Climate migration doesn’t work the way you might expect.
It has been two weeks since the Tampa Bay area experienced what the Tampa Bay Times called its “worst hurricane in a century,” when Hurricane Helene made landfall up the Florida coast. With Hurricane Milton spinning east, Florida’s Gulf Coast is about to see “the most serious weather situation” of the last century. Again.
The Sunshine State rode a post-pandemic growth wave to surpass New York as the country’s third-most populous state, and has four of the country’s five fastest-growing metro areas—including Cape Coral–Fort Myers, which Hurricane Ian slammed in 2022, producing the third-most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history. Will Florida’s lifestyle migrants decide they would rather live on higher ground? “The Great Florida Migration Is Coming Undone,” warns the Wall Street Journal.
Fat chance. To the extent that these storms will push anyone from Florida, it will not be people with the means to go, but people without the means to stay. This phenomenon—sometimes called “climate gentrification”—cuts against one popular idea of climate migration, in which wealthier households move to more secure locations and leave the poor to face extreme weather.
Locals are already conscious of this outcome. “The price of repairs may mean we lose our character,” Sam Henderson, the mayor of Gulfport, told the Tampa Bay Times after Helene. “There will be a different kind of people who can afford to live here, moving forward.”
The data surprised Joshua Graff Zivin, an author of a recent paper about how hurricanes affect housing markets in Florida. “We sort of imagined that the incidence of these events, especially big ones, are sufficiently salient that people are like, ‘Oh hell, I don’t want to live there, that’s dangerous and maybe expensive.’ We hadn’t really been thinking about the mechanical contraction of supply when you trash a bunch of stuff.”
Instead, the evidence suggests, natural disasters constrain the housing supply, leading to increased demand and higher prices for both buyers and renters. Economic instability produces waves of evictions, as landlords replace long-standing tenants with higher-income newcomers. The costs of recovery, whether in the form of emergency reconstruction, higher insurance premiums, or stricter building codes, are easier for higher-income households to bear.
Hurricanes not only lead to higher housing prices, but also demographic change in the years after a storm: “Incoming homeowners in this period have higher incomes, leading to an overall shift in the local economic profile toward higher-income groups,” Graff Zivin and his co-authors found.
“It’s a formula for temporary housing scarcity to turn into permanent displacement,” said Noah Patton, who is from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. One of the NLIHC’s studies of rental housing on the Jersey Shore after Superstorm Sandy found that affluent communities lost their low-income housing stock in the recovery. The factors pushing landlords toward a richer slice of the market included “high costs, inadequate or difficult access to recovery resources, and strong market incentives to redevelop existing low-cost rentals as higher-cost housing.”
Similarly, in a California State University–Chico study of relocations after the Camp Fire devastated Paradise, California, researchers found that the higher the survivors’ incomes, the more likely they were to have remained nearby. The highest-earning households were twice as likely as the lowest to have settled locally.
This fall, after years of deadly wildfires, Sonoma County in Northern California passed the nation’s first ordinance to pause evictions in the event of a disaster declaration. As Patrick Sisson observes in CityLab, that could help counter a well-established trend of rising evictions after disasters. But Florida has no such rules.
That’s progress, says Patton, but it’s just a Band-Aid. The real need is for long-term federal funding for low-income housing after disasters, which is included in a piece of legislation called the Reforming Disaster Recovery Act.
The design of federal disaster assistance can also encourage price gouging, observed Hannah Perls, a lawyer with the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program. In Hawai’i after the Lahaina fire, for example, rental assistance led landlords to jack up prices and evict tenants. “You can see this disaster capitalism can drive this out-migration for people who would like to stay but can’t afford to stay,” she said.
Then there is the cost of adaptation. Many observers have focused on the insurance crisis left behind by Hurricane Helene, which swept through parts of Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina where flood insurance policies are few and far between. Some residents without flood insurance may find themselves ineligible for federal disaster relief under the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s “obtain and maintain” policy, which requires previously flooded homes to have insurance to receive aid. It’s a commonsense idea, but because Florida does not require sellers to disclose previous flooding events, recent buyers may be caught off guard.
Still, in fast-growing Florida, that problem does not necessarily produce down-and-out neighborhoods: Residents who can’t afford to make repairs are forced to sell at bargain prices to investors who can. And as the memory of the hurricane fades, a simple logic asserts itself: New homes are worth more than old ones, and land by the water is still worth more than land away from it.
Holes in flood insurance coverage are also balanced out by the National Flood Insurance Program’s generous subsidies for homeowners in dangerous locations. While premiums have gone up in recent years, and coverage maxes out at $250,000, the program still constitutes a security blanket on Florida’s Gulf Coast, where coverage rates are high. Unlike other ways the government might provide aid after a disaster, flood insurance subsidy is a place-based recovery program that is designed to keep people in their communities, which can produce a lock-in effect.
Other skeptics of Florida’s magnetic pull on Americans from colder climes point to the state’s regular home insurance market, in which insurers are raising premiums and dropping coverage, pushing residents to the state-run Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the so-called insurer of last resort. Indeed, premiums in Florida can be three or four times higher than for comparable homes elsewhere in the country. Those costs may push home prices down, as buyers adjust what they’re willing to pay, but it is also likely to make coastal Florida living a more premium experience.
A related, Florida-specific example of the high costs of adaptation can be seen in the state’s condo buildings, which drew new scrutiny after the 2021 collapse in Surfside, north of Miami, which killed 98 people. Since then, the state has passed tough new laws to force older condo buildings to save more money, conduct inspections, and undertake expensive repairs. Some owners find they can’t foot the bill, and prices have fallen in buildings with big new maintenance assessments. But that does not translate into affordability for buyers—just a loss for sellers.
And more often, prices go up. According to analysis by the Tampa Bay Times of counties impacted by the Category 5 storm Ian in 2022: “Lee County homes sold in areas with the highest rates of flood insurance claims saw prices roughly 9% higher than those sold in places with less damage.”
If history is any guide, this devastating hurricane season will increase the state’s rents and home prices, rather than drive them down, and Florida’s growth will continue apace.
Then again, as hundred-year-storm chasers know, history may not be much help in the era of unprecedented weather events fueled by a changing climate. The hazards of long-term sea-level rise are distinct from those associated with disaster recovery, which comes with rebuilt, functioning infrastructure and a sense of returning to normal. Future climate change risks are not included in FEMA flood maps, insurance policies, or Florida land-use planning—and seem not to impact the way people consider the risks of coastal property.
It’s that last question that remains the big mystery at the heart of climate migration. Prices may go up as supply contracts, insurance payments flood in, and investment renovates buildings to code; prices may go down as rising premiums and maintenance fees get tacked on. But all else being equal, people still pay a premium to live in the riskiest places. No disaster has changed that calculus yet.
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