Last week, analysts at First Street, a financial research firm in Manhattan that models the future of property values in a climate-damaged world, issued a report suggesting that home values in the US will experience a catastrophic reversal over the next 30 years. The total projected loss: $1.47 trillion. Why? Planetary heating will shatter the housing market in the most vulnerable areas, mainly the Sun Belt, center of the congealed mass of Trump voters who don’t believe the warming regime is real. As First Street’s helpful maps of future destruction of property values make clear, the major losses will occur in Florida and Texas, with lesser but not to be discounted destruction of value in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada.
Unlike elected officials, government bureaucrats, too many NGOs that should know better, and most of the media, insurance companies are leading the way in establishing the new reality that climate, not Wall Street, not the speculative investor class, will dictate the value of real estate. Initially, housing in areas hit with planetary-heating-driven hurricanes, storm surge, and flooding will face enormous increases in the cost of insurance. According to First Street, the four largest metro areas expected to see the highest increases in insurance premiums over the next 30 years are Miami, with a 322% increase, followed by Jacksonville, (226%), Tampa (213%), and New Orleans (196%). Skyrocketing insurance premiums, coupled with repeated uninsurable losses due to storm damage, will drive people out of these cities. Second thing to consider: the market price of homes will plummet as insurance costs go up, and this will be followed by an increasing percentage of housing stock declared simply uninsurable.
Over time, due to these combined factors, there will be a regional exodus, according to the First Street analysis. The report describes “climate migration” that will drive “population redistribution,” with some 55 million Americans by 2055 voluntarily relocating within the U.S. to areas “less vulnerable to climate risks.”
That’s an astonishing figure, amounting to almost 17 percent of current US population. The last great in-country migration in the historical record of the United States occurred during the ecological catastrophe of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when some 2.5 million people fled the Plains states. At the time, US population was 130 million people.
If the First Street analysts are correct in their projections, we are looking at a population transfer never seen before in American history.
According to a 2024 US Census Bureau report, the South “added more people than all other regions combined, making it both the fastest-growing and largest-gaining region in the country.” MSN.com reports that “the Southern region, already the nation’s most populous, has been the only area to sustain consistent population growth throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, largely due to domestic migration.” Within the South, it was Texas (at a gain of 562,941) and Florida (at a gain of 467,347) that had the largest numeric increases in 2024.
Put another way: The two states most likely to have uninsurable housing in the near future are the fastest-growing.