Is the local weather disaster dictating the place persons are transferring?

Jamie Alexander said she will never forget the campfire. In 2018, Northern California wildfire killed 85 people, burned thousands of homes and filled the air with thick smoke.

“San Francisco air quality has been in the hazardous category for two weeks. and [it] only had significant health effects on my children,” said Alexander.

With the 2020 pandemic hit and another bad wildfire season forecast, Alexander’s family got into their RV and headed to Minnesota. Both Alexander, who works for a climate change non-profit, and her husband had jobs that allowed them to work remotely.

They landed in Duluth on the shores of Lake Superior. At first they just wanted to get through the summer.

But “we just fell in love with her here,” Alexander said. Also, she recalled, the air quality in California that year was terrible. So they decided to make the move permanent.

Now that working from home is universally accepted, more and more people are deciding where that home should be. For some people, that means places they think are safer from the effects of climate change, including Duluth.

Alexander’s family bought a house in Duluth right on the lake.

“I got into paddling this summer, which I never expected,” she said. She never thought she would live by a lake, “but it’s pretty amazing.”

Alexander is among the people who have moved to Duluth in recent years, at least in part because of climate change.

Jesse Keenan is a researcher on climate migration at Tulane University in New Orleans. A few years ago, while living at Harvard, he identified Duluth as an ideal landing spot for the likes of Alexander.

As climate conditions worsen, experts like Keenan say more people will leave places like California and move to places with more temperate climates — especially now that remote working is common.

“There’s a cohort of Americans who have the means, the resources, and the mobility of choice to get out there,” Keenan said.

But when Keenan first came to Duluth to discuss his idea — complete with pithy marketing slogans for the city, like “Climate Safe Duluth” — locals were skeptical. Real estate agent Karen Pagel Guerndt remembers hearing about it. It was the middle of winter and the temperature was 20 below zero.

“And so the whole idea of ​​climate migration for people coming here kind of made me laugh,” she said.

But then people started shouting. Since then, she has worked with clients from North Carolina to Utah who cite climate change as one of the reasons they chose Duluth, a small city of about 86,000.

There is no data showing how many of these people actually exist. But Adam Fulton, who directs the city’s planning and economic development, said more telecommuters are working out of Duluth. And he hears a lot of stories about people moving here from abroad.

“There are several unseen listings for real estate that may have been on the market earlier,” he said.

That poses a potential problem for places like Duluth that lack affordable housing. The median selling price of a home rose 10% last year to $240,000.

Fulton said the city is working to expand the variety of housing options for both newcomers and locals.

According to online real estate site Redfin, people say they take climate change into account when deciding where to move. But many of them are still moving to places like Florida and Arizona that face severe climate impacts.

“I think it’s mostly just a select group of people who might be personally impacted by climate change that are making the move based on that decision,” said Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather.

But no place is completely immune to the effects of climate change. Wildfires in Canada engulfed Minnesota in smoke last summer.

Doug Kouma, who moved to Duluth two years ago after dealing with wildfires and flooding in Sonoma County, Northern California, said he knows several other Californians who are considering a similar move.

“I think Duluth as a hub for climate migration is already a thing,” Kouma said. “I think we’re just beginning to realize it. And I think in two, three, five years, Duluth will probably be known for that.”