Your Ecological House: How will Oregon meet the coming climate ... - Albany Democrat-Herald

Your Ecological House: How will Oregon meet the coming climate refugee crunch?
“We can’t deter people fleeing for their lives. They will come.” — Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations When my wife and I moved to Oregon from California about 18 years ago, I predicted that we would be among the first of a large wave of “economic migrants” coming here. My reasoning was that a significant segment of California’s population would reach retirement age about 10 to 15 years after we arrived. Like us, they would realize they could sell their California house and, if they owned it outright, pay cash for an equivalent but much cheaper house in Oregon, and bank the difference. These financially secure retirees wouldn’t burden Oregon’s social services, though they might cause something of a labor shortage as they frequented restaurants and medical facilities. All in all, their presence would strengthen the economy, even if it did increase crowding.

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Today, I see evidence of that increased crowding all around the state in the forms of burgeoning suburbs and other new construction, and I hear long-established Oregonians complaining about the typical impacts of growth — longer lines, harder parking, higher fees. But the sad truth is those established residents “ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” In my last column, most of the climate refugees roaming the U.S. will be U.S. citizen (available online), I described how the overpopulated and drought-stricken Southwest is on the cusp of a full-blown water crisis. Much of the region’s agricultural and economic activity will have to be abandoned — starting soon — and thousands or even millions of people will be forced to migrate to greener pastures, many of them to the Pacific Northwest. And unlike the self-sufficient or readily employable economic migrants who have come here in recent years, many of these “climate refugees” will have lost their home’s equity in a crashing real estate market and, as their numbers here swell, will find diminishing employment prospects. In 2020, a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development study estimated that there were 14,655 people “experiencing homelessness” in Oregon. While that’s a relatively small number compared to those of larger states, it still places Oregon, with its population of just 4.25 million, in America’s top three states for per capita homelessness. A 2020 city government estimate put Portland’s homeless population at 3,800 people. That figure is likely higher now due to the pandemic and, most importantly, the shortage of affordable housing. City, state and federal funds provided $51 million to support Portland’s homeless in 2020. Looking ahead, we should ask how much that support would cost if an influx of climate refugees increased the city’s homeless population by a conservative estimate of, say, fivefold by 2035. (For that matter, how much would similar climate migrations cost the nation as a whole?) While Oregon’s homeless population grows, its stock of housing, especially affordable housing, is not keeping up with demand. According to an Oregon Homebuilders Association report, there was a statewide demand backlog of 110,000 homes in 2021, and 30,000 homes would need to be built annually in order to keep up with projected growth — that is, pre-climate-migration projected growth. (The current demand is driven mostly by incoming economically-secure migrants, as Oregon’s internal population actually shrank slightly in 2021 due to pandemic deaths and low birth rates.) At the time of the report, an average of only 20,000 homes were built annually over the past five years. Ominously, Oregon has also lost 4,000 homes to climate-exacerbated wildfires in that time span. These are some of the conditions that will greet American-citizen climate migrants when they arrive here. How many will come, and how soon they’ll arrive, is uncertain. But given the conditions in today’s Southwest, it’s certainly not too soon to start thinking about how to plan for climate migration at our ecological house. Philip S. Wenz is an environmental researcher and writer. Read more articles from his series Your Ecological House on his website at firebirdjournal.com.