Stroll along Cleveland’s Edgewater Pier on a summer evening, and you’ll hear Arabic, Spanish, and other languages wafting through the lake air. For decades, international immigrants have found a home in the city of Lake Erie.
But now, there’s an increasing chance that future waves of migrants — from Florida, Arizona, California, and beyond — could move here as extreme weather events caused by climate change in those regions prompt people to rethink where they want to live.
Hurricanes in Florida are leading to insurance companies fleeing the Sunshine State. In California, wildfires are resulting in urban devastation on a major scale. Last year, Phoenix, Arizona, experienced 21 consecutive days of record-breaking high temperatures.
By contrast, the highest temperature ever recorded in Detroit was 105 F, back in 1934.
With this in mind, some Great Lakes cities have been working to position themselves as so-called “climate havens.”
The term is anything if not controversial, but some urban leaders and planners around the Lakes see opportunity.
“Nobody revels in the effects of climate change,” said Chris Ronayne, county executive of Cuyahoga County. “Having said that, we are a region that is ready for population return. We’re a city built infrastructurally for a million people in our center city, and probably three million people in our urban core.”
According to Ronayne, the Cleveland county has streets and housing stock that could meet the needs of three times its actual population. He said they’re ready to receive and can provide the housing and a way of life that’s sustainable, as a legacy city of the Great Lakes.
Mapping a new reality
City and county authorities aren’t alone in thinking about a Great Lakes urban future with millions more residents: scientists and researchers are trying to map out that possibility, too.
“The Great Lakes have their problems, but there is this kind of opportunity,” said Derek Van Berkel of the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, and the co-author of a 2022 study on the topic.
Last year, Van Berkel and colleagues conducted a 1,000-person survey of residents and officials in various Great Lakes cities.
“Twenty per cent [of city planner participants] are serious [about preparing for climate migration], 30% have started conversations about it. Thirty per cent haven’t really talked much about it and 20% have not discussed the issue,” he said.
“There is a lot of variation. Ann Arbor, Buffalo and Cleveland — it tends to be the biggest cities [discussing climate migration] because they have established planning departments and the officers.”
Ann Arbor, for example, wanted to know how much water it’d need for a growing population.
Van Berkel said one of the main takeaways was that many people — 45% of survey participants — were unaware of climate migration in the first place.
“There was no clear signal that cities saw a huge benefit of this policy-wise,” he said. “We wanted to have a clear message, but there isn’t one.”
“We then asked if people would accept it, and it fell along political lines,” he said.
Participants who identified as Republicans were more opposed to the idea of welcoming migrants, while those who identified as Democrats were largely supportive.
A growing population has obvious financial advantages for a city, with taxpayers contributing money to city and county tax coffers, which, in theory, adds funding for better services to all residents.
What’s more, there’s an important political element: a larger population potentially means a greater number of representatives in Congress.
An ‘extractive mindset’
While the climate haven issue has been satirized by comedy shows, the idea of thousands of people coming into a city or town in a short period of time is worrying to many.
Although Great Lakes cities may be spared the worst of the climate crisis, they are hardly utopian, residents said. Although both have experienced an economic upturn in recent years, cities such as Cleveland and Detroit regularly rank among the poorest in the U.S.
“We don’t want to become an attraction to the wrong forces,” said Paul Jackson, executive director of the Detroit-based East Michigan Environmental Action Council. “There’s a problem with the mindset altogether that the Great Lakes and the water resources that are here are available. They’re not and they’re really precious and they’re already taxed heavily by the corporate forces that are already here.”
Gentrification that followed the 2020 pandemic continues to price local low- and medium-income residents out of the property market in large and mid-sized cities. At $38,000, the median household income in Detroit is roughly half the national level.
There’s a fear that incoming climate migrants could exacerbate the rising cost of living, but on a much greater scale.
Already, out-of-town property owners, including corporations, are being criticized in cities such as Toledo and Cleveland for buying up homes in working-class neighborhoods en masse. According to Outlier Media, property speculators — those who purchase real estate in up-and-coming neighborhoods and then largely ignore the investment until it becomes more valuable to sell — have controlled approximately 20% of properties in Detroit since the early 2010s.
“Climate migration could be a good thing, but their mindset is kind of what signals the overall intention, which is an extractive intention,” said Jackson.
“We’re talking about people who have the wherewithal and the awareness to move in advance, they have the money to move in advance of some future that hasn’t actually come to pass yet.”
Trees, ADUs and public transit: the plan for the future
Either way, cities are pressing ahead.
In Cuyahoga County, planners and leaders have worked on building out an urban tree canopy program that’s seen more than 11,000 trees planted since 2019, more progressive zoning codes to accommodate accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and greater flexibility in single-family zoning codes in an effort to encourage higher residential density levels.
“We have housing that’s being renovated to accommodate those coming from other places,” said Ronayne.
The County is also targeting investment in 13,000 parcels to become transit-oriented development zones. It has also developed the Fresh Water Institute, an education and water resource initiative that focuses on preserving the aquatic potential of Lake Erie and other waterways.
A 2023 case study by the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, involving Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, highlighted that the City of Cleveland has existing roads, sewers and water lines designed to support a population of over one million residents. Today, its current population is approximately 370,000 people.
“We’ve been programmed for three or four decades to manage the shrinking city. This is now a moment to be turning the page to a growth strategy,” said Ronayne.
Signs are growing that people in the South and West of the U.S. may be growing increasingly fed up with the upward trend of extreme weather events.
On the same day that residents of Sarasota, Florida, were dealing with Hurricane Milton last October and Phoenix saw temperature highs of 107 F, Cleveland reached a mild 61 F. Conversations on online forums and media reports of people leaving regions at heightened risk of climate-induced weather events are growing.
But the data suggests people are not yet moving away from these regions, specifically to the Great Lakes, in large numbers. Places such as Cleveland and Milwaukee continue to either lose residents or remain stagnant in terms of population.
In a region of the U.S. that, in the shadow of deindustrialization, has struggled to manage urban inequality more than many other parts of the country, some believe climate migration would present as many challenges as opportunities for Great Lakes cities.
“It does fold into gentrification, that’s happening here now. We have people moving here from the East Coast because they feel there is unlimited opportunity here,” said Jackson of what he is seeing take place recently in Detroit.
“[Climate migration] could be positive coming here, but they come here with the same mindset that created the so-called landscape of limited opportunity, which is exclusionary and classist and elitist.”
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Featured image: Cleveland, Ohio viewed from out on Lake Erie. (Photo Credit: iStock)
