A rising number of American homeowners are ready relocate this year due to extreme weather events and other climate-related concerns.
Some 49 percent of those who own a house are considering moving in 2026 due to climate events, according to a survey of 1,000 American adults by insurance provider Kin Insurance. Also a concern among homeowners is the rising cost of homeownership, the study noted.
“Kin uncovered that climate is driving decisions about where people live and the rising costs of homeownership are changing when and how people buy homes,” the study noted. The study also found that nearly all homeowners are concerned about severe weather damaging their homes.
Kin’s survey found that within the 49 percent of homeowners who want to move, 19 percent “definitely” are considering it, while 30 percent are “somewhat” considering it. Some 45 percent said they were not considering a move.
As for how far away they want to move, Kin broke up respondents’ intentions into three groups:
- Moving within their current city or community: 41 percent
- Moving to a different city or community in their state: 35 percent
- Moving to another state: 25 percent.
For those considering a move to another state, more than half of respondents wanted to avoid disaster-prone states like Florida and California and preferred to move to what they perceived as low-risk states, including Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Connecticut.
But they’re gonna continue to consoom and drive their individual giant SUVs everywhere. Don’t worry they will be electric so buy buy buy.
Anyway, AI running in datacenters powered by fossil fuel will surely find a technological solution to our consumption problems.
Surely we can’t just stop consooming.
And don’t forget to recycle!
The ethics and impact of migration is a real concern. If we just take overextraction and overconsumption and move it somewhere else, we’re not solving anything. (For example, if we take a region that has a lot of freshwater/biodiversity/arable land and just pave it over.)
I want to start having more discussions about this as migration goes mainstream but there’s no feasible way to legislate or enforce it which really worries me.
And all this because we refuse to slow capitalism down. The most important question on everyone’s mind when there’s elections is the economy and money. We need economic growth. Can’t tax billionaires. Can’t stop the consumption machine. Economic growth!
The sad thing is that most people are willing to relocate to avoid the effects it will have on them financially. It’s not because it could help to mitigate the change; they won’t move into a 15 minutes city. We’ll just perpetuate the sprawl elsewhere and continue what we have always done before.
It’s even more sad when I look at images of natural disasters, and beyond the immediate lost of lives, seeing people lose their things and run (drive) to buy even more things produced by the very system that is causing more frequent and intense natural disasters.
Beyond legislation and enforcement, it’s been disappointing to try to explain those things to people around me for decades, hoping they will make the connection, only for them to end up being mad at high gas prices. Also, that survey asks about inside the US only. What if people from one state don’t want immigrants from another state? It’s gonna be interesting to see when the next inevitable question in a decade or so will be if people are willing to become climate refugees in other countries, and if citizens of other countries are willing to accept them.