachia carries the heaviest burden. At least 3.6 million people there live in landslide-prone areas, accounting for 55 percent of the national total of people exposed to landslides. The steeply walled valleys are lush and rain-fed, but communities perch on slopes or settle in valley floors below — exactly where rocks, mud, and debris eventually come to rest.
West Virginia illustrates the disparity with brutal clarity: 20 percent of its population lives in high-risk areas, against a national average of just 2 percent. That tenfold difference is not a quirk of geography alone. It reflects who can afford to live where.
The pattern reverses sharply on the West Coast. In cities like Los Angeles and Seattle, at least 1.7 million people live with high landslide risk in mountainous regions. But those residents are more often wealthy. They have access to engineering solutions that stabilize slopes. They can afford to move or rebuild after a disaster. The same hazard, the same ground, but a completely different set of options.
A Tool That Scares the Market
The pushback against landslide mapping has a specific and consequential history. In 2011, lobbying halted North Carolina’s statewide landslide mapping effort. Property owners and industry groups worried that officially documented hazards would drop property values. The program sat inactive for six years.
Those six lost years had consequences. When Hurricane Helene hit in 2024, it triggered more than 9,400 landslides, mostly in North Carolina, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Geologists were still working to make up for lost time when the storm arrived. The map that could have informed decisions was incomplete.
The same dynamic has played out more recently in Alaska. Homeowners in Juneau and Sitka have pushed back against landslide mapping efforts, concerned the map itself will devalue property. Ben Mirus, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado, notes there is little evidence supporting that fear.
Mirus led the agency’s 2024 landslide mapping effort and was not involved in the new study, but he recognizes its importance. Once you have a map of where landslides are, he says, you want to look at why and where they matter. The new research does exactly that, overlaying hazard maps with socioeconomic data to reveal who is in harm’s way.
The Hyperlocal View of Danger
Joe Wartman, a geotechnical engineer at the University of Washington in Seattle, sees the new map as a transformative tool. The highest risk, his team found, appears in places with both dense populations and steep slopes. That combination is not rare, but it is concentrated.
“The new map gives us the ability to really hyper-localize and focus, to an extraordinary degree, on those who are most in danger,” Wartman said. [1] That precision matters because landslide mitigation is not a one-size-fits-all problem. “It is very difficult to mitigate and to manage landslide hazards across the vast terrain of the U.S.,” he added.
The study does not end with a prediction or a policy prescription. It ends with a simple observation about information. Despite the political resistance, the mapping work continues. Experts hope that continued landslide mapping will improve public safety for individuals and communities alike. “The more information there is,” Mirus says, “the better decisions people can make.”
Knowledge does not solve the problem by itself, but it is the necessary precondition for any solution. The map does not stop the ground from moving. It simply tells where the ground will move, and who will be standing there when it does.