Yahoo News. 12/18/2023. Nationwide headlines blare “Americans Abandoning neighborhoods due to rising flood risk, study finds.” This sounds startling.
Every realtor knows that–all other things being equal–real estate near bodies of water tends to be more expensive than real estate farther away. Every farmer knows that the most fertile soil–and thus the most attractive farmland–is near river bottoms. So it would shocking, to say the least, if this obvious historic reality were to be overturned due to rising flood “risk,”
A December 18 story in Yahoo News (republished from The Hill) states that “Rising risk of floods is hollowing out counties across the United States — creating abandoned pockets in the hearts of cities, a new report has found.”
Flight out of these “abandoned areas,” according to the article, “is accelerating, according to the findings published in Nature Climate Change.”
It is reported that “increasing flood risk has driven this “climate abandonment” of individual census tracts, sometimes quite rapidly.” “That’s the kind of dynamic demographers fear could lead to a “doom loop” of accelerating outmigration, until only those who can’t afford to leave are left behind in areas most threatened by the changing climate.”
“[I]ncreasing flood risk has driven this “climate abandonment” of individual census tracts, sometimes quite rapidly,” states the article. Demographers “fear” this “could lead to a ‘doom loop’ of accelerating outmigration, until only those who can’t afford to leave are left behind in areas most threatened by the changing climate.”
The study in question was an analysis of census records. “Over the past 20 years, those blocks have lost about 9 million people, according to the study — about 3 million of them as a result of rising risk from floods.” “This kind of declining neighborhood is what the First Street team call “climate abandonment areas” — parts of neighborhoods where more people left between 2000 and 2020 than moved in.”
“But in the most extreme cases — like Staten Island’s Midland Beach neighborhood — the drop in population was more like a collapse. In that census block, First Street found that a 2000-era population of 93 people had fallen by two-thirds to 31 people by 2020.” “This sort of dramatic collapse risks triggering a death spiral, Anne Perrault of Public Citizen told The Hill.”
“In many regions, the outmigration is leaving behind hollowed-out neighborhoods, which in the most extreme cases causes abandonment to cascade into more and more abandonment, she explained.”
The report also cites San Antonio, Texas —” a fast growing metropolis where First Street data shows 18 percent of the census blocks have been losing people to flood risk even as the county as a whole has gained 44 percent more people.
“In that city, people have been trickling out of the increasingly flood-prone urban core — neighborhoods like Tobin Hill/Pearl, where 40 percent of tracts are losing population — to newer, expanding suburban developments in the hills outside town, according to the data.”
Join Lysander Spooner University as we investigate these claims. Are Americans really fleeing areas near rivers, lakes and oceans due to increasing flood “risk”?
