The Sun Belt Boom Is Over | Opinion

Last week a "derecho"—an inland hurricane—battered metropolitan Houston, causing fatalities and billions of dollars of damage, blowing out windows in downtown high-rises and putting even more pressure on the state's beleaguered insurance system. With many insurers already reluctant to stay in markets like Texas, which experiences natural disasters that wreck disastrously overbuilt environments in all four seasons, homeowners are facing another round of premium increases and policy cancellations. And skyrocketing insurance costs are just one reason among many that the Sun Belt population boom might soon be coming to an end.

For years, abundant cheap housing, lower income taxes and endless sunshine have drawn people from the Northeast and Midwest to the "Sun Belt"—a loosely-defined term that refers to the U.S. South from Florida in the East to Arizona in the West. The proliferation and falling costs of indoor air-conditioning also played a huge role in the region's ascent. But a combination of destructive weather driven by climate change, enormous home insurance cost increases, housing scarcity and political lunacy are making parts of the Sun Belt much less desirable places to live than they were even 10 years ago.

People might enjoy the relatively mild winters—except when ice storms roll in and knock out the power grid for days on end—but many are coming to realize that they are effectively prisoners in their air-conditioned homes from April through October. Austin, for years a popular destination for people who wanted to escape brutal winters without sacrificing the cultural perks of blue city life, recorded 80 days with highs over 100 degrees in 2023. Some projections suggest that the city will experience 100-degree temperatures close to half the year by the end of the century, especially if their fellow citizens keep electing Republicans determined to short-circuit the green energy transition. Meanwhile, median home prices in the Austin-Round Rock metropolitan area have nearly tripled since 2011.

Those bloated prices also now come with enormous insurance price tags across large swaths of the Sun Belt, making housing even more expensive than it first appears. Thanks to the (in)famous "business-friendly" environment in the state, insurers can basically do whatever they want to their customers, and the state's average premium is now more than double the national average, with many insurers getting out of the market altogether. Many people, like Texas Monthly writer Michael Hardy, have a hard time getting anyone to insure their homes and must pay exorbitant premiums once they finally secure a policy. This can mean hundreds or even thousands of extra dollars per month on a mortgage payment – costs that aren't generally factored into articles that still breathlessly trumpet Texas as a super-duper cheap place to live. This isn't a new problem—the state created its own government-backed insurer of last resort more than 20 years ago, which totally isn't socialism folks—but it is clearly getting worse.

And it's a huge problem in states that are prone to hurricanes (Florida and the Gulf Coast in particular) or tornadoes, or both. Thirty Florida insurance companies have been "liquidated" or voluntarily stopped writing policies between 2020 and 2023, and others are considering leaving the state or are not offering new policies. Therefore, owning a home in certain parts of Florida means taking an enormous, possibly catastrophic, leap of faith that someone will continue to offer you insurance, or that state Republicans can take a long enough break from suppressing votes, forcing people to carry pregnancies to term and persecuting trans people to come up with a sustainable solution. And if you can't afford to buy a home, good luck with Florida's out-of-control rental market.

It would be one thing if this were the new normal, but things are projected to get much worse. There were a record 28 weather-related events in 2023 that caused at least a billion dollars in damage, with seven affecting Texas and two in Florida. It's not just that climate change is causing more erratic and extreme weather, but that there are so many more assets at risk due to the region's population growth. These realities will undoubtedly force insurance rates higher everywhere, but large swathes of the Sun Belt will suffer the most. Other fast-growing areas like Phoenix, Arizona, might dodge hurricanes, tornadoes and disastrous cold snaps, but face water shortages and ever-lengthening periods of time where it is so hot outside that stepping barefoot on the pavement will send you to the ER with severe burns.

This is to say nothing of the Handmaid's Tale, culture-war-obsessed politics that have taken hold in many parts of the Sun Belt. Abortion is now banned or severely constricted in Texas, the Deep South states, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, among others. Democrats managed to repeal Arizona's Civil War-era abortion ban earlier this month, but the state is just one GOP wave election away from joining its brethren across the south in imposing reproductive tyranny. Barely a week passes without some new anti-trans statute winding its way through a Sun Belt legislature. And many Republicans are just biding their time until the hard-right Supreme Court guts same-sex marriage protections so that they can reimpose pre-Obergefell prohibitions. Lower income taxes can only go so far in softening the blow of this authoritarian turn.

That all doesn't sound like much fun to me, but hey to each their own. Still, there's only one region of the country that combines government-by-sane-people, cheap housing, virtually inexhaustible water supplies and summers that won't burn the skin off the soles of your feet, and that's right here in the Upper Midwest.

You're welcome back any time.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.