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| Aerial view of Interstate 89, Exit 12, Taft Corners, Williston, Vermont as it looked in 1975. The area is now essentially a mini-city. Williston and the rest of Vermont might see more rapid population growth soon due to "climate refugees" fleeing vulnerable parts of the U.S |
Will this trigger a new great migration of people fleeing vulnerable areas?
And if that happens, will Vermont be part of the receiving end of this big migration?
Experts are warning that residents of western and southern states, faced with extreme drought, wildfires, water shortages, big storms, hurricanes and sea level rise, will soon start to swarm toward "safer" places in the United States.
One projection by Matthew Hauer, an assistant professor of sociology at Florida State University suggests 13.1 million Americans will relocate because of sea level rise along by 2100, based on projections that seas along the U.S. coast will rise by nearly six feet by then.
Where will all these people go? Apparently, mostly north and east. To the Midwest and the interior Northeast. Vermont is looking like one of the more desirable landing spots for these migrants. There's lots of reasons why.
Vermont is one place where we don't need to worry about sea level rise. At least not directly. The Green Mountain State is regarded a "safe" place from climate change. Sure, we're affected by global warming in the form of worse flooding, periodic droughts, stronger, weirder storms, hotter summers and iffier winters.
But we tend to avoid the worst of it all. The summer heat waves aren't all that bad, compared to other areas of the nation. We don't often experience hurricanes. Big wildfires are exceedingly rare. Droughts tend not to be as punishing as in the South and West.
Vermont is such a Goldilocks state for climate change avoidance that a detailed study by ProPublic and New York Times in 2021 listed the "safest "counties in the United States in terms of threats from climate change. Six of the top ten safest counties were in Vermont.
I still don't know whether that's true, but it does make sound Vermont enticing, doesn't it? Certainly, most of the 13.1 million sea level/climate refugees won't come to Vermont. But some of them might. A small percentage of those refugees would certainly swell our population far beyond the current 625,000 or so.
It's easier than ever to pull up roots and move. Most people need a job, and we don't have millions of employment opportunities here in Vermont. However, the pandemic demonstrated that it's often surprisingly easy to work from home, or from anywhere as long as you have a decent internet connection. Want to live in Vermont but your job is in California? No problem! You can do both!
On one hand, this is good. We have an aging population in the Green Mountain State, and we need relatively young, educated people here to boost our work force and our economy. We even have an incentive program that pays younger working families to move to Vermont to start new careers and lives.
However, plenty of roadblocks get in the way of a potential booming population. There's virtually no affordable housing around here. Or infrastructure, really. Plus, our population has been relatively stable for a century now. Vermont's population is less than double of that of 1900. Other states have grown exponentially.
We're accustomed to slow growth. What if our population begins to grow rapidly?
We cherish our rural atmosphere. Our little farms, undeveloped forests, our lack of crowds. We like our small and quirky state. Will we adjust to many more arrivals if forced to?
There's already resistance. Vermonters understandably cling to the small scale patterns of towns, populations, roads, you name it. We're not enamored by high rise buildings, super freeways, or endless sprawls of apartment blocks, "honky tonks, Dairy Queens and 7-11's," to quote an old Talking Heads song.
Sprawl has long been a dirty word in Vermont. If we do receive an influx of climate change refugees, we will have to build more densely in existing town centers, and build upward. Meaning something akin to high rises.
I can't imagine (at least not yet!) a Vermont with 30, 40, or 50 story towers. Currently, the tallest building in Vermont is Decker Towers in Burlington, at a mere 11 floors, or 124 feet tall. Vermont has the distinction of having the shortest tallest building in the United States, if that makes any sense.
By the looks of things, Vermont is going to have a hard time building anything remotely as tall as Decker Towers. Here's just one example, courtesy of VTDigger:
Busy Taft Corners in Williston is going through another rezoning effort.
Part of the change involves building heights. Currently, the tallest building you can construct there is 52 feet - about four stories. Town officials wanted to raise the Taft Corners building height limit to 110 feet. That's about eight stories, so not gigantic.
The town selectboard got so much blowback from that idea that they lowered the proposed height limit to 87 feet, or about six stories. That's still way too high for many people in Williston. VTDigger quoted one resident: "I just don't want to see a tall building in the middle of Williston, period. You know, it's a small town. It is a town. It's not a city."
Like it or not, the Taft Corners area of Williston has become a defacto small city. This isn't the only building height fight we've had recently. Burlington saw huge opposition back in 2015 to a proposal to build two 14-story towers in the city's downtown.
It's either taller buildings or much more intense sprawl in Vermont if people flee to the relative safety of the Green Mountain State. One way or another, we'll have to choose.
Vermont is already losing about 14,500 acres per year to residential development. (All of last summer, I heard the hammers and equipment for new houses going up in a formerly forested area less than a mile from my St. Albans house).
Building heights and sprawl are just two issues among many. We'd have to think about things large and small. School size and budgets, taxes, affordable housing, infrastructure, broadband, land use, job creation, cultural shifts. It goes on and on.
Societal issues arise, too. Things that are really hard to talk about, but need to be confronted. Vermont is among the whitest states in the nation. We have a reputation for tolerance, but we have our share of racist, homophobes, Christian nationalists and other creepy people living here.
A fair number of climate refugees that eventually arrive here will be Black, or of Hispanic, Asian or Arabic descent. How well will Vermont do as its racial diversity changes? I can only hope the resurgence of racism and xenophobia in the United States doesn't intensify further nationally and here in Vermont.
We have slightly less but still real conflict points too. Many Vermonters still dismissively refer to newcomers as "flatlanders" who supposedly don't fit in or bring their "problematic" ways of life to the Green Mountain State.
It'll probably be best to welcome climate refugees if we get them, since it's starting to look almost inevitable. Other locations are largely supporting what is already starting to be an influx.
In April, Tulane University associate professor of real estate Jesse Keenan provided CNBC a list of American cities that would be great "climate havens." In addition to Burlington, Vermont, Keenan listed cities like Buffalo and Rochester, New York, Asheville, North Carolina, Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Duluth, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Detroit, Michigan.
Several of these are rust belt cities that fell on hard times during the later half of the 20th century. This might, for these communities, a bit of a resurgence and recovery.
Buffalo, New York is already promoting itself as a climate refuge city. This city of screaming, blinding lake effect blizzards is actually regarded as among the safest from weather and climate disasters.
Wildfires and hurricanes tend not to hit Buffalo. Heat waves are actually the leading cause of weather-related fatalities. Buffalo does get heat waves, but less so than many areas of the nation. Plus, Lake Erie tends to temper the worst of the heat waves. Bonus: Lake Erie has plenty of fresh water, so droughts are not that big a problem.
Also, there's room in Buffalo for an influx of people. As Fast Company notes, Buffalo's population was around a half million in the 1950s and is now about half that.
Buffalo is also boosting affordable housing and bolstering its infrastructure for a climate refugee wave that has already started. Roughly 3,000 Puerto Ricans moved to the Buffalo metro area to start new lives after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island.
Fast Company does raise a risk that climate refugees can create in Buffalo, and anywhere else, including Vermont: Climate gentrification. Says the Fast Company article:
"'Think about the first people who are going to start migrating because of climate,' says Ryan McPherson, chief sustainability officer at the University of Buffalo. 'Those are not going to be poor people, right? Those are going to be people with resources. And so, we have to make sure that as we think about planning and making Buffalo ready for climate migration that we do that in a way that is very equitable and fair."
Wealth inequity is another important factor that we'll need to consider. We already have an extreme dearth of affordable housing. Plus, people with wealth tend to get their way, at least more than people of more modest means. The more well-heeled could potentially crowd out people of more modest means.
Sure, we'll need to welcome climate refugees when the time comes, but we 'll need the backbone and morals to take Buffalo's pledge: Make it fair to everybody, not just the folks with lots of cash lying around. We can't just let the wealthy drop in and snap up all the housing and land. There's got to be some fairness involved.
Vermont is already starting to see the first few climate refugees. For instance, at least three families fled Paradise, California after the town was destroyed by a 2018 wildfire and ended up in the Green Mountain State.
For instance the Boston Globe profiled the Holden family, who lost everything to the Paradise fire, and subsequently moved to "safer" Proctor, Vermont to start a new life. They did a lot of research, including watching YouTube videos of the horrible 2011 tropical storm Irene flooding. They were relieved that the Proctor/Rutland area, while damaged by the flood, was mostly intact after the disaster, unlike Paradise, California.
And the house they purchased did not suffer any flood damage from Irene.
The current small influx of people is manageable, and judging from the Globe article, the Holdens seem to be settling in just fine in Proctor.
However climate change and its effects on human behavior often hit in sudden and surprising ways. Good, smart people in Vermont are beginning to at least think about how to deal with this potential influx of people.
As WCAX-TV reported last year, we need to do a lot more to prepare for this possible influx:
"UVM Professor of Community Development and Applied Economics Chris Koliba says from a social and economic standpoint, Vermont probably isn't ready to take in more people."
Koliba's remarks to WCAX in December, 2021 are not doubt just as true now.
Note that we had a bit of an influx of people during the early months of the Covid pandemic, and that made the state's housing shortage worse, and strained schools and infrastructure to at least some extent.
The potential influx of climate refugees to Vermont does not at all have to be a bad thing. As Seven Days reported in January, these newcomers can inject the state's economy with new jobs and commerce, rescue flagging local schools and expand Vermont's tax base.
As Seven Days notes, as long as we plan soberly, and welcome people of all income types, especially the squeezed middle class, and keep our rural character, we can reap the economic benefits. This could easily be a win for Vermont. Which sounds harsh, since climate change is such a loss. "
As for me, I'm absolutely for welcoming people to Vermont. But we have to do it right and well. There won't be any do-overs.
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