Why Do We Keep Developing in Climate Disaster Zones?

Hurricane Helene’s path generated at least $53 billion in damages and, in North Carolina, left more than 102 dead across the state. Most striking was the destruction in Asheville, where flooding destroyed homes and businesses, downed trees, and washed out roads. A city once considered a ‘climate haven’ due to its elevation and distance from shorelines was cut off from the world, busting the myth of ‘safety’ wide open in the face of climate change. As the saying goes, "wherever you go, there you are" during the climate crisis—likely facing rising home insurance costs, wildfire smoke, and extreme weather.

Yet shockingly, cities with well-known track records of climate change-related disasters have become some of the fastest-growing areas in the country. As detailed by the New York Times in September, places across the U.S. Sun Belt (encompassing 15 states in the American Southwest, South, and Southeast)—including Phoenix, East Texas metro areas, and across Florida—have been adding to their populations by the millions over the past several decades; their growth putting more people in the path of potential destruction. Unlike cities that openly advertise themselves as so-called climate havens, in the Sun Belt, economic growth, industry, and historically cheap housing are the main thrust of the appeal. As the nation-wide housing crisis demands we build more housing, what is an ethical and sustainable growth strategy? Why, and how, do we continue to build in the face of life-altering climate emergencies?

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Jobs, housing, and family changes typically drive families to move between states, but affordability remains key. The Times story reports that Houston has added jobs in the oil and gas sector, as well as tech, attracting people to the city in recent years. But the most recent Sun Belt growth, says Jesse Keenan, associate professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University, has been made possible by past population booms in the region, driven in the 1960s and ’70s by what he calls "consumer preferences."

"People wanted to move to a warmer, more moderate climate. A lot of people, as they were getting to be retirees, particularly from World War II, accumulated wealth so they could move," he says. The housing constructed for that initial migration was, overwhelmingly, inexpensive, suburban, single-family homes. Affordability brought jobs, which brought more rapid suburbanization. 

"Suburbanization is critical to the Sun Belt," Keenan says. "The impetus for growth was moving faster than a lot of local government officials could keep up with." For places like Phoenix, that meant not considering the long-term availability of drinking water. In other Sun Belt cities near coasts, suburbs "[were] growing faster than they could recognize risk for flooding," he adds. Coupled with deregulation in the ’90s happening at city and state levels, Keenan says that urban planning and environmental regulation had little ability to keep development reigned in. "By the 2010s, what you see is unchecked development that’s moving into higher and higher [climate] risk areas, looking for the last little bit of developable land that was near an economic base."

Over the past 60-plus years, rapid climate change has brought havoc to the Sun Belt: Despite a recent decade of suburban growth in Phoenix, some new development was paused last year after the state grappled with water shortages; five of the 20 fastest-growing suburbs in the country are in Florida, despite worsening hurricanes that are less predictable and carry greater threat of flooding and storm surges. Experts argue that to keep building housing in these areas, we need to use adaptive strategies. Adaptation, says William "Billy" Fleming, climate activist and Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, requires various types of interventions that deal with the (often urgent) effects of climate change. While a 3D-printed, fire-resistant home might be an adaptive technology for wildfire, dealing with the scale of climate-related crises can require larger infrastructure projects like desalination for water scarcity, or updating power grids to handle energy demands during a heat wave. Historically, Galveston’s seawall or flood control infrastructure along the Mississippi River served toward adaptation; or, more recently, New York City’s dry line was constructed for the same purpose.

But, says Fleming, the problem with these large projects—outside of their enormous, ballooning cost—is how their construction or expansions get approved and funded. "The only way that you can really get a big flood control system, whether it’s the a surge barrier around New Orleans or upgrades to the channelized system that controls the Mississippi river, is if you can show tons of new commercial development: housing, heavy industry like oil and gas, or other massive economic growth. In some ways, building and maintaining that infrastructure requires building high-risk housing [and] industrial facilities behind them," he says. "And the only way to convince people to live or invest in those things is to tell them that it’s safe and produce propaganda around the safety and security of our flood control system that, even if it were properly maintained, could never actually provide that kind of security."

Selling residents on security is particularly helpful in Texas and Florida, where there’s no income tax and governments rely on property tax rolls for local and state budgets. "There’s something called an ‘adaptation paradox’ where you need to continue to promote development so that you can tax that development to spend on adaptation investments for other places," Keenan says. "Miami needs to continue building high-end housing because they need to tax that housing so that they can use that to put into adaptation investments that protect other parts of town." Fleming notes that such adaptation investments are often insufficient and have unfortunate results. 

"People who end up buying into it are the ones who get blamed for it. They’re told they shouldn’t have bought a house there, they shouldn’t have moved to that place," he says, "when every single message they got—from their bank, their mortgage lender, their realtor, their city, from their state—is that this is a safe, affordable place. Inevitably, when disaster comes, they're the ones who are blamed, and very little—if any—of the recovery money that comes from a major storm event ever makes its way back to them."

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Adaptation won’t be enough; As these regions will likely continue growing, several researchers interviewed for this story see mitigative strategies—those that reduce carbon to prevent or lessen the severity of disasters—as crucial. Yet as we continue to see large-scale, climate-fueled catastrophes, it begs the question of whether or not these areas should continue growing—and whether or not those living there should stay. Climate-informed zoning has been part of this discourse; managing new development by addressing site-specific climate risks could hold possibilities. In some coastal areas like South Carolina, the state may opt for managed retreat as a mitigative strategy which, according to ProPublica, could be "a way to take the most chronically flooded homes and turn them into open space so they can improve drainage and lower flood risk for the surrounding area." Compensating owners for their houses might address Fleming’s critique of who’s to blame for property loss, but moving populations away harms not just existing real estate practices and the tax benefits they bring in, but the homeowners themselves. 

According to Jessica Varner, a professor of landscape and environmental history at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School and member of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, Houston residents saw a first wave of buyouts after Hurricane Harvey struck in 2017. "You’re not just replacing a home," she says. "It’s a family, it’s a support system, and so that’s why it’s difficult in terms of buyout or retreat." For lower-income residents, Varner says that the buyout timeline opens the door to predatory buyers: "Folks are living in destroyed homes waiting for the buyout process to be finished, and predatory real estate developers are coming in offering money for those homes." Often, these offers are for less money than the original buyout. "So the question [becomes] about waiting years for a federal buyout [and] living in a home that is vulnerable to flooding multiple times a year versus selling and getting out," she adds.

Keenan believes that while much climate mitigation is focused on how we build, it’s more economically effective at scale to consider where we build. While walkability and public transportation are important, building smaller homes—reversing the Sun Belt’s historic land use trends—is not just crucial, but already happening more broadly. "New housing construction is becoming smaller and smaller and that’s not [only] because of decarbonization," Keenan says. "We’re essentially just running out of land, and developers are trying to build as much housing as they can in the right places. Part of decarbonization is not just about environmental technology bells and whistles. It literally just comes down to how many square feet."

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Coupled with larger-scale adaptive infrastructure, these areas could see some relief, but it would require city officials to reverse past suburbanization schemes. "In places like Houston or Jacksonville, Florida, it’s quite evident that a lot of the increased growth and development is happening on the outer rings of actual urban centers," says Elizabeth Camuti, an assistant professor in landscape architecture at Tulane University who focuses on climate adaptation in the Gulf Coast. "So, I’m thinking about ways that we can incentivize development that is denser in places that already have an existing housing stock, or adaptively reusing buildings and urban cores to support where people live in the future. It’s a way of trying to reduce our footprint, while thinking about how we adapt existing structures or buildings to climate change."

With another approaching Trump administration, one that could shrink President Biden’s endeavors to federally incentivize density and roll back his administration’s attempt to address compounding vulnerabilities to climate disasters, states will need to rethink their land use, budgets, and risk-management approaches. This might result in much smaller-scale interventions like weatherization or building code reforms, but the small things matter, says Camuti. 

"The dignity of people living in these places in the ‘here and now’ is incredibly important," she adds. "So the little things that we can do as practitioners, like improving green infrastructure, or designing low cost adaptation strategies for buildings—like how we can raise or retrofit houses in the most economical way in the short term—it’s still something that I try to keep front-of-mind with my students as we ask these larger questions about the future." 

Top photo of an aerial view of destroyed houses in Port St Lucie, Florida, after Hurricane Milton on October 11, 2024, by Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP via Getty Images.

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