Climate Displacement Will Ignite an Already Volatile Housing Landscape
Idea in Brief
The current solutions to longstanding housing problems portend poorly for how the U.S. will support people in responding to climate change.
Shifts in family and household configurations that bring together people for connection and support may open fresh avenues for fostering resilience and stabilizing both family life and today’s housing landscape.
Policy-makers need to address issues related to climate displacement and housing systemically and inclusively - and not just place the burden on the individual.
By Katherine Prince
"black and white building" by striatic is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Housing has long been insecure for too many. Climate displacement will worsen the situation, making current divides more dire and threatening the futures of families and children. The most vulnerable among us will, as ever, have fewer buffers for disruptions to housing and suffer the most from the inadequacies of our systems and policies. The nation’s efforts to provide enough viable housing for all will influence how family and household configurations evolve and what housing people see as being viable. But these shifting configurations, along with improved systems and policies, could also provide fresh paths toward resilience and support.
Current Housing Landscape
In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, many U.S. households were struggling to pay for housing costs. As shown below, too many renters and homeowners were cost burdened, meaning that their rent or mortgage costs exceeded 30% of their household incomes. Among them, a significant percentage were severely cost burdened, with more than half their incomes going to housing.
| Degree of Cost Burden | Renters | Homeowners |
|---|---|---|
| Cost Burdened | 46% | 20% |
| Severely Cost Burdened | 24% | 9% |
Black and Hispanic households are almost twice as likely to be cost burdened as White households. Such racial disparities, especially differences in homeownership, had been growing before the pandemic. In addition, the number of people experiencing homelessness, especially unsheltered homelessness, has also increased.
As these statistics show, the U.S. housing landscape was already volatile. Growing costs fueled by local development restrictions, low interest rates and increased demand was pushing more and more people to rent. That, in turn, made rent more expensive. In addition, gentrification was on the rise, contributing to the suburbanization of poverty and causing cultural displacement even among long-term residents who could find a way to stay in their neighborhoods. Millions of renters were facing outright or soft evictions as well as less obvious forms of displacement, such as the inability of young people to afford to establish homes in the communities where they grew up. The American household size also increased for the first time in 160 years because the population was growing faster than new households were being established.
The COVID-19 pandemic added fuel to this fire. More than half of all renter households lost income during its first year. Through December 2020, housing insecurity increased for Black and Hispanic renters, as shown below, while holding steady for White renters.
| Type of Household | Black Renters | Hispanic Renters |
|---|---|---|
| All Households | 11% | 7% |
| Households with children | 16% | 9% |
The pandemic also intensified energy insecurity by increasing residential utility bills, especially during 2020’s record summer heat. Like housing insecurity, energy insecurity already loomed as a larger risk for communities of color than for non-Hispanic White households.
For those who can afford housing of their choice, current trends reflect a desire for more flexible spaces that can accommodate a variety of activities and household needs such as working and learning at home. There has also been a shift toward living in a community where homes are larger but farther from amenities.
At the same time, efforts are underway to accommodate a wider variety of household configurations and to make housing more affordable. Some of them are described below.
Some cities and states have changed zoning regulations to allow for accessory dwelling units.
Minneapolis and the state of Oregon have effectively eliminated single-family zoning, as did Charlotte.
Technological and financial innovations such as modular development, 3D printing, crowdfunding housing projects, and using rent payment data to establish creditworthiness, have emerged to help address the housing crisis.
Co-living business models have evolved, and platforms such as Nesterly and Silvernest are helping to connect seniors with non-family roommates.
The pandemic ushered in experiments with using hotels as affordable housing.
Some communities have been seeking to address housing shortages by creating affordable housing trusts and bonds or proposing ballot measures that would curb short-term rentals or control rent.
Trends and Impacts in Housing and Family Configurations
As household size has increased, so too has multigenerational living. In 2018, 20% of Americans lived in a multi-generational household, as compared to 12% in 1980. In addition, household configurations have diversified. In 2019, 20% of households were shared, with at least one “extra adult” residing in them; that figure stood at 17% in 2007. Sometimes, these shifts reflect economic necessity; sometimes, personal choice. The same housing and family configurations can be viewed and experienced differently depending on individuals’ motivations and socioeconomic situations, as well as racial and class-based stereotypes.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, loss of income and depletion of savings caused more people – friends, relatives, and subtenants – to move in together to make ends meet.
Today, overcrowding, which had been increasing since the mid-2000s, continues to rise, especially among low-wage service workers. While people earning relatively high incomes might describe their housing situations differently, they too had been making decisions designed to make housing more affordable or increase connections. Those choices include increasing commutes, choosing relatively small homes, or sharing living spaces – for example, through co-living spaces, co-housing arrangements, or multi-generational households.
Sharing housing can be positive, but it can also have downsides. Some of the arrangements that have been gaining traction over the past couple of decades promise to counter the isolating effects of putting the immediate family unit at the nexus of households. While living in overcrowded housing can have significant detrimental effects, definitions of overcrowding tend to treat small, nuclear families as the norm and as a superior family configuration. That assumption does not always align with families’ own preferences and cultural contexts.
Nonetheless, young children living in overcrowded households or moving two or more times per year face a variety of health and developmental risks and educational challenges. Housing insecurity also affects their connections with caregivers and their access to informal neighborhood social networks and medical care. These effects can happen even when they do not switch schools.
Such challenges are most acute for low-income families. They are all too immediate and also have long-term impacts, including reduced likelihood of graduating from high school and physical conditions such as high blood pressure and weakened immune systems. Furthermore, the more crowded the housing, the greater the risk of infectious diseases spreading. This includes those carried by disease vectors such as mosquitos and ticks that are anticipated to become more prevalent as climate change intensifies.
In addition, children who experience frequent moves can grow up to have a diminished sense of self, because place attachment contributes to the construction of personal identity. Children who have little opportunity to interact independently with their local environments can also have reduced feelings of belonging and security. Furthermore, climate change can also have direct and indirect effects on people’s mental health.
Climate Change and Housing Insecurity
The experience of COVID-19 has highlighted the preexisting volatility in the U.S. housing landscape. This volatility makes for a shaky foundation as the U.S., like countries around the world, faces the realities of looming climate displacement. Vulnerability to climate displacement correlates with present-day housing insecurity.
As I explored elsewhere, the southeastern U.S. is most vulnerable to the public health effects of climate change because that region is prone to severe storms and has relatively high poverty levels. The American South also experienced the greatest increases in population between 2010 and 2020, both overall and of people under 18. Several states in this region (including Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Maryland, Alabama, and South Carolina) have the highest relative percentages of Black population. In addition, the region– particularly Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas – currently has the greatest housing insecurity and the highest percentage of adults experiencing food insecurity.
The American South will face a perfect storm as climate change intensifies already pronounced challenges, and that storm intersects with longstanding racial inequities. But other U.S. regions, and people with no or relatively thin safety nets across the country, will also face housing disruption.
It is no surprise that there will be income disparities in how the impacts of climate change will be distributed and experienced and what options people will have in responding to them. Already, recovery efforts from large-scale natural disasters tend to privilege homeowners over renters.
Despite the wholescale relocation of a few small communities, most people are on their own in balancing the complicated equation that involves maintaining a sense of belonging and proximity to employment, while mitigating climate risks. Internationally, there is no legal framework specific to the needs and protection of children who migrate due to climate.
Indeed, it can be hard to trace whether people of any age are moving because of climate change. So far, climate migration within the U.S. has taken place primarily among relatively affluent people who have the flexibility and means to move preemptively. When clusters of people have moved away from wildfires or other natural disasters, the receiving communities have not always taken kindly to the newcomers, and political landscapes have shifted. Of course, the U.S. is also expected to be a destination for climate migrants from other countries, despite the current inadequacy of both its immigration policies and international frameworks.
Future Watch: Who Will Bear the Burdens?
Competition for essential resources such as jobs and housing could intensify as climate change ignites the already volatile housing landscape. More frequent moves and increased overcrowding are likely to beset people in at least some places and income brackets relatively near term. As more and more places become decreasingly habitable, widespread displacement could leave no one untouched.
A variety of community-level climate adaptations have been proposed. They include inclusive decision making, the extension of existing tools such as bolstering homes and infrastructure, and changing approaches to land use. There could also be creative household responses – along the lines of recent, rising interest in shared living arrangements or the formation of learning pods among some families during the pandemic - that bring together new combinations of people to weather the strains of climate change. But the challenges of increased housing insecurity and decreasingly habitable places could limit many people’s ability to establish the family and household configurations that they want.
The current, inadequate solutions to longstanding housing problems portend poorly for how the U.S. will support people in responding to climate change. We already have staggering socio-economic divides. They could deepen as low-income children and families, along with children and families of color, bear the brunt of an increasingly volatile climate. Shifts in family and household configurations that bring together more people in deliberate ways for connection and support may open fresh avenues for fostering resilience and stabilizing both family life and today’s tenuous housing landscape. But they alone only continue to place the burden of navigating climate disruption squarely – and unfairly – on individuals’ shoulders. To avoid that, policy-makers need to start to address issues related to climate displacement and housing systemically and inclusively. Without their coordinated and concerted action, young children’s flourishing will falter.
Katherine Prince is Vice President of Strategic Foresight at Knowledgeworks.