Great Escape
Can You Escape Climate Gentrification if You’re Rich?
Even if you can afford to move now — it will impact everybody
When a luxury real estate agent heard that a Harvard academic was preaching that home prices in elevated areas of Miami were rising with the sea level, she called his report “fake news.” “I have not talked to one buyer — not one — who said, ‘I’m not buying in Miami because of sea-level rise,’” she told the Miami Herald. “It’s a simple ebb and flow of the real estate market, not the ocean.”
Well, responded the academic, Jesse M. Keenan, a faculty member of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, who for years has been studying the impact of climate change on cities, what can he say? “There’s some contingent who are just deniers because they don’t want it to impact their jobs or people’s perception.”
For his study of climate gentrification in the Miami area, published in Environmental Research Letters, Keenan and his co-authors, Thomas Hill and Anurag Gumber, ran a computer analysis of 800,000 properties. They also interviewed 48 local officials, researchers, real estate developers, investors, financiers, residents, and activists. “A consumer preference may exist,” they concluded, “in favor of higher-elevation properties. Likewise, lower-elevation properties…
