The deadly cost of America's housing crisis

Our homes should make us feel safe. A decent home is a refuge from the outside world, a relatively fixed point where people can drop their vigilance. Most of us need the security of home to stay balanced in the face of an unstable, sometimes frightening world.

But Americans are increasingly less safe in their own homes. This isn't because of a sudden surge in crime (which is actually declining in most places) but because of climate and geography.

Compared with much of the rest of the country, many of America's cities are well situated to weather the coming decades of the climate crisis. Their density makes them more energy-efficient — partly because residents tend to drive less and apartments are easier to keep cool than single-family homes. They also have more robust emergency-services infrastructure than rural areas and are situated further from fire-prone wooded areas.

But as local zoning and resident opposition have made it nearly impossible to build housing in these cities, would-be residents are pushed into more treacherous areas. In some parts of the country, the only affordable homes for middle-class households are in areas prone to disasters. The people who move to those high-risk areas are being robbed of the security that everyone should be able to enjoy in their homes. Because of our collective refusal to build more housing where it is most needed, millions of people live with elevated climate risk.

Until we act, more of those people are fated to lose their homes — or their lives.

The heat is on

As is increasingly routine, extreme heat has been roasting much of the United States this summer. Phoenix hit a daily high of 118 degrees in June, breaking a 40-year-old record. In Texas, a broiling July heat wave caused power outages for millions of people and clogged hospitals with patients who could not be safely discharged to homes that lacked air conditioning. These heat waves have deadly consequences: Extreme heat killed 2,302 Americans in 2023 alone.

While many parts of the country have faced high temperatures this year, the danger has not been evenly distributed. Where I live, across the bay from San Francisco, thermometers climbed into the mid-80s — not exactly pleasant for perspiration-prone Ashkenazi men such as myself, but tolerable. Further-inland locales like California's fast-growing Central Valley, on the other hand, have been getting positively scorched. On the West Coast, the safest place to be in a heat wave tends to be near the Pacific Ocean. But that's not where people are moving. Thanks to the city's anemic new-housing growth, the population of San Francisco (average daily high in July: 66 degrees) has stagnated for years while home prices have soared. Growth has been faster and more consistent in white-hot cities like Fresno (98 degrees), Sacramento (93 degrees), and Bakersfield (98 degrees), where housing is more abundant but deadly heat is far more common. The Golden State's land-use patterns are putting middle-class and working-class households at a higher risk of exposure to extreme, possibly fatal, heat.

This split is a miniature version of the trend playing out across the US: Migration is pushing more people into harm's way. The fastest-growing states in the country are in the Sun Belt: Texas, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. The Sun Belt also happens to be the part of the country most at risk of extreme heat as the climate crisis gets worse. There were more than 300 heat-related deaths in Texas last year. And that's to say nothing of the risk Gulf states face from hurricanes, which climate change has similarly exacerbated.

The shift to the Sun Belt isn't part of some sublimated death drive or a desire to test the limits of modern sunscreen. The reason for the mass movement is pretty simple: People are going where they can afford housing. Compare homebuilding in Houston (average daily July high of 95 degrees) with homebuilding in San Francisco. I've found that Houston had roughly three times as many housing starts per capita in 2021 as San Francisco, and even in parts of the past decade where Houston's housing starts dipped a bit, they were still significantly higher than San Francisco's. No wonder, then, that a one-bedroom apartment in Houston costs half as much as one in San Francisco, even though Houston has increased its population by more than 200,000 residents since 2010. Houston's ability to build more housing than San Francisco comes down to the rules the two cities impose on the construction of new housing. The same could be said of much of the rest of the Sun Belt. Houston is an extreme example because it literally does not have a zoning code, but in general, Sun Belt cities tend to have much looser zoning and permitting rules than high-cost California cities.

Even within many states, new housing tends to get built in the areas most vulnerable to climate disasters. Once again, take California: San Francisco and other exclusionary coastal towns block new housing, so much of the state's homebuilding takes the form of single-family sprawl deep into extremely hot inland, low-lying areas or into what's called the wildland-urban interface: the part of the state where forest fires crash up against human habitation, with deadly results. Ironically, some of this allocation is done under the cover of environmentalism. The California Environmental Quality Act requires developers to go through a convoluted environmental-review process to get their projects approved. While California's legislature has spent the past few years expanding the types of projects that are exempt from the law, it's still a powerful tool that not-in-my-backyarders, or NIMBYs, can use to block development in their neighborhoods. Unsurprisingly, the threat of CEQA litigation tends to loom largest in affluent, exclusive communities; the risk of litigation is lowest in sparsely populated areas, where there are few residents to complain about new housing. Thus the law actually creates an incentive to concentrate development in the wildland-urban interface, away from the more densely populated areas that also happen to be more fire-resistant.

To be sure, income and climate risk are not perfectly correlated; several wealthy enclaves are at risk of coastal erosion. And a fair amount of high-value real estate is nestled in the wildland-urban interface, as the San Francisco Bay Area learned during the 1991 Oakland Hills fires and as Los Angeles learned during the 2018 Woolsey fire that chewed up Malibu. But America's housing shortage tends to distribute climate-related suffering along class lines.

Even if they manage to avoid sudden catastrophes, people who have been pushed out to the urban periphery may well face subtler long-term consequences. If living in a wildfire-prone area doesn't kill you or destroy your house, it can still increase your exposure to toxic smoke, which can lead to serious respiratory and cardiovascular conditions. Beyond the risks from heat, fire, and smoke inhalation are the more quotidian harms of being geographically cut off from the center of a metropolitan area. In 2010, nearly 10% of Americans lived in areas where it would take them more than an hour to reach a trauma-care center in the event of an emergency. For those who work in the central city, even the long commute from the exurbs can be dangerous. Long car commutes have been associated with higher blood pressure, and that's to say nothing of the other risks associated with a long ride in a country where traffic collisions kill more than 40,000 people each year. If we could somehow wish away the large and growing risk of climate disasters, sprawl would still be bad for American public health.

What makes a home

In his book about Hurricane Katrina, the historian Andy Horowitz writes that "disasters are less discrete events than they are contingent processes." The true disaster is not the hurricane on its own but how the hurricane collides with society, politics, and infrastructure. A hurricane of a certain strength, speed, and rainfall can have drastically different effects depending on whether it makes landfall in an uninhabited area, a thoroughly prepared city, or a city with inadequate levees, entrenched patterns of residential segregation, and an ill-equipped emergency-response system.

Similarly, the safety of our communities is directly tied to choices about where, how, and why we build them. Sure, small things like doing controlled burns, making air conditioning more widely available, and building better evacuation routes can reduce some of the dangers created by pushing people out to the periphery. But we have a moral imperative to allow more homebuilding in the parts of the country that are already well positioned to accept more people. While NIMBYs have cleverly cited environmental concerns to block housing development in these areas, making it possible for more people to live in them is essential to sustainably and safely growing our country for the next generation.

Ned Resnikoff is the policy director of California YIMBY and co-leader of the Metropolitan Abundance Project.