Mark Gongloff: Why are Americans so willing to move to disaster zones?

Four years ago, the rise of remote work created a new version of the American dream: No longer forced to live close to the office, millions of people realized they could pull up stakes from New Jersey or wherever and move to sunnier, cheaper places.

Unfortunately, many who made the trip found a nightmare waiting when they arrived: climate change and its accompanying threat of home-destroying natural disasters.

The good news is that destruction and soaring insurance costs might finally be forcing Americans to take climate into account when deciding where to live. The bad news is that, on the whole, they’re still making risky choices — often leaping from figurative frying pans into literal fires.

After years of population booming in regions most exposed to proliferating natural disasters, the stampede has started to slow, a new report from the real estate company Redfin suggests. A net 16,144 people moved into U.S. counties with high flood risk last year, as defined by the climate-research firm First Street Foundation. That’s a striking slowdown from the 383,656 who rushed into those places in 2021 and 2022. And a net 63,365 people moved into high wildfire-risk counties in 2023, compared with 446,343 in the previous two years.

People are flat-out abandoning specific places that have become synonymous with catastrophe, such as California’s wildfire country, disaster-prone Houston, coastal Louisiana and increasingly semiaquatic Miami. Of course, many of those places also have high living costs, so it’s difficult to separate the climate signal from the noise of the more-traditional reasons people move. Surrounding Houston, for example, are bubbles of migration into places that are just as likely to flood as the city, suggesting there’s more to the story than avoiding the weather.

And people ditching houses in Florida as a result of soaring insurance costs and disasters are still managing to find buyers. A net 68,564 people moved into high-flood-risk counties in the Sunshine State last year, accounting for more than half of the country’s total migration into flood zones, according to Redfin.

“Homebuyers tell us they care about climate, but then when it comes to where they’re actually choosing to live and buy homes, they seem to prioritize other things,” Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather said in an interview, “namely affordability, but also warm winters, being close to family, amenities and things like that.”

Florida’s Lee County, home to Fort Myers, was one of the country’s hottest destinations again in 2023, as it has been for years, with a net influx of 8,374 people. Even after Fort Myers was devastated by Hurricane Ian in 2022, bargain hunters snatched up properties there before the flood waters had receded.

Many of them were underwater again after Debby passed by and flooded Florida’s west coast with heavy rainfall and a storm surge. Notably, Debby wasn’t even a hurricane at that point, just a tropical storm — a reminder that you don’t need a cinematic catastrophe to wreak havoc when the air and water are superheated. Mere thunderstorms can do billions of dollars in damage.

Meanwhile, 30,156 people moved to counties in Texas at high risk of wildfire, according to Redfin, accounting for nearly a third of the entire country’s net migration into fire-prone counties last year. Many were fleeing California’s wildfires and high prices just to end up in a state that had only slightly fewer wildfires last year.

Texas even has its own baby version of California’s insurance crisis, with homeowner premiums rising 23% last year, the biggest gain in the country, according to S&P Global. Unlike California, where premiums are constrained by regulation, “business-friendly” Texas invites insurance companies to let ’er rip. As a result, Texas has the sixth-highest average annual premiums in the country, according to Bankrate.com.

But these numbers are apparently still not high enough to change the minds of house hunters. Something has to give. One reason the number of billion-dollar disasters in this country keeps setting records is our dogged insistence on subsidizing the movement of houses, stores, offices and people into disaster zones. Policymakers need to find ways to let the costs in these places reflect the risk while assisting homeowners who can’t afford to move or pay those higher costs. Consumers need more information about the climate risks and potential insurance rates of the homes they want to buy.

It won’t be easy. But somewhere between 17 million and 39 million homes in this country are underinsured for flood and fire risk, according to various estimates, representing the potential loss of more than $1 trillion in property value. Getting real about these risks could be painful economically, but ignoring them until nature forces the issue would be the real nightmare.

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Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

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