- The most iconic cities in the US have gotten so unaffordable that some have actually been losing population.

New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, these meccas of culture, diversity, and opportunity are now places mostly for the wealthy.

On a national and neighborhood level.

People are being forced to move to places where housing is available and affordable.

And those places are often the riskiest ones when it comes to extreme weather.

- States like New York and California, they're losing population because they're so expensive and people are moving to places like Arizona and Texas and Florida because housing is cheaper.

That coincides with people moving to some of the higher climate risk places.

- We covered why Sunbelt states keep growing in a recent episode, but let's go a bit deeper.

What is it about liberal cities and states that's pushing people to move often into harm's way, and is there anything we can do to reverse this trend and make these places more affordable?

Again, in this episode we'll take a look at why blue States got so bad at building what climate risk looks like across the country and how the map of where we live will be fundamentally reshaped in the future and stay tuned because we'll also find out where we should be investing in for the future.

The US is about 4 million homes short of what we need, and the crisis goes back to the great recession that started in 2007.

- Developers couldn't get loans to build homes and people couldn't get loans to buy homes, so we just stopped building altogether, and that really left some long-term scars on the industry.

A number of the development companies actually went bankrupt.

We lost essentially an entire generation of people who would've gone into the construction trades and didn't.

And so nationally, we haven't built enough for about 15 years to keep up with the demand created by population growth and job growth.

But some of these are also policy choices.

We've made it very difficult to build anything except single family detached homes on about three quarters of our land.

So sort of a combination of the market factors and the policy factors have really left us in this very deep hole.

- Homelessness is one of the most visible results of insufficient housing, and it's a much bigger problem in our blue coastal states and cities.

So what's going - On?

A lot of the deep blue cities and states seem to have a particularly difficult time keeping up with the demand for housing in some places, particularly sort of high opportunity metro areas, places that have really good job opportunities like Seattle and Portland and DC and Boston, New York.

We actually haven't been building enough homes to keep up with demand for more like 30 to 40 years, - And this means those with the lease resources are literally left on the street and home ownership becomes a distant dream for the average person.

But the reason blue cities got into such a deep hole is actually pretty interesting and came from a place of good intention.

- We had a period of time where the federal government went in and did urban renewal projects in cities, tore down a lot of existing homes, particularly lower income communities.

A lot of black and brown communities lost their homes without really having much say in the matter.

- A glaring example of this happened in Portland, Oregon.

During the fifties and sixties, the Albana neighborhood was home to 80% of Portland's black population, but then the government stepped in and carved up the neighborhood, demolishing thousands of homes to build a series of urban renewal projects, and local residents didn't have a say.

- And so in part we have put in place this community engagement process where people who currently live in a place get a chance to come out and talk to their mayor and their city council members and the planning board, particularly before we tear down buildings and replace them with new ones.

- This community engagement process where residents get to weigh in on what's happening in their neighborhood is a core part of the democratic process, especially in more liberal cities.

But is it really democratic at all?

- Often these meetings are held in the evenings.

People who have families with kids can't come or people who work non-traditional jobs and work in the evening.

So the people who show up to community meetings are very often older.

They're wealthier, they tend to be whiter and more male than the communities surrounding them.

And so although it looks democratic, it really isn't.

- The term NIMBY stands for, not in my Backyard, and it's been a big force against development in a lot of liberal cities.

- And so really we've kind of lost the thread that things were initially supposed to protect against and have just made it very difficult and complicated and expensive to build housing in a lot of these communities.

- But what this means is that people are being pushed out of high opportunity cities and they're moving to places that have high climate risk.

Some of the fastest growing metros are also some of the most dangerous.

Let's take a look at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for example.

It's at high risk for extreme heat flooding, sea level rise and hurricanes, and it's growing rapidly.

- It's not that people are moving there because of the climate risks, but because housing is more affordable, - Sunbelt cities, especially their suburbs, have done a good job of building homes quickly to keep up with the growing demand.

They've made it easier and cheaper to build homes.

- Some of the more market oriented Republican places are just more realistic about what the offs are.

They have not adopted really strict regulations.

Development is by and large allowed by a pretty straightforward and transparent process.

They've made it easy to build - And a new report confirms this.

It costs more than twice as much to build multi-family housing in California as it does in Texas, and it takes 22 months longer.

But of course, building housing quickly is not strictly a good thing.

Rapid development in places with climate risk, that seems like a recipe for disaster.

The Carolinas, Florida and Texas are some of the fastest growing states, but they also have some of the highest climate risk in the country.

Extreme precipitation will make major floods more likely in the future, and extreme heat is projected to get much worse in the future.

So at what point do people stop moving to these risky places?

- Think about migration.

You have these push factors, which are what we often refer to as like dis amenities in a community, and you have these amenities, which we call pull factors, and people tend to move based on those push and pull factors.

Places with a lot of amenities tend to attract people.

Places with a lot of dis amenities tend to propel people or push people out, and it, it's not until the dis amenity of climate starts to outweigh all those other amenities that we really see people push out of those areas.

- First street estimates that 5.2 million Americans will move because of climate risk this year, but by 2055, that number will be 10 times higher, but it won't be the major events that push people to move.

It'll be the chronic ones, - Rare events, the really highly impactful events like hurricanes that your a hundred year event, your 500 year event, and they destroy huge parts of the city or the areas where they impact.

But people oftentimes are insured.

Government money will come in and the area rebuilds and essentially looks like it did before better.

If you have an area that's constantly being hit by like a 20 year flood or title flooding, it is the persistent exposure that's eroding the desirability of an area that's eroding the property values.

Those are more impactful in terms of driving people away.

- These persistent hazards like flooding, wildfire, smoke, heat, and drought will reshape the map of where people live in the future.

But some of the riskiest regions are still growing the fastest.

So what's going on?

Well, Jeremy and his team did a huge analysis of migration patterns projected out to 2055.

They layered in what we know about moving trends, about macro economics, housing availability, job markets, all that.

Then they added in climate risk from all kinds of hazards, and then they analyzed around 80,000 census tracks and grouped them into categories.

We'll focus on three of those categories.

Risky growth, climate abandonment, and climate resilient.

First, let's look at risky growth - Over the next 30 or 40 years, the places that have been strong drivers of population growth, strong drivers of end migration are gonna continue to be parts of California, Arizona, parts of Texas, parts of Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee.

They're building more housing, they're building more infrastructure.

There's gonna be more wildfires in Southern California.

More hurricanes, they're gonna become stronger.

And ultimately what that means is that there's more opportunity for damages.

They're just becoming more risky.

- The top risky growth areas are mostly in Texas and Florida with some in the northeast, but then there are climate abandonment areas, places that don't have many amenities to draw people in and are suffering from extreme weather, and they're all over the map.

- Fresno topped our climate abandonment list primarily because there is a relatively weak macroeconomic structure in Fresno.

There's not a tremendous amount of industry relocating to the area.

There's not a lot of jobs, but they also have really high levels of drought, high levels of extreme heat risk, and they are the number one county for exposure to wildfire smoke.

- The top climate abandonment areas are in the Central Valley of California, coastal New Jersey and Alabama Insurance increases extreme weather and low economic outlook, make foreign uncertain future, future.

But there is a major threat to our housing market that we haven't talked about just yet, and it's coming apart at the seams.

The insurance market, - If you go back and look at insurance trends, there's a pretty steady linear increase over time, oftentimes in line with inflation.

Then after 2017, we I, we saw kind of this hockey stick increase.

So we've seen dramatic increases in insurance over the last, you know, 5, 6, 7 years, - And that just reflects that we have more extreme weather, more damage, more expensive storms, in part because we've built all of these high value homes in risky places.

And so insurance companies have to charge more money in order to cover the costs.

- So simply building more homes without regard to future risk isn't the solution.

If we ignore climate risk, we're just setting ourselves up for more expensive disasters and a future where we won't be able to get insurance at all.

In 2024, California built around 100,000 new homes and housing units.

Then in January of 2025, close to 20,000 homes were wiped out in the devastating LA fires and homeowners throughout fire prone California are struggling to get insurance.

Building homes in risky places only compounds our housing problems.

It doesn't solve them.

So what's our solution?

- It has to start with making it easier to build homes of all shapes and sizes in more places and allowing the market to build in places where there's the most demand, right?

So people should be able to live in walkable neighborhoods with stores and restaurants nearby and close to jobs because they want to.

- Policies, zoning and sentiment, particularly in our expensive blue cities, are going to have to shift to accommodate the needs, not only of current residents, but also of new ones.

- On the flip side, providing people with better information, particularly about things like the climate risks they'll face, allows them to make informed decisions about where to live and how much to pay to live there.

It's not that we can't allow people to move to coastal Florida or you know, to the mountains in Colorado.

It's often just a matter of shifting location by a couple of miles within the same city or metro.

- But another part of addressing the housing crisis is making sure that homes that are already located in risky areas are resilient to the climate risks of the future.

- So for instance, Florida has upgraded their building codes a lot.

They required that new homes have roofs that are securely bolted to the walls so the roof doesn't fly off.

That's actually not very expensive, but it increases the resilience of the house and protects it from really expensive damage.

- But where should we be living in the future?

Well, the First Street report also designated climate resilient areas, and these are places with a lot of amenities and strong job markets, and they're relatively lower risk when it comes to climate change.

- A lot of places that we ended up finding were Midwestern areas, great Lakes areas, you know, around Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, on up into the northeast.

Places like Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Madison, Wisconsin.

We're projecting those places to grow.

- It's clear that we need more housing, but we have to be strategic about how we build and where building more density and investing more in these climate resilient areas seems like a good place to start.