Joshua Bessex/AP Photo
Jonathon Carmenatty clears snow from a sidewalk in Buffalo, New York, on November 18, 2022.
Snowvember 2.0, the multiday lake-effect blizzard that slammed Buffalo with six feet of snow earlier this month, likely set a New York state record for total inches of snow in a 24-hour period. It wasn’t the most snow ever—some towns in the region got seven feet of snow in 2014 over roughly the same stretch of days in November. But the weather forecasts were on point for this storm, and Buffalo residents kept calm, carried on, and dug out.
Relocation promotions usually do not feature frosty winters punctuated by six-foot snowstorms. But the city’s “Be in Buffalo” marketing campaign leans hard into promoting the recovering Rust Belt metropolis as “a climate change refuge.” But it is seriously difficult to imagine the denizens, of say, Miami, fed up with annual hurricane anxieties, trading in beach umbrellas for snow shovels, ice melt, and antifreeze.
But it is also hard to fault Team Buffalo for inserting climate security pitches into its mission to draw in new blood after decades of decay and derision. The city touts good-paying jobs, and all-season, but especially winter, recreational outdoor activities like sledding, tubing, skiing, and ice bumper cars, and real possibilities for home ownership. Trulia, a national online real estate marketplace, ranked Buffalo as the fourth-safest city from natural disasters, behind Syracuse, Cleveland, and Akron, Ohio. Summers are temperate without the oppressive heat and humidity of the East. Access to the Great Lakes, one of the world’s largest sources of fresh water, is unparalleled.
Should we consider Buffalo to be a climate haven as certain parts of the country become uninhabitable? “There is no place that will avoid the negative impacts of climate change,” says Ryan McPherson, University at Buffalo’s chief sustainability officer. “But the types of threats that we experience here, I’ll take those over tornadoes, supersaturated climate-induced hurricanes, and wildfires that are the most destructive because you have the least prepping time.”
There has, in fact, been a small uptick in Buffalo’s population, and some of that boost has come from climate migration. The city gained some 17,000 people over the past decade, a 6.5 percent increase. Some 10,000 Puerto Ricans moved to Buffalo after Hurricane Maria in 2017, and many stayed on because of family ties and good jobs.
Climate anxiety is definitely a thing. Some retirees are reconsidering moves to Florida or Southern California. One couple recently profiled by The New York Times ditched San Diego for Asheville, North Carolina. Though older people may be more inclined to give Buffalo’s severe winters a miss, younger, college-educated millennial and Generation Z workers have been attracted by the positive economic vibes. Yet the influx of both Black and white middle- and upper-middle-class transplants has also increased resentments about gentrification. “Let’s not kid ourselves: When we see climate disaster happening it will be people with means who are able to move more freely,” says Ben Crowther, advocacy manager for America Walks, a national nonprofit that promotes state and local investments in walking and walkable communities. The key to protecting residents and existing housing stock, he says, are mechanisms like community land trusts that can ensure that current residents who want to stay in their homes or neighborhoods can.
In the short term, climate refuge proselytizers skirt around the edges of what severe winters mean for the region.
One advantage that Rust Belt cities have is existing infrastructure. The opening of the Erie Canal in the early 19th century transformed Buffalo into a regional transportation hub and critical transshipment point for Midwestern grain. The city later became a steel and hydroelectric powerhouse. But the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway route from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1950s did the city in. The population plummeted from more than half a million to today’s roughly 277,000. “They’ve already made the investments in the built environment that enable a lot of people to move there,” says Crowther. “Their heydays were in the 1950s and ’60s and sometimes earlier, and they invested a lot in infrastructure and in housing, and they’re still relatively affordable.”
Buffalo has the oldest housing stock in the country, and has doubled down on architectural preservation and upkeep through various financing programs, particularly for low-income people living in historic districts. The city looks to capitalize on Inflation Reduction Act funds through new initiatives designed to reconnect Black neighborhoods that had been split by the Kensington Expressway, an ill-conceived mid-century highway project. East Side neighborhoods will benefit from tens of millions of state dollars that will bring new paving, street redesigns, bike lanes, and other improvements that gained particular urgency after the Tops supermarket massacre in May.
In the short term, climate refuge proselytizers skirt around the edges of what severe winters mean for the region. After the season’s first and record-setting snowfall, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called out the National Guard and received a federal disaster declaration for 11 affected counties. New York home heating costs are expected to increase by 50 percent during this heating season—no small matter in a city where nearly 30 percent of its residents live in poverty. The state recently secured $60 million in additional LIHEAP funding to provide low-income people with home heating assistance.
Weatherization programs have helped Buffalonians fortify their homes in the winter, but similar efforts to respond to warm-weather issues have been hindered by funding constraints. Buffalo also has to confront how to handle the by-products of warming, such as increased rainfall and flooding. Planning efforts must incorporate stormwater runoff and absorption strategies, and tree plantings and other greening efforts to build natural canopies that can reduce temperatures and filter the air.
Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist for AccuWeather, calls the Buffalo climate pitch “interesting branding.” A lake-effect snowstorm is a regional climatic oddity. Unlike a Midwestern blizzard or a New England nor’easter that produces several inches of snow per hour over a couple of hours, Arctic air moving over warming waters produces phenomenal amounts of snow—three to six inches an hour—over a very localized area for hours on end. “The risk for these higher-end, lake-effect events will still be there and may increase in some cases going forward,” he says. “Overall, in the coming decades, there are some signs that there could be fewer snow events, but some of the snow events that do occur could even be larger.”
In addition to severe winters, the regional risk profile includes episodes of severe heat, humidity, and thunderstorms that can spawn localized tornadoes. “Sure, direct hurricane landfalls are not a threat in Buffalo,” Porter says. But there are severe weather events that happen in places or at times that residents have never seen before. “Heavy rain from a hurricane moving inland can sometimes result in flooding rainfall in the vicinity of the Great Lakes,” he says. “That’s always a concern that sometimes is underrated by people.” In 2011, Tropical Storm Irene’s punishing rains caused catastrophic river and stream flooding that destroyed thousands of roadways and hundreds of homes and bridges—in Vermont.
“It’s a fallacy to think that there’s any safe place,” Porter says. “Every community has various types of weather and climate risks; it’s about understanding what they are and how you can mitigate your risk now.”
