How The New Great Black Migration Ends Up Being a Climate Trap
The Green Living Plan, a new climate and environmental injustice exploration series from theBEnote, takes a quick look at how recent heatwave maps match recent Black residential migration maps.
Greenhouse gas, fossil fuel extracted and capitalism triggered climate crisis has created what are now, officially, the hottest days ever recorded by humankind. We’re seeing planetary temperatures causing stress of the kind that’s close to what’s described in the opening scene of Kim Stanley Robinson’s highly recommended read The Ministry for the Future, but the intensity is not yet there for one mass climate genocidal moment. As this unfolds, here in the United States, the hottest places are concentrated throughout the South and Southwest. Here’s a list of the hottest heatwave cities in the U.S. displayed in the New York Times as of today which stand out …
In addition, here’s what the Heat Index looked like across the country on Thursday, as we headed into the weekend …
Matching Trends
What’s equally troubling, beyond the heat, is that places facing the most extreme heat are also places that many U.S. residents are moving to in desperate search of affordable housing. Both unaffordable housing crises and climate crisis worsening heat waves are climbing on parallel pikes. As The Economist recently reports …
[E]xtreme heat in the Sunbelt is not convincing Americans to up sticks. Census figures suggest that 12 of the 15 fastest-growing cities in America are in the region. A recent study from Redfin, a property platform, finds that the 50 counties with the highest share of homes exposed to extreme-heat risk grew by an average of 4.7 percent between 2016 and 2020. The five hot counties that experienced the most growth were in Arizona, Florida and Texas. Williamson County, Texas, which includes Austin, grew by a whopping 16.3 percent. Counties with lots of homes vulnerable to drought, fire and floods also grew, though less rapidly. Places with relatively low climate risk experienced population declines. Rather than migrating away from the areas most affected by climate change, Americans are moving towards them, lured by the promise of lower taxes and house prices than in costly coastal metros.
It’s not simply Americans, either. It’s specific categories and demographics of Americans battered by high rents and high housing prices in comparably cooler and Northernmost and some Western places drawn by the promise of socio-economic paradise. Alarmingly, the demographic rushing to heatwave states is the Black demographic, the population that’s already the most disproportionately impacted by climate crisis dangers. Look at how the Black migration shift (as our Prosperity Now feature pointed out earlier) appears to match the map of hottest states above …
As Capital B News pointed out earlier this year, new Black residents moving into the Phoenix area represented “ … the fastest-growing region for Black people outside the Dallas and Houston areas, according to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2010 and 2021.” As Capital B noticed …
70,000 Black folks who moved into Maricopa County between 2010 and 2020. More than 650,000 people have relocated to the Phoenix area during that time, making Maricopa the country’s fastest-growing county. A disproportionate amount of that growth is driven by new Black residents: Between January 2020 and December 2021, the Black population’s increase outpaced every other major racial group. Maricopa County’s Black population is growing nearly seven times faster than its white population. Those moving to Phoenix are a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Black Americans who have left the coasts and the Midwest in search of better jobs and safer communities.
Things To Think About
Noticing these simultaneous heatwave and population shifts, several problems come to mind …
Black populations moving to the hottest places in the country, and the trend not abating anytime soon if low housing prices are too appealing to ignore, could find those same populations caught in a climate crisis trap.
If they’re stuck in places that get hotter, we’ll begin seeing Black populations in the U.S. hit by a fresh increase of heat-related ailments and deaths over time. Income will be a significant determinant of how well Black residents can ride heat waves.
How much will income inequality exacerbate heat impacts?
Another worry will not only be heat-related health impacts. Residents in heat-stricken arid states like Arizona and Nevada that have traditionally struggled with low water supplies will then deal with another crisis: Lack of water access. Which types of residents will that hurt the most? What will water prices look like in the future? And, because of income inequality, who will get ready access to water and who won’t?
What happens if heat waves also severely pound local economies in cities like Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, Las Vegas and elsewhere? Will economically distressed Black communities have the resources to rise recessionary waves in the midst of heat waves?
If climate crisis heat waves are an ongoing, worsening and prominent feature in these cities, making them unlivable, what happens to the value of these homes recently bought by hopeful Black residents? Will these homes really be the vaults of “generational wealth” as assumed?
Are communities organized for these impending trends? Are Black anchor institutions - from churches to non-profits - organizing around climate crisis and heat waves as a major issue and pushing policymakers to make their cities and living spaces climate resilient?
Housing prices in a hotter South and West may get more affordable, but higher housing prices in a cooler North could make those regions less accessible to low-to-moderate income Black populations that were already forced out of those regions due to unaffordability. As ProPublica notes …
… 1 in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse. This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty. Mobility itself, global-migration experts point out, is often a reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others will be left behind. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the society around them ceases to offer any more support.