Confronting the Reality of Climate Displacement
Planners are, by nature, patient and cautiously optimistic people. The exigencies of the job practically require it, where timelines are measured not in days, weeks, or years, but often in decades. Workarounds, improvisations based on changing events on the ground, are common and necessary. So it goes with planner Hillary Brown’s new book, Revitalize|Resettle: How Main Street USA Can Offer New Beginnings For America’s Climate-Displaced. A city planner, a former Loeb fellow at Harvard, and the author of two previous books, Brown has written a comprehensive blueprint for how we might relocate climate-displaced residents to chronically underpopulated towns—and do so in an orderly, planned fashion. It’s certainly a tall and optimistic order. A good deal of the book was written in the run-up to the presidential election, so the book outlines a lot of involvement from the federal government, which is now not likely to happen. As a result, we talked about the way forward, the art of what’s possible now. This edited interview is the result of a phone conversation and a series of subsequent follow up emails.
MCP: Martin C. Pedersen
HB: Hillary Brown
The reason why I was interested in your book is, one of the almost certain impacts of climate change will be significant population resettlements. Talk about your impetus for the book.
Aside from my long preoccupation with climate change, I’ve really had a kind of a long-term affinity for small-town America. My first ever job was a study of Main Street, Brattleboro, Vermont. I’ve been sensitive to the fact that many of these smaller places in America are failing. And many of them are wonderful, distinctive communities with untapped resources.
And it’s no doubt true: climate chaos will render some areas uninhabitable, but the timeline for that remains unclear. Estimates of how many will experience inundation from sea level rise by 2100 range from 4 to 13 million—and many more globally. But this number does not include the millions displaced by inland flooding, wildfires, and extreme heat. Plus those forced out by rising costs in major receiver cities from climate gentrification.
The book is really a blueprint for how we might consider population resettlement. Ideally, who would you like to read the book?
It’s written with professionals in mind, and by that I mean planners and architects, developers as well—but importantly, especially now, the philanthropic community. We’ve had a different turn of events since the election. In the book I cite a lot of ways in which the federal government could help us prepare for this, but this will now likely default to state and local. More than ever, we need corporate and NGO philanthropy to help build local capacity to prepare for climate migrants.
While reading the book, I did notice a lot of involvement from the federal government and thought, “Well, maybe not now …”
That’s what happens after consequential elections. But there are other ways in which a lot of this can take place. Many small communities have taken it upon themselves to revitalize and, as a result, have already attracted new population. The small farming town of Ord, Nebraska, which over time had lost 10% of its population, undertook community-minded economic revitalization. In 2001 it adopted a 1% tax increase for economic development, founded a leadership academy to train locals to grow new businesses, and developed new and rehabbed housing. In one decade, it’s seen a 54% increase in 30–35-year-olds, new folks and families moving in. Tiny Winnett, Montana, is reviving its last vestige of native prairie by partnering with the World Wildlife Fund and local agribusinesses to eradicate invasives, install wildlife friendly fencing, enabling cattle to still flourish in this iconic landscape, keeping its resource economy healthy and luring young ranchers to this beautiful region.
The biggest irony is that just in the past decade or so, we’ve seen people relocating to places in literal climate hot spots, from the coastal cities in Florida to the water-scarce Southwest and Texas and the wild/urban interface in the Northwest. North Carolina, for example: for every one FEMA buyout of coastal property, 10 houses have been built in floodplains. Obviously, we’ve got our heads screwed on wrong. We need a much more climate-savvy public.
Projected net migration caused by sea-level rise in the U.S. by 2100. Courtesy of Guardian News & Media, Ltd.
The book proposes where and how resettlement would work and would require an unprecedented level of political cooperation in an environment where that doesn’t exist. How do you work around that?
Indeed. The recently approved Trump budget doesn’t just gut the EPA and jeopardize our climate goals. It will decimate the growing renewables workforce in the heartland. That said, I still think sources of funding remain that could help launch pilot programs for upgrading infrastructure. We need to focus on private investment, the development community, the real estate community. We need to look to state and local funding and financing. New York State has allocated $200 million for small-town revitalization this year. T-Mobile has a hometown grant program. So the philanthropic sector could help jumpstart receiver settlement pilot projects that could set the example.
The problem with the philanthropic community is that it’s largely urban based. Moreover, it has really underinvested in rural America. But rural locales can certainly be testing grounds for the kind of social, environmental, and economic improvements that I’m talking about. They can do scenario planning. They can get consulting experts to help put a pilot together. And they can work with federal regional commissions—unless they’re being abolished too. There are workarounds. There are many ambitious towns that, having lost their population and tax base, have sought to revitalize their populations. As of 2021, more than 40 places in the U.S. had offered outright payments to newcomers, hoping to attract remote workers and grow their economies.
These rural places need repopulation. However, my fear would be if it were to happen in such large numbers, all at once, how those people would be received, and how they could possibly be received in an orderly fashion?
A big issue. That’s why I think we need to be strategic about this. According to the research from the NGO called PLACE Initiative, there are some 256 small towns or micropolitan areas in less-risky climate regions that could be characterized as good receiving places. Not all of them are going to be receptive to this idea, but many of them certainly will see this as an opportunity. Some of them have already successfully recruited remote workers.
And not everybody who’s displaced is going to want to wind up in a small town. But I think that the many opportunities around small-town living could be made still more attractive. And that’s where we just need an enlightened public to help undo the downturn in rural America. We professionals always emphasize sustainable urbanism, right? Yet we tend to overlook the fact that cities are completely dependent completely on rural areas for energy, water, food, and materials, and we have long underinvested in them!
Climate receiver counties. Source: PLACE (Proactive Leadership Advocates for Climate & Equity).
And what do you think would be reasonable first steps? Because your blueprint is really a 20-year plan.
Or a 40- or 50-year plan. We must start with willing communities in those places that want to repopulate, that want to reclaim some of their prior wealth from jobs they lost in the forestry, mining, or other industries with new businesses. Many actively seek to improve their situation based on some of their local assets. The former steel town of Monessen, Pennsylvania—population 20,000 in 1940 to just under 7,000 in 2021—was left with over 100 abandoned properties. It began offering free vacant properties to outsiders willing to repair, bring up to code, and then inhabit them. Today, about half of those properties are under ownership by newcomers.
This can be community driven, not necessarily requiring federal grants, because many of them have already done it themselves. When a ski resort in middle Vermont closed in 2010 due to facility mismanagement, property values in nearby West Windsor (population 1,099) plummeted, and its general store closed. In 2015, the community bought the ski area with help from the state and local foundations and secured another nonprofit to operate it again with more than 100 local volunteers. Between 2010 and 2020, the town’s population jumped 20%, and housing prices rose again.
There are many others that I cite. There’s a wonderful example in upstate New York, Mount Morris, a tiny town that was really in bad shape. The townsfolk advertised to developers to see whether they could help them revitalize. They found a progressive developer who said, “Yes, I can do this on Main Street. We’re gonna have to upgrade the stores, storefronts. People will have to have good window displays and stay open longer hours.” But he gets paid back through redeveloping the floors above on Main Street as rental housing, great for retiring farmers and newcomers. Those are just a few examples of communities that can do this themselves. They will have to be self-selecting.
We’ve got the land to accommodate pretty big shifts. The question is whether we have the wherewithal and the political will to pull it off.
You’re absolutely right. One of the things that the current administration wants to do is to appropriate our national park land for housing. This is the most wrong-headed idea possible. The book shows a map made by the Nature Conservancy of our most climate-resilient lands. This is overlaid with the potential receiving areas. This reveals those certain areas that shouldn’t be developed since they are the best zones for ecological resiliency, biodiversity, and wildlife connectivity.
Or they’re part of the watershed.
Exactly. I think this puts the onus on developers and planners to think about rezoning for undertaking more compact redevelopment, walkable streets, the obvious things that can make these town upgrades not deplete the surroundings. Brattleboro, Vermont, for instance, has rezoned excess space within properties along its commercial strip for multifamily housing. Great idea! We have the capability to do this. Will the developer and real estate industry respond to it? I don’t know, but I hope so.
I think we could safely call it the planning challenge of our time.
The book includes a quote from the American Planning Association that reads “factoring climate migrants into long-range plans, planners and other community leaders can ensure there is adequate housing, transportation, and other services for future populations. Some planners might seize this opportunity to revitalize cities and small towns after decades of population decline.” [emphasis Brown’s]
We should have been planning for climate adaptation 20 years ago, but here we are.
Our near-term climate challenges are momentous and unprecedented. At the same time, there is an unmet need to renew and transform America’s declining rural regions. Revitalized and repopulated hinterland communities could help mix our urban and rural perspectives and hopefully even counter some of the divisions and suspicions that threaten America’s social cohesion. Rather than postponing action until the effects of climate destabilization become unmanageable, bold planning across America must begin now.
Feature image: downtown Ord, Nebraska, via Wikipedia.