George Williams has stacks of ephemera from his family’s history in New Orleans. He pulls out thick books of photos, clippings, and pamphlets documenting it all — including the family’s long-running participation in the city’s famous Mardi Gras carnivals.
Williams says he can trace his family’s roots in the city back to the 18th century. But he doesn’t live there anymore. Four years ago, he left and moved to Cincinnati. He had a straightforward reason for leaving his hometown.
“What brought me up here, when you get down to the root of the matter, is climate change,” he says. “I am in my late 50s and I’m an eighth-generation native of the city [of New Orleans]. I’ve spent most of my life there. During that time, firsthand — which, granted, is anecdotal evidence — I’ve watched us go from a storm of the century once every century to a storm of the century once every couple of years.”
He’s not the only one to make the journey. In recent years, people have moved to Cincinnati to escape wildfires in California, hurricanes in New Orleans and Florida, and extreme heat in Arizona.
Just how many isn’t exactly clear — they’re a blip in Census data suggesting more people are actually leaving Cincinnati for other states than are coming here from them. But local environmental groups are studying the phenomenon known as climate migration.
They want to make plans in case more people start coming to Cincinnati because it’s relatively insulated from some of climate change’s most dramatic effects.
A complex issue
Van Sullivan works for Green Umbrella. The regional environmental group is undertaking a major project this summer to understand how people see Cincinnati as a potential destination to escape extreme weather elsewhere and what that could mean for housing, infrastructure, and other local issues.
“We want to get a handle both on awareness of climate migration as an issue but also an understanding of these adjacent issues that touch what we would need to attend to should we become a climate haven,” Sullivan says.
Amy Cotter is a researcher with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy who studies climate migration. She says exactly how many people are moving to new regions due to climate change is difficult to pin down. Census data can show new influxes of population. But it doesn’t show why people moved. And those decisions are often made based on a variety of factors.
But Cotter says both scholarly research and data from real estate companies suggest a number of people are thinking seriously about the issue as they move. One study by real estate firm Redfin found two-thirds of people moving to a different part of the country factored in climate change. Other studies vary widely, with some saying about 15% of respondents rate it a top concern.
“It’s on peoples’ minds,” Cotter says. “They’re clearly factoring it into their relocation decisions.”
Climate change is personal
For Williams, it was a deeply intense and personal choice, in part borne from losing loved ones and prized possessions to hurricanes.
Scientists say climate change isn’t necessarily causing more hurricanes. But it is making the ones that form much more intense. As the Gulf of Mexico heats up, for example, those higher temperatures cause stronger, longer lasting hurricanes that strike land more often and move further inland. There has been a marked increase in the severest hurricanes — ones like Hurricane Katrina, Ida and Helene — in the last couple decades. That’s a big concern for Williams.
He had ridden out hurricanes before, including the infamous Katrina. And he rode out Ida in his house in New Orleans. But something changed in him after that. He remembers watching weather forecasts on a laptop powered by a solar cell because his power wasn’t due to be restored for weeks. They were showing more storms potentially hitting New Orleans in the aftermath of Ida. He knew he couldn’t stay.
“Quite frankly, at that point I broke,” he said. “An overwhelming sense of ‘I’m going to die, my animals are going to die. I can’t do this anymore.’ And that’s what led me up here.”
Why Cincinnati?
Fear of extreme heat, wildfires, or hurricanes might be reasons people leave other regions. But why come to Cincinnati specifically? Experts like Cotter say there are multiple factors.
Jose Lopez-Arenivar grew up in Phoenix and lived there until just a few years ago. He says he remembers being young and dealing with the desert heat as he played with his friends. But there would be rainy times that cooled things down, and temperatures at night were reasonable. That changed as he grew up. Rising heat and longer hot seasons pushed Lopez-Arenivar to his limits. He says rising low temperatures at night put him over the edge.
“Those summers just kept getting longer and longer,” he says. “It just kept getting hotter. It takes a toll on you mentally, physically. As soon as you walk outside, you're angry.”
By 2022, he and his wife knew they needed to move elsewhere. Both work from home, but his wife’s job relies on being in the same state as the company she works for. That narrowed their choices to other hot places like Texas and Florida — or Ohio.
Lopez-Arenivar began researching. He tracked the weather in various Ohio cities, looked at home prices and cultural amenities. He noted the Great Lakes are relatively close for water access. Weather fluctuates, but generally not in extreme ways seen in other places. Weighing all the factors, he says Cincinnati stuck out.
“A little bit of everything, but it’s very mild in everything,” he says. “So that’s why we ended up choosing Cincinnati.”
The family moved to the city’s eastern suburbs a few years ago.
Family ties
Other recent climate-motivated transplants WVXU talked to said they followed people they knew here. And some said family and friends had followed them here after they moved. Williams has friends who moved to Cincinnati after Hurricane Katrina, influencing his choice to come to the city.
Rose Hemphill moved to Cincinnati from Florida in 2019. She had a laundry list of climate-related worries — flooding, loss of power, extreme heat — that she is glad to have escaped.
“I have lived in three different states in the South, and had to evacuate from every single one of them for hurricanes,” she said. “And I was really, really sick of the heat. People say, ‘You’re crazy, why would you move from Florida to Ohio?’ But I was so done. I was ready to get out.”
Her path out of the South was largely about climate change, she says. But her path to Cincinnati specifically was more about her now-husband. He’s from Cincinnati originally and when Hemphill decided to leave Florida, the Queen City was a natural relocation spot. And she’s not alone. She had family in New Orleans who, like Williams, decided to leave after Hurricane Ida.
“They called us and they were like, ‘Do you like Cincinnati?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah!' So they moved here six months later. And they’re still here," Hemphill says.
Likely a small trend — but one that could grow
Williams, Lopez-Arenivar, and Hemphill are just a few of the thousands of people who moved to the region in the last few years, and their stories are anecdotal. Plus, Census data suggests that while Greater Cincinnati gained 20,000 new residents between July 2023 and July 2024, most of them came from other countries. Some of them could have come due to climate change as well — or political instability, lack of resources or other issues.
But the region actually saw a decline in interstate moves like the ones Williams, Hemphill, and Lopez-Arenivar made. Census data suggests roughly 900 more people left for other regions of the United States than came here from them last year.
Climate experts say their stories are still important reminders of the impacts of climate change — and of the need for cities to prepare.
Future issues
Cotter of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy says increased climate migration could cause a number of issues for cities if trends were to intensify. Among them: strain on housing supply and potential speculation on residential properties by out-of-town investors — meaning, people who buy property with the aim of reselling it for a profit.
“I would suggest that any place that thinks it might be in an advantageous location needs to pay attention to speculation and pay attention to ways it could maybe forestall displacement of its existing population through rent pressures or housing price pressures,” she said.
Sullivan with Green Umbrella says the group’s work this summer will involve surveys, focus groups, and research about what Cincinnati and surrounding municipalities can do to prepare for climate change and people seeking to escape its effects in other parts of the country.
“Climate migration is one of many factors that shapes our region,” Sullivan says. “And so we are dedicating a significant portion of our work this year to A, better understanding this issue; B, figuring out what are some of the strategy options for our communities are; and C, working with our communities to implement them.”
Cotter says that work is vital.
“Anticipating and putting in place resilience measures will accrue benefits to longstanding residents as well by helping them withstand climate change,” she said. “At the same time, you can plan ahead for what you will do if an influx of population comes.”
Williams says he’s grown quite fond of Cincinnati. Leafing through his books of family lore, he says he still loves New Orleans and misses it often. But he doesn’t see himself ever going back.
“I seriously doubt it,” he says. “I don’t think I could make it through a contemporary hurricane season again with the PTSD and such. If the storm didn’t kill me, my chances of surviving due to my mental state afterward would be slim to none.”
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