NOAH BERGER/AP PHOTO
An aerial view of Paradise, California, after it burned to the ground in 2018
This article appears in the February 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
By Jake Bittle
Simon & Schuster
Patrick Garvey loved living in the Florida Keys. Famed as an oasis for quirky folks, the idyllic limestone island chain offered Garvey, who’d journeyed down from the Canadian Maritimes, the kind of off-the-beaten-track life he craved. On isolated Big Pine Key, he found his passion project, cultivating a rare tropical fruit grove. He had a wife, twin daughters, and a pet pooch. Life was good—until September of 2017, when Hurricane Irma made a turn for the Keys. With his family already out of harm’s way, he stayed put and spent harrowing hours in a nearby school shelter with hundreds of other evacuees. Emerging hours later, Garvey picked his way across the pulverized island. He found his grove with only one solitary tree.
Hurricanes expose the perils of living on the front porch of the climate crisis. In the coming decades, severe storms, floods, fires, heat waves, and drought will force millions of Americans to search for new homes. In The Great Displacement, journalist Jake Bittle delivers powerful stories of seven scarred communities and their people, compelled to cope with loss, unresponsive bureaucracies, and the prospect of future threats. Journeying across the South to the Southwest and into California, he digs deep into the personal experiences of these first climate crisis migrants and delivers a potent appraisal of the myriad forces already uprooting and complicating life for Americans as they scatter across the country.
Given the sweep of the continental United States, migration is a portal to some of the most fraught chapters in the country’s history. Bittle, a staff writer for Grist, an online climate and justice magazine, opens with a nod to the early-to-mid-20th-century Great Migration, which propelled some six million terrorized Blacks out of the South. On its surface, by contrast, the climate crisis is an equal-opportunity, slow-motion catastrophe in progress, one that affects everyone regardless of melanin content or whether you are penniless, bank in Bitcoins, or stuff dead presidents in a wallet. Bittle underlines this egalitarian starting point, but proceeds by reporting how it’s overlaid on the nation’s historic and enduring fault lines of race, ethnicity, and class that structure where Americans live today and where they end up in the aftermath of a cataclysm.
Black communities have long been sited in perilous areas. One place Bittle profiles is Lincoln City, a Black neighborhood in Kinston, North Carolina. Settled after the Civil War, the community’s formerly enslaved people made their homes on a swampy riverbank that whites knew to be susceptible to flooding. (In 1981, the Army Corps of Engineers completed one dam to protect Raleigh and decided against a second to protect areas like Kinston to the south.) Most of their descendants refused buyouts after Hurricane Fran’s flooding in 1996. Three years later, when Hurricane Floyd decimated Lincoln City, county officials did not have to ask; residents came to them. A perverse kind of managed retreat then dispersed the mostly senior residents who did not have flood insurance elsewhere throughout the region and the country. But the white residents of the state’s Outer Banks, a series of barrier islands, have been the repeated beneficiaries of beach nourishment and other projects to protect their homes and other properties.
Bittle is at his finest as a chronicler of the loss of place and the sense of belonging for victims of natural disasters.
A superb storyteller, Bittle is at his finest as a chronicler of the loss of place and the sense of belonging, and the frustration that financial constraints pose for the victims of natural disasters. These elements combined to convince some survivors to stay in proven dangerous zones like Coffey Park, a Santa Rosa, California, neighborhood ravaged by the 2017 Tubbs Fire. He spotlights the particular socioeconomic and demographic markers that determined whether people moved to someplace safer and affordable or stayed in imperiled places despite the risks and costs. After the embers came over hills and the highway-cum-firebreak they’d thought would protect their community, Kevin Tran and his family escaped in two cars. His father took their dog in one. Tran had his mother ride with him in a second, fearing that she might double back to retrieve photo albums. They made it out with just minutes to spare before the fire reduced their neighborhood to ashes. Their insurance payout came nowhere near to covering what it would cost to live anywhere else in metro San Francisco. They opted not to move out of their diverse, congenial middle-class community, a rarity in that part of California, that they all loved.
José Guzman, his wife, and four children took a roundabout route back to Coffey Park. Following the fire, they initially moved clear across the country to Louisville, Kentucky, for several years. The lower cost of living and fewer climate hazards there, however, proved no match for the emotional tug of California life, even though that meant returning to rebuild on a burned-out plot of land with an outstanding mortgage. A wealthy suburban couple, Vicki and Mark Carrino, stayed on, too. They returned to Fountaingrove outside Santa Rosa. Despite the near certainty that fire still loomed in their future, the Carrinos were so bonded to their former homestead that they built an almost exact (and expensive) replica of their former home with their insurance proceeds and savings.
Why? Sociologists Anna Rhodes and Max Besbris have explored the concept of a “forever home” in their study of a Houston suburb flooded by Hurricane Harvey. They found that the appeal of a forever home—a dwelling for a lifetime, surrounded by family, friends, and strong community ties—underpins longtime residents’ decisions to remain, rebuild, and defy the obvious dangers.
Living in perilous areas means that public officials must incorporate “resilience” into community planning—that is, managing and hardening vulnerable places against future disasters. But is resilience just another word for nothing left to lose? Norfolk, Virginia, increasingly prey to sea level rise, has embarked on fortifying the Chesterfield Heights neighborhood by raising streets, improving drainage, and building berms. But Bittle deems the case for this multimillion-dollar project to be disingenuous, a slender benefit that only staves off the inevitable. Even as the coastal real estate markets already display hints of the bubble that preceded the Great Recession, he notes that at some point in the not-too-distant future, even before chronic flooding overwhelms some coastal neighborhoods in Norfolk and beyond, that market is likely to crater.
What stays true is them that have gets. When the town of Paradise, California, burned to the ground in 2018, one group of migrants found an agreeable place to settle down in the Boise, Idaho, suburb of Nampa. Some of them had been couch-surfing or struggling with rent payments. But one enterprising real estate agent, enchanted with her new home, convinced some of her fellow residents to follow her lead and settle in Idaho. Thanks to her ministrations, they found an appealing place with less climate risk and with homes they could afford. Left to fend for themselves, hundreds of other Paradise evacuees fell into homelessness, consigned to a tent city in a Walmart parking lot ten minutes away from their incinerated town.
If Bittle’s sojourn through threatened places lands on a discordant coda, it is because he provides few solid answers to his question of where the climate-displaced will go. Instead, Bittle proffers plausible scenarios with plenty of caveats. While a few small communities have opted for “managed retreat” (planned moves of people and assets out of danger zones), he argues that it will not work as well for larger places. Bittle cites Boston, New York, Miami, and Charleston, South Carolina, as especially endangered, and notes that the cost of buying out homes and moving other assets away from tide-impacted shorelines almost anywhere along the East Coast will be difficult and pricey. To be sure, forward-thinkers in Charleston are taking small but significant steps to move people out of threatened areas. Hurricane Sandy did force New York to cede sections of Staten Island to the water. But developers still hold sway. The rebuilt homes in the post-Sandy Rockaways now have million-dollar-plus price tags.
After natural disasters that render areas or regions uninhabitable, Bittle argues, many people will seek out deeply resourced cities that can recover faster than rural areas. The long-term effects of climate change also prompt him to provide some regional speculations. Cincinnati and Buffalo could become more attractive for climate migrants outrunning disaster. Buffalo (this season’s brutal snowstorms notwithstanding) boosters have been selling the city as a climate refuge. While retirees make decisions on a shorter timeline more inclined to warmth, younger people may well steel themselves for the climate crises ahead, and northern tiers of the U.S. are more likely to house them. Here, Bittle rightly raises the ugly specter of climate gentrification.
Despite what census data reveals about population flows to Texas, Florida, and Arizona, for instance, the South and Southwest will actually disgorge people and industries in the coming decades due to increasing temperatures and water scarcity. As long the megadrought continues, this calamity almost guarantees a shift in migration patterns for a popular city like Phoenix. And the Southeast also has its own unique water scarcity issues.
In crafting his concluding solutions matrix, Bittle treads too gently on federal and state-level deciders. Steering taxpayer dollars more quickly to victims in the wake of disasters is certainly warranted. Bittle documents agency foot-dragging in distributing relief dollars and exposes deeper shortcomings, like the policies that block replacing affordable homes like trailers. If anyone doubted it, he makes clear that reforms commensurate with the emerging migration conundrum are overdue.
States also need to move on home insurance regulatory overhauls. After two years of fire seasons that compelled the California insurance industry to pay out more than $12 billion in claims, the companies responded in the way that insurance companies trying to recoup tremendous losses invariably do: by jacking up premiums. After the Tubbs Fire, Bittle reports, one wealthy couple received the bill for their new insurance premium, which came to $8,000 a year. If the Great Recession punctured the illusion of the American dream of home ownership for people of color who’d succumbed to subprime mortgage deceptions, the climate crisis now poses similar hazards to homeowners who are underinsured or uninsured against flood and fire losses. Here again, many are likely to be low-income people of color.
Such problems are exacerbated in red states averse to regulation. In the Republican regions of the Southwest, real estate developers operate as islands unto themselves, building exurban communities like Merrill Ranch in Florence, Arizona. There, credulous town officials, not thinking past their own political expiration dates, promised infinite supplies of scarce water to incoming residents. Meanwhile, nearby cotton farmers face financial ruin inflicted by a nearly dry reservoir and limited water rights.
Unfortunately, Bittle sidesteps the partisan divide that grinds up solutions-oriented policymaking into fine dust. Federal and state agencies, insurance companies, and real estate concerns respond to political rules-setters. Some state lawmakers and nonprofits are actively exploring solutions to the climate crisis, as Bittle notes, but not enough are. Indeed, if climate is a defining crisis of the 21st century, the federal actors, the president, members of Congress and state leaders, and regulators bear monumental responsibilities here.
Bittle duly recognizes that the Democrats’ renewable-energy climate package is a step forward (though it comes with generous tax credits and lets fossil fuel producers off the hook), and the historic infrastructure bill provided billions to FEMA programs. But even with these billions, there are not enough dollars to aid every threatened place. Nor is the fiscal path ahead certain in a volatile and chaotic environment. The Republican House, with its chaos-seekers, climate deniers, and fossil fuel supporters, will ensure that forward motion on climate adaptation and mitigation will be nonexistent so long as they are in the majority.
As for the questions Bittle raises about Americans’ social responsibilities to people in imperiled places, the answers are obvious and unsettling. History, politics, and racism in places like Lincoln City converged to dictate who must move, who gets to live where, and at what costs. Absent a big step up from political deciders to plan for these massive population shifts, climate crises could usher in decades of economic dislocation and racial and social turmoil.
Like thousands of other survivors of natural disasters, Bittle relays that several more personal crises forced Patrick Garvey to grapple with some very difficult decisions. His wife had decided that a separation beat eking out a precarious existence on a decimated Big Pine. He had no more money for repairs. Another storm might destroy any fruit trees he replanted. Rising brackish water could seep into the soil and kill off the trees, too. Garvey agonized over how to restart his life. “What happened next,” Bittle writes, “was for the water to decide.”
