When Marissa Hernandez visited New York for the first time more than a decade ago, she saw a lake filled with water. It brought her to tears.
A resident of a small city in northern California, Hernandez only knew lakes besieged by drought. After living in a place where she could walk to the middle of a lake without getting wet, seeing a lake filled with water was powerful — a memory that lingers all these years later.
Hernandez now serves as executive director of BluSeed Studios in Saranac Lake. She also co-owns the Little Big Farm in Saranac with her husband, Jeffery Dupra. They lived in Grass Valley, California with their two children up until 2019, when Hernandez made the difficult decision to leave the place she’d grown up in and move to the Adirondacks.
The couple knew it was the right choice. In California, she remembers always having a fire bag packed in her car or by the front door. She remembers not being able to leave the kids at home alone during risky fire times and the daily stress that drought and heat brought. The risk of wildfires was always on their minds.
“We needed to go somewhere where we could farm and grow food and not stress about water, and not worry about whether there’s enough for people drink,” Hernandez said.
Extreme weather is becoming more frequent across both the U.S. and globe — and with it, migration.
As the climate changes and extreme weather events plow through communities, damaging homes and disrupting people’s quality of life, it’s spurring climate migration to milder, safer areas. An October 2021 climate migration report from the White House estimated that “tens of millions” of people will participate in climate migration in the next few decades.
Recent upticks in extreme weather tie back to climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of the United Nations, said in 2021. On July 22, for instance, the planet experienced its hottest day on record — for the second day in a row. Last month, Hurricane Beryl became the earliest category five hurricane recorded in the Atlantic. and this year, to date, 28,649 wildfires to date have burned more than 4.5 million acres in the U.S. according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
Locally, though some extreme weather has touched down — from Hurricane Beryl-related flooding closing roads in Keene, Jay and Elizabethtown to extreme heat warnings in June — the Adirondacks are set to be more resilient to the effects of climate change. With that resilience comes the possibility of being a climate migration destination, according to Paul Smith’s College natural science professor Curt Stager.
“It’s already happening,” Stager said. “It’s not just the Adirondacks, but the northeast (U.S.) as a whole. … States like Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont are actually planning for this.”
It’s an opportunity to expand shrinking Adirondack communities and lure more year-round residents, Elizabethtown-based housing nonprofit Adirondack Roots Executive Director Megan Murphy said. Potential population increases come with a higher demand for housing, though — something that’s already in short supply, especially in the Tri-Lakes.
“There is an opportunity to have younger people actually see this area as a good opportunity, (a) place to live. So I do think that might be an interesting framework for us to be thinking about here, to stem some of the out-migration that we’ve had,” Murphy said. “We already have a situation where people are being priced out of this market already, and so (climate migration) would possibly only exacerbate that.”
North by northeast
There are a few reasons why the Adirondacks will be more resistant to climate change than, for instance, the southwestern U.S., Stager said.
“Although the changes will be noticeable, they’re, in a lot of ways, less severe than other places,” he said.
The Adirondacks are not primed for a drought, making forests and species able to handle increased heat with more ease than those in the southwest, according to Stager. The mountainous terrain and elevation also means that cooler conditions “will still be present, it’s just that they’ll be moving higher up.”
“Our biggest changes here are going to be shorter, milder winters and longer, hotter summers,” Stager said.
For Adirondack Center for Writing board member Sherri York, a seasonal resident on Upper Saranac Lake who spends the rest of the year in Los Angeles, traveling to the North Country is a chance to experience a change in seasons closer to her childhood in the midwest.
“The season change is just so great for us, having grown up where we had all the seasons, and all the seasons are here,” she said. “In this existential way, it’s like the best of fall, the best of winter, the best of summer.”
York and her husband bought their lake house in 2021 after toying with the idea for years. Though they are not considered climate migrants, York said it was “climate influences that eventually got us here.”
“When we had the means to try to get a lake house … we started looking around California very, very slowly through the years. What we realized was that a lot of the lakes, they weren’t drying up, but you could see all of the dock extensions because there was less and less water,” she said.
They expanded their search beyond California and eventually landed on their Saranac Lake house, where they spend the summer months and a few weeks in the fall and winter. York and her husband love living in LA, and while she said their quality of life hasn’t been affected by climate change in California, there have been “a lot of scary parts.”
“There’s definitely fires that are a threat. Insurance factors because of fires — our insurance, homeowners insurance, is skyrocketing,” York said. “We’ve had droughts. We’ve taken out all of our lawn and we have drought-tolerant plants. So, there’s definitely been an effect like that.”
Leaving the apocalypse
Echo, an artist who owns The Station in Onchiota, said that he and his partner Melissa Lambert left northern California in 2017 because it was, in a word, “apocalyptic.”
“We experienced five consecutive years of ever-increasing-in-size wildfires that burned down half of the town we lived in one year and then the next closest town the next year,” he said.
They saw houses engulfed in flames, propane tanks explode and debris fall from the sky.
As residents of Middletown, California for many years, they were no stranger to wildfires and he said they had become “complacent” — reassured by the sights of planes flying in with water and bulldozers directing the fire on the mountains.
“The Valley Fire changed that,” Echo said.
In September 2017, faulty electrical wiring on a hot tub started a blaze that burned 76,076 acres of land and 1,955 structures, killing four and burning through half of Middletown in two days.
“It’s just nuts,” he said. “It’s horrible.”
Through the annual fires, their house never burned — but every time they evacuated, under the assumption that it would, they went through those emotions. and when they returned, they were met with guilt and confusion when their home still stood while so many others’ did not.
The closest fire came within half a mile of their home.
Echo said there was a pervasive sense that “this was going to happen to everything, everywhere.”
It was as certain as freezing in the winter in the Adirondacks.
“There wasn’t really a matter of if, there was a matter of when,” Echo said. “It frayed your nerves. You were always on edge.”
The fire scanner was on at all times. He’d get no sleep during nights with high wind. If they weren’t getting enough rain in the winter, there was the anxiety of a fire-filled summer.
“A hot day is not just a hot day, it’s a risky day,” Echo said.
They knew the climate wasn’t going to get any better. California has been in long periods of pervasive drought and temperatures there have been above average by several degrees for most of the past decade.
“If it wasn’t for the fires, we’d still be there,” Echo said. “That was home.”
But he said it was not a hard decision to move, and he’s never had second thoughts about it.
“It was a clear choice,” Echo said. “It was a choice between ‘You will eventually lose everything and maybe even your life.’ or ‘You might have a different life somewhere.’”
Marissa Hernandez and her husband lived around three hours east of Echo. They bonded over their shared experience of living in a fire zone and leaving for a home in a less threatened area. Coming from the same region, they have some of the same things to say about wildfires.
“It’s not if, it’s when,” Hernandez said.
The weather wasn’t the only reason she moved to the East Coast, but it was a “huge factor,” she said.
In researching places to move to, the Adirondacks became a prime location for them. Because this area is supposed to see the effects of climate change slower than other areas, that was something they thought about in their move, Hernandez said, but they also had a family link to the area through Dupra’s parents.
Hernandez said there are many more people like them. A friend recently moved from California to Albany to leave the fire zone. She knew many people who moved away from the fire zones before and after them.
She said that maybe one day humans will stop burning fossil fuels for energy. But that would take a massive social change and is unlikely. Until then, she said people just try to survive.
On weeks like this, where smoke from wildfires in Canada floats over to the Adirondacks, she feels a tinge of that old anxiety again. It’s something she thinks will never leave her.
Snowbirds migrate
Bob Miller, broker and owner at Bob Miller Real Estate in Lake Placid, said that he’s had two clients who have moved to Florida and returned to the North Country shortly after, due to their increasing homeowners insurance — an effect of extreme weather.
“We are seeing people rethink their move down there,” he said. “Their insurance costs have gone up dramatically.”
It’s too early and too small a market to track trends, Miller said.
“I think those that are concerned about climate change, we’re talking about events that may happen down the line, so the trends just haven’t started yet,” he said.
Miller said extreme weather elsewhere tends to send people to the Adirondacks. He recalled that after Hurricane Sandy devastated the New Jersey coast in 2012, numerous people sold their homes there and bought land up north, telling him they were tired of risking the ocean’s wind and water.
Margie Philo, broker and owner at Berkshire Hathaway Adirondack Premier Properties, has had mostly seasonal residents looking for a relief from the heat.
“We have people that have decided that they can’t stand living in the south, the east coast states in particular,” she said. “We do see people that are moving here, some of them full-time, some of them seven, eight months a year.”
Nick Politi, real estate broker and owner at Merrill L. Thomas in Lake Placid, said that, while he hasn’t seen what would be considered climate migration yet, he has seen more seasonal residents coming in from warm climates, which could be the start of a larger movement.
“It’s a little early for that up here in terms of people moving here. Certainly on the second home market side, I hear it more often that it’s more of an escape than a permanent residence,” Politi said. “But, I foresee that there is going to be some sort of northern migration relating to the heat and humidity and weather.”
Politi said that the Adirondacks have often served as a safe haven during national and international crises.
“I can remember when 9/11 happened and it was very scary and there were a lot of people who came up here, and then most recently, COVID happened, and a lot of people came up here,” he said. “I do see more people bringing it up, global warming.”
He anticipates that, rather than people moving from the south and west to the Adirondacks, the region would see more climate migrants from closer places that are also seeing more heat and humidity than they’re used to — New Jersey, Pennsylvania and southern New York.
York, who splits her time between Saranac Lake and LA, agreed.
“I think people are going to be more interested in coming here all year round,” she said. “This is one of those sweet-spot areas that, it will be affected by climate change … but it’s in maybe a safer place.”
Saranac Lake realtor Katie Stiles, who owns Adirondack Stiles Real Estate, said she also sees people who feel the Adirondack environment is a safe place to live. But she has not seen much climate migration herself. Stiles said one case stands out — a woman from California who relocated here after her town on the West Coast burned to the ground.
Stiles said extreme weather likely uproots people, and some of those people land in the Adirondacks. Most often, she sees people moving here because they have family connections or have visited here before.
She also sees people who lived here before returning for a variety of reasons — for the weather and the culture.
What concerns her, climate-wise, is the impact on winter tourism. Last winter, she said Saranac Lake got very little snow. It was the warmest winter on record in Saranac Lake. She jokingly said she feels there were more biking days than snowmobiling days on the new Adirondack Rail Trail.
A growing trend
The Adirondacks is not the only destination for American climate migrants.
A 2023 report from Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress — a group that researches housing, infrastructure, education and government — found that 1,179 people moved from Los Angeles County to the Hudson Valley between 2018 and 2020.
“Many assumed that our growing TV and film industries had attracted these West Coast transplants,” the report reads. “But Pattern has also encountered several people who moved from Los Angeles during that time because they were tired of water restrictions and wary of fires. Those are climate refugees, and their arrival in the Hudson Valley deserves more attention and analysis.”
Other climate migrants have settled in the Great Lakes region, which spans from Minnesota to New York. About 5,000 people moved to Buffalo from Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, according to Yale Climate Connections, run by the Yale Center for Climate Communication, and Wisconsin Public Radio reported in May 2023 that Wisconsin saw more people move into the state than leave in 2022, with more than 7,657 people moving there from other U.S. states.
Forever wild
There are a few reasons why the Adirondacks are different from other climate migration destinations.
The more than 6 million acre Adirondack Park has been protected by the state Constitution since 1894, when it was decreed to “be forever kept as wild forest lands.” A little under 2.6 million of those acres — 44.6% — are protected by the state, while more than 2.8 million acres, or 49.4%, are private. Half of the private lands are classified as “resource management” and 34.42% “rural use” by the Adirondack Park Agency. Only a collective 14.58% of private lands are classified for hamlet, moderate intensity or low intensity use — where most housing is likely to be built.
“The wild half (of the Adirondack Park), for now, has strong legal protections, including the state Constitution of New York state,” Stager said. “In a way, we’re in better shape as far as the wild areas go than a lot of the rest of the country. We already have some good protections, and we’ll need to keep those in place to keep protecting it and have it be the place we love.”
Murphy, whose work at Adirondack Roots includes increasing the local housing stock, said that the region faces some unique challenges that make development difficult.
“One of the things that’s a little different about here and some other rural areas such as Vermont and others is that we have a tight land market,” she said. “Whereas, many rural places across the country, they have an excess of land. They can create development because they have the ability to. They have it as a resource. Here, because of the Adirondack Park and because we already have a lot of development in the areas that are developable, we have a much tighter vacant land market, and it’s a much more expensive vacant land market.”
She added that she “could see that becoming even tighter” if the region saw an uptick in demand due to climate migration.
Philo said that, while recent affordable housing projects in the Tri-Lakes have provided income-qualified housing for people who already live here, there’s still a dearth of attainable, middle-income housing for potential climate migrants.
“What we don’t have being built are homes or condominiums or townhomes for people who want to move here because they find our climate to be a better-tolerable, suitable condition year-round,” she said. “We don’t have large construction companies … coming here to invest in large tracts of land to build a large number of houses. They won’t come unless they can build a large number of houses.”
Initially, when Echo and Lambert left California, they moved to New York City. In 2020, they moved to the Adirondacks to open The Station. They had visited Rainbow Lake every year to visit Lambert’s dad.
“The green waterness of it all, the lushness was definitely a draw,” Echo said. “The Adirondack climate was one of the reasons we are here.”
He said they were fortunate to find a house, saying it was all luck.
“It was overpriced for what it was,” he said, but they did not have much to choose from.
Echo said there likely are many people who want to move here, but can’t, because they can’t find a house.
Barriers to entry
Development hurdles aside, available, affordable housing has been scarce in the North Country for years.
This affordable housing crisis impacts nearly every aspect of life here, from school enrollment to the size of the labor market. It’s impacting some local businesses’ ability to grow and families’ ability to put down roots in the Adirondacks. It’s forcing some residents to commute long distances to work, causing a reduction in volunteer services — including dwindling volunteer fire department membership — and contributes to homelessness.
A 2023 report on the housing crisis from the Lake Champlain-Lake George Regional Planning Board said that “income levels are drastically misaligned with housing costs” and “housing production has not kept up with demand.” Other contributing factors to the crisis, according to the report, include stymied wage growth, an aging housing stock, and the proliferation of both owner-occupied vacation homes and short-term vacation rentals.
With the possibility of a wave of climate migration in the next decade or so, the housing crisis and disparities in the local housing market become starker — low- and middle-income people may not be able to afford to leave their climate change-ravaged homes and move to the safer, cooler Adirondacks, let alone find affordable, stable, safe, year-round housing.
“How do we make it so people can live here? To have an income and a home you can afford? Employees for the businesses?” Stager asked. “The pressures are on the towns and villages and hamlets, and every community is going to have to decide how we want to handle this. Do we want to welcome the newcomers in? If so, we’ve got to provide, make them feel welcome — whatever that takes. But, at the same time, we also have to make it affordable for local Adirondackers to be here.”
The tight market isn’t likely to let up soon, Politi said.
“Because there’s a tremendous amount of demand and not a lot of supply, I see values not going down,” he said. “We only have so much inventory here.”
According to Philo, people who own homes aren’t likely to sell, either, creating a logjam.
“Not only are we small and low on housing, but those people who own homes and have 2% or 3% mortgages don’t want to sell because they know the next they buy is going to be at 7%,” she said. “It’s still a very brisk, very busy market here — it’s just that we don’t have enough to sell.”
Stager said some “important conversations” amongst locals are in order as the question of increasing the region’s long-term residents through climate migration looms.
“Who are we as Adirondackers? What does it mean to be an Adirondacker? How do we keep that but also welcome people in to (culturally) enrich our communities and help increase our tax base?” he said.