History is cyclical, not linear. Most people don’t truly understand that. It’s especially true in real estate. If you base the purchase of a home or investment property on what’s been desirable for the past thirty or forty years you may be unpleasantly surprised at the results moving forward. On the other hand, if you grasp the longer demographic and economic cycles you can take advantage of the ebbs and flows that are evident from the historical record. A goodly amount of luck doesn’t hurt either.
For example, my mother was born in Boerum Hill Brooklyn. When my grandparents lived there in the 1930’s and 40’s Boerum Hill was a vibrant immigrant neighborhood occupied by Sicilians, Jews, Greeks, and Irish. From all the stories I heard from the old people in my family it was a great community to weather the duel storms of the Great Depression and World War II. People didn’t have much, but they all looked after each other.
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By 1970 Boerum Hill had been completely abandoned and left in ruin in the rush to suburbia. My grandmother’s younger brothers physically helped build Levittown on Long Island as carpenters and masons when they returned home from the war. White people got federally subsidized tract homes, new schools, and endless ribbons of fresh highways in the suburbs. The building stock back in Brooklyn was left to rot and was occupied by the portion of society that was intentionally and systematically excluded from the post war economic bonanza. As my elderly relatives would say, “The old neighborhood got very dark.” Blacks rented unwanted buildings from absentee slumlords or got herded into crappy public housing projects. The city of New York as a whole had been hollowed out by the nearly complete loss of its middle class. The quality of the public schools went into free fall. The infrastructure of the city was in a horrendous state of disrepair. The city wobbled on the brink of bankruptcy. There were devastating race riots. Crime was out of control.
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Today Boerum Hill is a million dollar neighborhood occupied by bright educated young people, families, well heeled empty nesters, and the inevitable hipsters. They enjoy a high quality of life, access to good jobs, and culture – and they pay extra for the privilege. New York City is flush with cash and has never been in better physical condition.
No one in 1940 could have imagined how far down the old Brooklyn neighborhood would sink by 1970. And no one in 1970 could have predicted the spectacular gentrification of 2015. For those people who purchased property in the area in 1940 it must have seemed like a smart move compared to buying a fallow potato field way out on Long Island or New Jersey. But it was all downhill for decades and they probably never lived to see Boerum Hill recover. For those who bought property in Boerum Hill in the early 1990’s it must have felt like a huge risk. But all those cheap run down old buildings proved to be a massive gravy train that just kept rolling in. That’s the cycle of history at work.
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Meanwhile back in Levittown, things aren’t as good as they used to be. For many Millennials the cul-de-sacs and strip malls of aging post war suburbia have no magic. The majority of these towns are composed of modest homes in quiet subdivisions. That’s not the problem. The trouble comes with the sad public realm of endless highways, parking lots, Quiki-Marts, chain restaurants, big box retailers, and car dealerships. “There’s no there there”, to quote Gertrude Stein.
Aside from shifting generational preferences there are other complications. Maintaining all the spread out infrastructure from the paltry tax base just isn’t adding up. The Jiffy Lube and Applebee’s don’t bring in enough revenue to cover the ongoing cost of the associated highway, water, and sewer systems. Municipal governments in aging suburbs are also burdened with an accumulation of pension and health care obligations for legacy public workers. Current teachers, fire fighters, cops, and maintenance crews are competing for scarce funds with their retired counterparts. At a certain point the red ink is going to overwhelm these towns.
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By the 1950’s my family had migrated first to Hialeah in the new suburbs of Miami, Florida. Then on to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles where I was born in 1967. This movement was absolutely in keeping with the national trend. Just a few years earlier in 1962 California had surpassed New York as the most populous state in the country. Americans were rapidly suburbanizing while also marching relentlessly out of the Northeast and Midwest toward the sparsely populated Southeast and West. New post war public investments in highways, land reclamation, and aqueducts were transforming worthless desert wastelands and swamps into prosperous new cities. Jobs in new industries like electronics and aerospace appeared in the Sunbelt as well.
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As I grew up in the 1970’s and 80’s the trend was for people to continue to push out to the far edges in search of the American Dream at a reasonable price. Keep in mind, the population of California rose from 19 million in 1967 to 39 million today. And all those new people wanted a ranch house and a pool. People would hit the highway and keep driving until they found the house they wanted at a price they could manage. Businesses migrated outward to new suburban office parks and shopping centers. Commuters didn’t drive from suburbs to downtown as much as they drove from one suburb to another. People drove over mountain ranges and across deserts in search of the right mix of house and affordability. And then, somewhere along the line, something else started to happen.
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People in large Sunbelt cities like Los Angeles began to hit a point of diminishing returns where the affordable fringe locations were not only far inferior to the coastal neighborhoods of previous generations, but the prices were still relatively high given the long commutes and multiple compromises. By the time you found a house you could afford you were just too far from the things that made life in LA worthwhile.
Migration leaped out of California entirely and bounced to smaller Sunbelt cities such as Phoenix, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, and Denver. These destinations were LA-lite. The same principle was at work. People liked the older 1950’s version of Los Angeles that offered cheap land, traffic free roads, safety, and open space. But by the 1980’s that was already a distant memory. So they packed up and found their suburban bliss on a brand new cul-de-sac in Flagstaff or Reno. At the time I also noticed increasing “market segmentation” since the people who moved to Santa Fe or Aspen were quite different from the folks who moved to Fort Collins or Provo. Predictably, businesses migrated selectively along with the population.
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The same dynamic happened as people seeking a more “San Francisco” environment migrated to Oregon and Washington State. 70% of the people who relocated to Portland and Seattle in recent decades were from California. Nevada continued to attract people looking for an affordable tax haven just across the border. Increasingly this left California a land of prosperous coastal “haves” and inland “have-nots”. Wealth concentrated near the ocean and poverty persisted in the Central Valley. The broad middle class evaporated.
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The same dynamics were at work on the east coast. I lived in New Jersey for a good portion of my childhood. If you rummage through social media sites looking up people from my old high school half of them will turn up in Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida. They wanted the same comfortable suburban home they grew up in. They just didn’t want the New Jersey price tag, property taxes, traffic, or car insurance rates. And they could live without the snow. Whatever industry didn’t leave for Latin America or Asia was moved south away from labor unions toward “Right to Work” states.
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And finally there’s Texas – the grand daddy of all the Sunbelt empires. Texas has became the new California. Abundant cheap land, endless wide new highways, low taxes, a hands-off government, a booming economy, and the constant reassuring hum of air conditioning compressors. Growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. At the moment this seems like a great place to invest in real estate. And it may very well be. At least for the next little while.
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So here’s my interpretation of what the future may bring. I have no scientific research to back this up. It’s just a hunch. And I most likely won’t live long enough to know if I’m right or wrong since the pendulum of history swings so slowly and I’m already a bit long in the tooth. But here goes.
The Sunbelt is currently at its peak. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston, and all the other spread out post war metroplexes are at full flower. But we know how this ends. The infrastructure will age. The tax base won’t keep up with maintenance. There are already problems with water. Most state departments of transportation are functionally insolvent. Some of the most dynamic regional economies are built on industries that have short life cycles and stiff global competition. It’s easy for people to move to a generic Sunbelt city, but it’s just as easy to move away when the bloom is off the rose. Fuel is cheap and abundant at the moment, but that won’t always be the case. And all the shiny educated dynamic young people that were lured into town to goose the local economy will eventually grow old and crotchety.
The vast majority of post war construction is cheap and disposable. The newer the building the more “innovative” the materials. The average plastic and particleboard tract house or Krispy Kreme outlet has a life expectancy of a Labrador Retriever. These buildings turn to compost when exposed to direct sunlight and moisture. In retrospect a 1970’s injection molded Malibu Barbie Dream House was more durable. There won’t be much left of Henderson, Nevada once the water supply is cut off, the last refrigerated tractor trailer full of Lean Cuisine breaks down on the side of the road, and the Social Security checks fail to materialize. Everything built in the last sixty years was designed around cheap motoring. Not only are these towns not easily retrofitted, but they aren’t worthy of being saved. No one will ever covet their great grandmother’s fiberglass shower stall or polystyrene foam Tuscan columns.
On the other hand, this is what Buffalo, New York looks like after sixty years of absolute neglect and abandonment. It has good bones. Buffalo will never run out of fresh water, endless fertile nearby farmland, or cheap clean electricity from the hydro stations at Niagara. It’s also in a good neighborhood. (Canada is across the street dude. They’re like, super nice and chill.) Long after commercial aviation becomes prohibitively expensive and the interstate highways get funky there will still be shipping on the Great Lakes and inland river systems. Water transport has always been the most viable and economical way to move large loads of heavy things for pennies on the dollar. You might not take a canal boat from Chicago to Branson, Missouri for a weekend of golf and country music, but a good old fashioned train might get you to Boston or Washington overnight without any trouble.
The entire Midwest has emptied out. The population fell by half in the last few generations. High quality real estate is currently on offer at fire sale prices. Every bad thing that could possibly happen to a place has already occurred and the region is ripe for reinvention. There’s just enough residual knowledge and equipment left behind that fine grained local productive industry and agriculture can take root again. We won’t be seeing the Detroit or Cleveland of 1950 ever again. That era of massive auto plants and steel mills is over. But these places have the qualities that will be in demand in coming decades. At least that’s my best guess at which way the pendulum will be swinging.
I share your interest in the Great Lakes region as a place with abundant infrastructure and resources lying fallow —- but as a native upstate NYer who relocated to the Richmond, VA area in 2003, I have to point out some headwinds facing Buffalo.
Buffalo currently faces 2 big longstanding problems and one eternal one: loss of its raison d’être, unhelpful policies handed down from Albany/NYC are changeable, but not guaranteed, and the climate is, uh, legendary.
It’s true that it has great bones like so many other places in the northern tier, and yes it has cheap energy like Seattle did (does?) —– and that is why I think it will be, much like much smaller Amsterdam, NY, (or more famously, Detroit, a magnet for FORIEGN immigrants from poorer parts of the world who know a great deal when they see one, have much fewer options, and are WILLING to do what it takes make a less-than-perfect option work.
They’re already moving in. Buffalo is filling up with hardworking immigrants from places like Somalia and Bangladesh. Right now. Kind of awesome…
Johnny-
You’re correct that particle board+time=equals compost. Particularly with shotcrete stucco (blown on, not trowelled) which leaves cracks and gaps which allow moisture to seep in, accelerated the process. Even more distressing, apartment buildings are now being built with OSB manufactured structural beams.
But where does this leave us? Even if the flesh were willing, not everyone can move back to the bespoke masonry of the east coast and Great Lakes.
My goal isn’t necessarily to offer solutions. I’m not clairvoyant and can’t predict the future or how best to move forward. Instead, I make observations and hold up pictures of the painfully obvious (but culturally invisible) and ask people to develop their own responses. Personally, I think many parts of North America are in overshoot – they contain more people than the land can naturally support. At the moment we have complex systems that pipe in water, electricity, natural gas, diesel,frozen foods, imported manufactured goods, etc. so life is actually pretty good. But as those complex systems wobble and become unreliable people will migrate to areas were the basics are more readily available at a lower cost. Will everyone in today’s Styrofoam McMansions in Scottsdale and Henderson move to a brick apartment building in Green Bay or Kalamazoo? Probably not. But the overall trajectory will favor places with shorter supply chains and more abundant local resources. How exactly that unfolds is a mystery.
I will say that in the short term the catalytic crisis won’t be environmental, but geopolitical. War (or something very much like war) is brewing. When international trade breaks down we’ll all discover just how much of everything we need each day comes from very far away – when it suddenly disappears.
Mmm, I don’t really think so. The international trade system is currently run by China’s mercantile empire — the copy of Britain’s mercantile empire — and they have no intention of letting it break down. (Britain’s mercantile empire never broke down. They sort of handed it to the US and then the US sort of handed it to China.) If China ever decides to embargo a country, that country is *screwed*, but they have no reason to do so unless another country goes hostile.
So if a completely insane US administration declared war on China, China would embargo the US, the US would discover that we’re dependent on China to supply our army, and the war would end very quickly. More likely, the US government would recognize this and *not* be that insane.
International trade will remain remarkably stable. The real issue is things like water, which is far to expensive to import from distant places. Also, things *will* get more expensive… but that won’t stop us buying solar panels from China, or similar productive machinery — why would it?
Wow….As a thirty + year shop rat…(GM) I’ve lived these trends. First in the tractor factories (Iowa and Illinois) and later…(after Republicans took over in the 80s) in Michigan in the auto factories. I’ve lived the ebbs and flows of jobs and the effects migration has on families and emotions. I was one of the lucky ones, I had a trade, (Electrician) which was huge help for finding work. I also worked on the side and have seen the lost in pride in the workmanship that goes into building structures. All for the dollar. Whatever was the cheapest. No long range thought at all to what will happen in a hundred years.
When I would say something out loud, “I wonder how long this house/building will stand?” It always can back, “long enough to get paid.”
I found this article fascinating. You spoke out loud what I have been feeling/living all these years. I kept saying to myself, “Yes, yes, he’s soooooooo right.”
When one goes to Europe, and I believe it should be a require class for every high school senior. One gets a completely different sense of place and time, especially time. Over there they don’t call a house/home/building “Old” until it is five hundred years old. They have a much stronger sense of place than we will ever have.
I guess my only caveat, Clifford, is what you mean by “Europe”. sure, the classic old towns are that (classic). But have you ever taken a Google StreetVue “drive” (because I assume as a tourist one wouldn’t) around suburban Rome, or the outskirts of Marseille? Not pretty at all. Which is why all the crime and social disfunction is concentrated there?
If anything, suburban Italy is worse, because the economy has been somewhat stagnant for thrity years!
Great big picture look and I’m in full agreement with your overall analysis.
Just one clarification – California (except for a few counties) is not a desert. It’s a textbook Mediterranean climate. Obviously, large populations have existed around the Mediterranean since the beginning of recorded history. Of course, lifestyles will have to adjust to the Mediterranean norm (olives instead of almonds, fish not beef, lavender not lawns, etc.) to support more people but it’s totally do-able and actually a really desirable lifestyle and not a disaster in the making at all.
But what about the true deserts like Arizona, Nevada, etc? Well, I do see ancient precedents in places like Cairo, Baghdad and Tehran for large desert populations. But generally you have a natural feature like a river running right through town (e.g. the friggin Nile) in those places. And I also don’t see Arizonians willing to live like Cairo slum dwellers to get their water footprints down to a sustainable level. Plus the aforementioned fake Tuscan column expiry date. We’ll see how it plays out. Best of luck to ’em.
Brian – When no water comes out of your tap or the water bill is prohibitively high… That’s a desert.
It is absolutely possible to support twenty million people in Southern California, five million in greater Phoenix, and two million in Vegas. But not the way people are used to living there at the moment. It will be easier to abandon large chunks of these places rather then retrofit them. The parts that are saved will have to be worthy of the effort based on productive activity and real long term value.
My personal expectation is that at a certain point portions of the water supply system will fail – possibly during an earthquake, very likely with the help of an economic crisis – and the cost of replacing the pumping stations, pipelines, and processing facilities in some areas will exceed the value of the real estate that is being served. When money is no object the state and feds write checks in the name of “restoration and job creation”. When all levels of government are flat broke some places (desert or Mediterranean) will lose value and depopulate.
California has plenty of water to support its urban population even under the worst long-term drought scenarios. Urban use is only 20% of water consumption and half of that is for landscaping, which is easily dispensed with. The cost of the water infrastructure to get the water and deliver it to cities is small compared the value of property. Arizona also has a lot of ag use which will go before the cities. Nevada not so much; it’s the only state where water issues might significantly affect urban growth.
Agreed. The other bogeyman is earthquakes. A whopping 63 people died in the ’89 S.F. quake. There was very serious damage ($63b) of course, but on high value land, things get rebuilt. Engineering and disaster training lessons have been learned, as well. Not to minimize the threat to lives and infrastructure, of course. Case in point: Fukushima. But obviously humans have been living in Japan for a while. It just becomes a fact of life in that region, as much as blizzards, hurricanes, etc are in other areas.
The real threat to California is basic financial math, as this article points out. The cost of sprawl infrastructure, municipal pension costs, high taxes, coastal housing bubble, middle class exodus… all these things are coming home to roost and people are voting with their feet.
Things will even out – they always do – but the question is when, how painful it will be and what California might look like on the 10, 20, 50 and 100 year horizon. I think the Rust Belt is a good bet, especially given the table stakes, but I also think California will be just fine, albeit a very different place over the long haul.
Lots to agree with here, but it is important to distinguish southwest from southeast. Southwest may indeed run into water issues and hit a population limit (though of course nothing is certain), but southeast has plenty of water. Look, I’m a Midwest guy, and I love these old rust belt cities, but we can’t deny that all things being equal people clearly prefer warmer weather and beaches within a reasonable drive. The migration numbers scream that since the advent of air conditioning. And, even in post-2008 years, that big trend continues.
Now, if for some reason air conditioning were not able to be affordable or widely available, the migration pattern would probably shift in a heartbeat. Atlanta was a pretty small place before AC, not to mention Houston or Dallas. But until that happens, I fully expect the big migration patterns to continue as-is. Even then, there are SO many people now in the sun belt that politics comes into play when considering resource allocation.
First, I didn’t say that the Southeast would fail or become depopulated per se.
The desert cities of Arizona, Nevada etc. will contract due to physical constraints like water shortages. But the Southeast will struggle mostly due to cultural limitations. The South is particularly ill-suited to wholesale reinvention. I’m confident that the Southeast “could” restructure itself since the land will naturally support more people than the desert West, but I don’t see the political will in the region even vaguely interested in having that conversation.
When a city grows from a little Podunk town to a metroplex of five million people in just a couple of generations it has shallow roots. People drift in and they drift out. There’s no social cohesion. There’s no institutional memory. It’s more likely that people will turn on each other than pull together in a crisis. Post WWII development in the South is especially centerless and anonymous. People seek out retirement villages and gated communities specifically because they don’t want to be a part of the larger world or be bothered by their neighbors. When people do come together it’s often based on particular religious or racial affinities in an us-vs.-them scenario.
There’s generally plenty of water in the Southeast, but it’s being badly mismanaged to support a development pattern that isn’t likely to hold up over time. Alabama, Florida, and Georgia routinely sue each other over water rights as reservoir levels drop during droughts. Lake Lenier outside Atlanta sinks pretty low at times. That’s a problem for people, but it’s super critical for the cooling water needed for all the power plants in the region. Miami and south Florida struggle with salt water intrusion due to over pumping. The Everglades and Lake Okeechobee have been getting funky for decades. Agriculture in parts of Texas pretty much came to a halt in recent years as the rains failed to materialize and temperatures hovered in the 100 degree range for months at a time.
The Midwest has the advantage of physical plenty combined with a radically reduced population. It will be easier to ride out the multiple challenges of the 21st Century in Michigan or Ohio than the flimsy boomtowns of the Sunbelt. Air conditioning will be the least of the South’s problems.
Ah, you suffer from some of the same delusions about the southeast that I once did, and many of my northern friends still do. Where to begin? First, let me say that hearing someone who grew up in NYS (about the most de facto segregated state in the country) who now lives in Maine (about the most homogeneous and having the least 17-25 year olds in the USA) grouse about the South’s struggles with “diversity” has gotten tiring. Not trying to accuse you of this, but I do feel the need to educate you on the broader issue. First half of my graduating class (and much of the “good” half) seems to have migrated to North Carolina somewhere. Raliegh in particular keeps topping various livability rankings nationwide — and, yes, there’s no shortage of water in the area. I’ve never been to Atlanta, but it seems to be, famously, a Xanadu for relocating reverse-migrating African Americans, a cliche even.
Historically, you are correct, the South, like many other parts of the world, never reached anywhere near it’s potential because of muti-polar hostilities and long memories, but, other than the DEEP south, lack of air conditioning alone did not keep the place from developing (originally, Virginia was the most populated state); indeed, my adopted home makes me want to flee to Manitoba (or maybe just the Birkshires) in the Summer, but the Spring and autumns are LONG lasting, and the winters are sunny to a degree that, if your house has some thermal mass (mine is made from granite) homes are much cheaper to heat, and sweaters and light jackets are usually sufficient. So, I doubt that people didn’t settle in the upper south more because of climate — it was more likely what de Tocqueville pointed out about the divide of the Ohio river: North side, opportunity and industry; south side, stasis and indolence.
That has all changed quite a bit. First, there are both a huge number of transplants from other regions in the USA, and it is starting to get a LOT more foriegn immigration — I think here in Richmond topped the gain in %s of Latin Americans in recent years, and THAT (foriegn immigration generally) I can say somewhat confidently, will be what drives domestic regional growth mostly more than anything else (my best guess: much of it will eventually be from Asia — in China alone an ABSURD number of people are moving to the cities every year, and many people in those cities will want out and will choose the USA as a lifestyle choice —- we have a LOT more space, and, in most places, it is CHEAP by world standards.
Well, depends what you mean by “the south”, doesn’t it? South Carolina is still a scarily racist, sexist, and generally regressive place. Georgia outside Atlanta is too. Alabama is too. So is northern Florida. Mississippi is slowly getting *slightly* better…
Virginia and North Carolina have had huge population shifts fairly recently so they’re a bit different. But of course the Virginia coastline is going to get hammered by flooding. North Carolina does have some decent potential.
And Atlanta is the epitome of sprawl development, so it has some serious problems to overcome. Maybe half of it is salvageable?
Oh, the Pacific Northwest is a terrible place to live! Awful! It’s SO gloomy, the people are SO unfriendly, and the coffee is SO bitter! Much better to stay in California 😉
Adrienne, check out this old blog post. It directly addresses your comment.
https://granolashotgun.com/2014/12/25/the-inner-cleveland-of-trendy-cities/
And then there’s this… http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
adrienne please tell everyone to stay away from the PNW! I don’t want any more Californiack coming here!
Jim of Olym
Dude, that ship sailed. Portland and Seattle et al are already overpriced and people are migrating away from the entire west coast – San Diego, Vancouver, and everything in between. Ordinary homes in the interior like Missoula, Montana are already selling for $350K – $800K because people from Seattle and Portland are migrating away from the coast and driving up prices. Or would you prefer internal passports to keep people where they are?
The challenge for me is how to decide which place. Which is likely to be the better choice? Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati? I like Buffalo for the reasons you stated and I like that it is relatively small and that it is flat, which makes cycling easy. But what about all the other towns? Youngstown, Akron, Erie, etc. Seems to me the places with a stronger cultural and architectural legacy would be a better choice. Ultimately, it’ll come down to which place has the better natural resources and geographic location. Many of the great old places exist where they are for a reason. Most often it has to do with navigable water and resources such as wood, furs, coal, and things you’ve noted here. I guess it depends on what the future deems essential. Things like hydroelectric power as in Buffalo will be probably be one of them. This is an exciting topic.
The resource base and geography of a place are important. But just as important is the local culture.
I’m confident that even really harsh unforgiving environments can be made to work if the population is cohesive and industrious. For example, Mormons in Utah and Idaho will band together and rise to the challenge of whatever trouble arrises. This is the “Israel effect”. You can make the desert bloom with enough effort if your people stick together and have wise leaders. But if you’re not a Mormon or a Jew in one of these regions you might have a problem. They’re good people. But they might not be your people. I know some wonderful Evangelical Christians that I’m confident will make things work one way or another. But you won’t find me migrating to Mississippi or South Carolina. They’re just not my people. These things will become more important in a crisis. You don’t want to become someone else’s pariah or scape goat.
Hmmm. If you care about politics, Ohio is a long fight between the city governments vs. the state government dominated by hostile rural/suburban/*anti-urban* interests (about half the state population is rural, and it’s been gerrymandered to make the political situation worse). Upstate NY is more a case of benign neglect by a state government which is very corrupt and thinks of upstate as unimportant (more than half the population is downstate near NYC). Michigan is weirder yet, because the auto industry has such a mental control over the government at all levels that nobody in power, no matter how well meaning, can get out of their roads-roads-roads mentality…. but this may change.
There’s also Rust Belt New England, which I dearly love — mostly in western Massachusetts, some in Connecticut.
Pennsylvania…. has had some major political shifts very recently and honestly I can’t give a fair analysis right now. But I would consider Pittsburgh or Scranton or even Allentown.
I agree with Johnny that you have to find a culture which “feels right”. I’m native to upstate NY so it feels right to me (and the New England vibe is similar). Other people prefer the Midwestern vibe which you get in Ohio or Michigan, which is subtly different.
Johnny, what do you think about climate change and the recent harsh Midwest winters we’ve seen? Are Midwest folks talking about escaping that?
Your question suggests that sunny weather all by itself is enough to depopulate an entire region. There was some truth to that in recent decades. But people tend to balance multiple considerations as they migrate. Lots of people would love to live in Manhattan or San Francisco, but it’s crazy expensive. So they live where the numbers add up for them instead. Toronto has miserable winters but it’s thriving anyway. Some people actually like winter.
From what I understand climate change is supposed to bring more extreme events. Hotter summers, colder winters, more droughts, more floods, more tornados, and more hurricanes. The Midwest might very well have trouble dealing with climate change, but so will every place else.
Do you want to buy property in Florida and have the insurance industry redline your entire county because the risk of yet another flood or storm is just too high? Do you want to live in Arizona when the last drop of ancient ground water is sucked dry and the Colorado River is reduced to a trickle? Do you want to live in Michigan or Upstate New York and get hit with a series of unusually brutal blizzards? And let’s not forget about earthquakes.
People will ultimately pick their own poison. There will be winners and losers. Given all the options I personally believe the Midwest and Pacific Northwest are in a better position than the South or West. But there will be pockets everywhere that unexpectedly thrive or fail.