Sinking land is driving down home values in California's Central Valley, study shows

Sinking ground in California's Central Valley is causing property values to sink, according to a new study by UC Riverside .

"When we see droughts, we see larger subsidence, we see more extraction of groundwater, we see larger subsidence, and that's a sign for many other problems, like water availability, job availability and so on," said Mehdi Nemati, author and UC Riverside Enviro Economics and Policy assistant professor.

Professor Nemati is part of a group of researchers looking into how excessive groundwater pumping is impacting the housing market.

To determine how this sinking is impacting home values, researchers used satellite-based radar data to measure ground-level changes.

They compared data on impacted areas in eight counties to nearly 200,000 home sale transactions, inclu