When it comes to unsolicited requests for advice, June through October is Jesse Keenan’s busy season. “That’s when I get the most amount of emails, calls, or even handwritten letters,” Keenan, an associate professor of Sustainable Real Estate and Urban Planning in the school of architecture at Tulane University, says. At least once a day, these concerned voices come to him—a stranger with an extremely personal question: Where should I move next?
Keenan, whose research largely focuses on the intersection of climate change and the built environment, has catapulted to the forefront of discussions surrounding climate migration, climate refugees, and so-called climate havens. As the United States faces increasingly catastrophic fires, extreme heat, droughts, and hurricanes, among other climate disasters, concerned residents are turning to Keenan to tell them which parts of the country might offer relief. In 2019, a piece in the New York Times centered on Keenan’s research proposed Duluth, Minnesota as a potential asylum for those looking to escape the most dangerous impacts of climate change. By 2023, thousands of people had moved to the small city in hopes of a future with fewer climate risks. “These things are real,” Keenan says of the way climate is impacting both the cities and the homes in which people choose to spend their lives. “It’s slow numbers right now, but [it] will grow.”
Many realtors who live and work in areas with higher climate risks see this trend too. However, the force behind these moves is not the disasters themselves, but the increasing costs to take care of and own a home in these locales. “I wouldn’t say that the wildfires themselves are driving people away,” Debra Miller, a Sacramento-based real estate agent with Century 21 Select Real Estate, tells AD. “It’s the cost of maintaining their properties and the cost of insurance.”
Other agents interviewed for this story agree that the high price of insurance in areas that are vulnerable to climate disasters is one of the leading problems for buyers and sellers in their markets. In June, Allstate joined State Farm in halting coverage for new clients in California, stating costly natural disasters as a primary reason for the move. In July, Farmers Insurance followed the lead of dozens of other providers and stopped underwriting new policies in Florida. “It’s looking desperate,” Désirée Ávila, a South Florida–based realtor, says of the real estate landscape following these decisions. For homeowners who are already covered, premiums are increasing—sometimes to the point that they become unaffordable. Ávila runs a Facebook group for residents of Oakland Park, a suburb near Fort Lauderdale, and says that at least a few times a month a member posts about their insurance policy going up. “There’s this continuous desperation about these policies going up so much and so fast; people can’t keep up with the cost,” she adds.
It’s for these reasons and more that Zac Sperow, a realtor based in Napa and Solano County, California, believes climate change is the next biggest concern in the real estate industry. In addition to the higher costs for individual homeowners, he worries about the cascading impacts on the market as a whole. “We had a luxury insurance specialist come to our office, who told us that in the next few years it would be extremely difficult to insure many high-end homes in the area,” Sperow says. Should these properties become uninsurable, potential buyers won’t be able to finance their purchase. “It means it has to sell for cash, which means there’s only so many people that can buy that house for cash at that price, which means the prices have to come down,” he adds.
For those looking to buy in the current market, Sperow is also advising clients to consider climate change as a factor in the home’s potential resale value. “I had one client who was looking to buy in an area that is constantly flooding. I had to tell them they may not be able to sell it [in the future] if they buy it.”
In these ongoing conversations, cities like Duluth have popped up as “climate havens,” or areas where climate change isn’t likely to be as bad. “The idea of a climate haven is fiction; nowhere is safe…but there are areas that are comparatively lower risk,” Keenan explains. One such city is Raleigh, which AD found to be among the most climate resilient cities using data from the University of Notre Dame’s Urban Adaptation Assessment. “We don’t have as many climate issues because we’re inland,” says Deb Brown, a Raleigh-based agent with Century 21 Triangle Group. “We do have occasional problems, but not in the way it affects people along the East Coast.” This past weekend, Tropical Storm Ophelia made landfall in North Carolina. According to local weather reports, Raleigh saw strong winds and rain, but experienced fewer severe impacts compared to the coastal regions.
However, she’s not presently seeing much influx to the area from out-of-towners simply looking for a more climate-friendly place. Instead, she finds people drawn to jobs, a lower cost of living, education, and proximity to both beaches and mountains. “I think people will continue coming here for a variety of reasons,” she says. “But as more severe and frequent weather events happen consistently in different parts of the country, people might be attracted to our area because of the resilience overall.”
Presently, most people aren’t moving across the country because of climate change—whether because of increasing costs or the disasters themselves. “Most of this is people moving locally,” Keenan says. “But there is some contingent of people that are moving and will move across long distances.” Ávila, the South Florida–based realtor, believes that while people may not pack up and leave an area, they may have to settle for less than what they originally wanted when buying homes in the future. “An insurance premium could make your mortgage payment not feasible,” she says. “And so you have to choose something that’s less in order to accommodate that.” She thinks more people may begin living in multifamily buildings, where the responsibility of the exterior and other common spaces is shared among the tenants.
As climate change continues to worsen, Keenan believes there will be sorting at a hyper-local scale based on individual values and measures of risk. “We’ll begin to separate ourselves, even very locally (like on a block or lot) between different measures of the quality of the building, the architectural elements, and also physical risk attributes. So we’ll begin to see a world with lower quality housing and higher quality housing.”
In some ways, this is already starting to play out. So-called climate resilient design has been used in new developments as both a marketing and sales tool, particularly in the upper luxury market. New properties may come with solar panels and backup generators, all with redundancy in mind. “In part, I think this is because people perceive that these amenities are going to reduce their insurance premiums,” Keenan says. “The problem with this, though, is that there’s not a lot of clear information about the extent to which resilience measures actually reduce your premium.”
Miller, the Sacramento-based agent, believes that a more standardized definition of a resilient home, agreed among the government and insurance companies, could mitigate some of these issues. “Currently there’s nothing,” she says. What an insurance company might view as a resilient home is drastically different than what state authorities might recommend. “A homeowner may [make upgrades to the home’s resilience] following state recommendations and spend $5,000, but then the insurance company comes along and says they need to make different modifications, and then it’s another $3,000,” she says. “So the insurance industry and the state fire regulations need to come together and create some solutions on what works best.”
Many people, like Sperow, believe that not enough homeowners are aware of these risks, though they should be. “I would say the majority of realtors are not having these conversations with their clients,” he says. “I think 10 years from now this will be a huge topic of conversation on every purchase.” But these discussions will be had alongside other points of topic regarding the difficulty and inequity in the housing market. As Keenan adds, “This is in the context of a broader challenge of affordability in this country. So it just adds more stress to what is already a very challenging housing situation.”
