The ready access to nature and winter sports is what prompted Elizabeth Scott and her family to up sticks from Portland, Oregon, to Houghton on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula in summer 2021.
With 29% of Michigan’s territory and only 3% of its population, to many, the Upper Peninsula (U.P.) might appear a dream place to start over.
For Scott and her family, there were also push factors at play.
“The big challenge[s] in Portland [are] the wildfires and the number of hot days in the summer. We had our windows taped shut and [air conditioning] filters on stock because we would blast through them,” she said, of her family’s efforts to prevent wildfire smoke from entering their home.
Last year, Portland saw 25 days of temperatures of 90 F or higher. Houghton, by contrast, had just two.
The family spent the summer of 2020 at Scott’s parents’ home in Wisconsin, which worked as a test-run for full-time life in the upper Midwest, she said.
A year later, they made the plunge.
“My biggest concern was [wondering] am I going to be able to find friends, and it’s not a problem. There’s quite an international vibe here,” she said, noting that the presence of Michigan Technical University means there’s a community that shares much of her family’s worldviews.
“The U.P. gave us more space inside and out, and awesome winter weather.”
Smaller Great Lakes communities such as Houghton, which is home to more than 8,000 permanent residents and an additional 7,300 students during the college year, have been growing steadily for over two decades. The years during and immediately after the pandemic saw rural regions of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin grow faster than rural America as a whole, where populations are broadly in decline. Reports suggest that if the current population growth rate in rural Great Lakes counties continues, their populations could increase by 1.5 million people in the next six years.
Many are drawn by the ready access to nature; however, a small but growing number are believed to be people such as Scott, who are moving here due to climate-related issues in their former regions.
Can these new residents help revive rural areas?
In 2018, Keith Meyers founded Remote Workforce Keweenaw in Chassell, Michigan, initially as a means to bring economic vitality to the local area by attracting people from other parts of the country.
“Climate has been a factor for many [migrants],” he said. “Those coming from out in the northwest have cited wildfire risk, smoke as a factor.”
Meyers has tracked 230 remote workers coming to the region, chiefly from Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Madison, since the start of the initiative, but believes that number to be a significant undercount.
“Many of our remote workers are in information technology fields and have brought robust salaries to our area,” he said. “They are eating out, shopping locally and supporting our non-profit organizations as volunteers, sharing their incredible expertise.”
Experts say that these kinds of organized initiatives could have enormous benefits for rural Great Lakes regions with scant human capital or infrastructure, including several small communities in the U.P. that haven’t experienced population growth in over a century.
“When we talk about rural areas in our region — the U.P., Michigan and parts of Wisconsin — we have rural communities that have seen decades of population loss and disinvestment, so tax bases are really low,” said Richelle Winkler, a demographer focusing on human migration at Houghton’s Michigan Technological University.
“There’s a critical need for younger people to support the labor force and to vitalize communities,” she said. “Some of the counties in the U.P. are the oldest counties in the country because of outward migration and the in-migration of older people.”
Will climate migration overwhelm local infrastructure?
While many experts cite the ready access to huge volumes of freshwater as a leading reason for considering the Great Lakes as a climate haven, day-to-day needs such as housing, healthcare access and jobs are essential for any thriving community, according to locals.
Like much of the rest of the region, the cost of housing on the Keweenaw Peninsula has become a growing concern for many in recent years.
According to Zillow, the “typical home value” in Houghton (the largest community on the Keweenaw Peninsula), stood at about $257,603 on August 31, 2025. That’s a 6% year-on-year increase, and a significant rise compared to June 2021, when the figure was $212,027. For the U.S. as a whole, the year-on-year growth at the end of August was just 0.2%.
With a median household income of under $54,000 per year, what residents of Keweenaw County earn is well below the national average.
Just as important are challenges that may play out around rural gentrification, development planning, impacts on the environment and existing communities’ sense of place.
“The biggest point is that this kind of growth, to do it well, requires planning,” Winkler said. “To do it in such a way that you can mitigate the consequences and to really take advantage of the opportunities requires forethought and planning and community engagement and visioning.”
According to Winkler, rural communities only have a couple supporting a whole region. The capacity to do that work is really low.
The Upper Peninsula already faces healthcare shortages, specifically with an inadequate number of inpatient psychiatric hospital beds. Other facilities that have the required infrastructure in place face staff shortages, making those facilities available to the public, experts said.
What’s more, with a population density of just 3.8 people per square mile in Keweenaw County (compared to Michigan’s state average of 174 people per square mile), any sudden or large influx of people could put pressure on services such as daycares.
And while access to water abounds, that too may be affected in the years ahead. Experts have warned that the privatization of water sources, as a consequence of the growing number of data centers and other major water consumers, could contribute to further strain.
Data centers are under the spotlight in the U.P. for reasons other than water consumption. When a crypto mining facility began operations nine miles south of Sault Ste. Marie in March, a nearby elementary school specializing in outdoor education, was forced to take classes indoors due to the oppressive noise.
Still, efforts to alleviate the aforementioned infrastructural challenges on the Keweenaw Peninsula, which could otherwise be worsened by climate migration, are underway.
In Chassell Township, a rural area of 1,878 residents south of Houghton, a piece of property left derelict for a decade is now set to be transformed into a mixed-use development that will include 22 housing units.
Furthermore, researchers are discussing the idea of establishing land trusts in rural Great Lakes regions to ensure that property prices remain affordable for both long-term residents and newcomers.
Winkler said that in order to map their way forward in a future that could include thousands of climate migrants, rural and smaller Great Lakes communities could look to how the Intermountain West, lakeside communities across the Great Lakes and small ski resort towns in the northeast have handled growth in recent decades.
Is large-scale climate migration a certainty?
All the while, the question of whether thousands of people fleeing climate hazards elsewhere for the rural Great Lakes is actually happening remains unanswered.
“There isn’t a lot of this happening yet. The research is pretty speculative and is more about talking to people about what they think might happen,” said Winckler.
She adds that it’s important to be skeptical about whether this will happen. There are still many people moving towards more heat in the southwest.
One critical issue to keep in mind, according to all involved, is that nowhere on earth can really be considered a bona fide “climate haven.” Parts of the Great Lakes struggled again this summer with air quality resulting from wildfires in western Canada. Even age-old winter-time life could be threatened under the shadow of climate change.
“My biggest concern is if we have another winter like we did last year. Our snowpack was less than half the average,” said Scott, who grew up in southeastern Wisconsin.
According to Scott, last year they would get snow, and the rest was rain. She said they’re here for the snow and the winter, but last winter, with how it vacillated between cold rain and snow, was miserable.
Catch more news at Great Lakes Now:
How Great Lakes cities are preparing for climate migration
Are data centers a threat to the Great Lakes?
Featured image: The rocky coast of Lake Huron looking out over the popular Les Cheneaux Islands in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. (Photo Credit: iStock)
