Originally published in Toronto Star, Jan 29, 2026
By Ian Bickis The Canadian Press
TORONTO – When Kathryn Bakos was house hunting a few years ago, her checklist included some things that might not come first in mind for a dream home.
“I did not want a reverse-sloped driveway,” she explained in an interview.
“My husband said, well, what happens if we find our perfect home? I said, it’s not our perfect home if it has a reverse slope.”
Such driveways direct water toward the home, an issue Bakos is well aware of after researching how increasingly common catastrophic floods hurt home values.
The angle of a driveway is just one of many hazards home shoppers need to understand as climate change creates more extreme weather trends, said Bakos, managing director of finance and resilience at University of Waterloo’s Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation.