Why have Americans been moving closer to climate risk?

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Last week, as Hurricane Milton was barrelling towards the west coast of Florida, one well-known television meteorologist covering the storm was brought to tears during a broadcast. “I apologise — this is just horrific,” he said, choking up.

It was made more so by the fact that Hurricane Helene had only just ripped through Florida and the Carolinas, killing at least 225 people and destroying not just coastal areas, but mountain towns like Asheville, a community some 500 miles from where the storm made landfall. YouTube videos of the floods in that city showed buildings floating down raging rivers. 

All of this comes amid the usual wildfires and drought out west. During a recent trip to Denver, I developed a hacking cough from the smoky haze that lingered over the skyline. 

So it’s worth asking why it is that the south and the west of the US, the places most exposed to fires, floods, hurricanes and extreme heat, are also the places where Americans have been moving in droves over the past few years.

Since the 2010s, Americans have been moving away from northern cities such as Boston, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, towards the Sunbelt. But this great migration towards the south and west of the country sped up dramatically during the Covid pandemic, when states such as Florida, Texas, the Carolinas, cities like Phoenix and parts of the Sierra Nevada mountains became hot destinations. 

The migration has happened for many reasons. During the pandemic, many people sought space and fewer restrictions on daily activities, which naturally brought them to red states in the south and west. Others wanted closer proximity to nature, given the increased opportunities for remote work, as well as the temperate climates, cheaper real estate, lower taxes and weaker business regulation on offer in these places.

Places like Florida and Texas actively marketed themselves as laissez-faire refuges from locked-down blue states. Elon Musk was one of the icons of this libertarian migration, moving Tesla’s headquarters from Silicon Valley to Texas.

The single most pronounced migratory pattern was the outflow from New York to Miami. Wealthy knowledge workers in finance, technology and services flocked from one vulnerable coastal city to an even riskier one, as hedge funds and tech start-ups set up shop in Silicon Beach.

At a national level, a recent study by federal mortgage underwriter Freddie Mac found that inflows of people from low and moderate climate risk areas to high-risk areas have doubled since the pandemic. Forty per cent of the population of the US now live in the coastal counties most prone to hurricanes. Net migration to high wildfire risk areas has increased 146 per cent since 2020.

It’s no surprise then that a 2023 Federal Reserve Board study of household economics and decision-making found that 16 per cent of American adults reported some kind of personal or property disruption from a natural disaster within the past 12 months. While the country experienced on average one billion-dollar natural disaster every four months in the 1980s, that figure is up to one every three weeks according to the government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment report put out last year. The total cost of climate and weather disasters in the US in 2023 was a whopping $165bn, and 2024 will probably exceed that.

So far, both individuals and businesses have been willing to ignore the longer-term financial and human risk of all this in favour of the short-term gains that come in the form of large business subsidies, light-touch regulation, and low taxes and property prices. 

But I wonder if we may have reached a tipping point here. For starters, insurance premiums are becoming completely unaffordable. They are up 33 per cent at a national level since the pandemic and up by high double or even triple digits in the most vulnerable areas.

What’s more, the US is more at physical risk from climate change than many other large economies, like Germany, Italy, Indonesia or Brazil. Just as America’s politics and debt levels may warrant higher risk premiums, so may its climate vulnerabilities.

There are, of course, any number of actions that can and are being taken to mitigate such risk at both a state and federal level — everything from strengthening utility grids and upgrading coastal infrastructure, to developing urban heat plans and better managing forests to reduce wildfire risk. Despite this, it’s telling that few Americans want to ban building in or force relocation from risky areas, according to a Pew study. As always, we want to have our cake and eat it, too. 

But there is evidence of a nascent counter-trend. A recent Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco paper entitled “Snow Belt to Sun Belt Migration: End of an Era?” found a noticeable decline in cold to warm migration patterns among college-educated young people, who are most concerned about climate change. 

My own daughter, a recent college graduate, told me she’d decided to stay in Chicago not just because of relatively affordable housing, but because it is “a cold climate near a large body of fresh water”. Such are the dystopian calculations of a generation born into a warming world.

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