Top Retirement Havens Threatened by Extreme Weather

Climate change “isn’t the first thing people think about” when they’re deciding where to retire, says Michael Greenberg, an emeritus professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University who has studied environmental risk for older people. “You want to move to a place that fulfills your dreams. But you should also want to protect yourself and your assets that you worked so hard for.”

High temperatures disproportionately threaten older adults, who are more likely than younger people to suffer heat exhaustion, stroke and dehydration and to have health conditions sensitive to heat, including cardiovascular and respiratory problems.

Aaron Erez sees this firsthand in the older patients he treats as a functional medicine doctor in San Diego. They tell him hot summers “make it hard to stay active or even go outside, leading to weight gain and worsened chronic illnesses,” he says. “Some who settled in popular retirement destinations like Phoenix or Tampa now regret it.”

There are already 12,000 deaths a year in the United States related to heat, with that number projected to rise exponentially if temperatures continue to increase at current rates, researchers at Duke University found. Separate studies show that more than 80 percent of people who die from such causes are over age 60.

Rising seas, rising costs

Meanwhile, 1 in 6 Americans age 65 or older live in coastal areas subject to sea level rise, and that proportion is projected to increase to 1 in 3 by 2100, another Duke study found. That makes them vulnerable to flooding from severe storms such as Hurricane Beryl, which inundated Houston in July, and Tropical Storm Debby, which lashed retirement hot spots Myrtle Beach and Charleston, South Carolina.  

“When this may be your final house or you want to find a place along the shore or near a river or on a mountain, you’ve got to do due diligence,” Greenberg says. “You need to know if it’s in a flood zone. And part of the problem is that these are changing over time. What used to be a 100-year flood plain, now you might need to expect a flood every 10 years.”

Emerging research suggests that this can be a life-or-death decision. People age 60 and up made up 15 percent of the population of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit but accounted for 70 percent of storm deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three-quarters of residents who died in California’s Camp Fire were 65 or older.

“As people get older, they tend to have much greater vulnerabilities and are less able to respond to a change in their environment, and that’s what these weather events do,” says Theresa Shireman, director of the Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research at Brown University’s School of Public Health.

Financial repercussions of climate change are also growing, from the risk of serious, costly property damage to the soaring price of homeowner’s insurance.

Florida is the least affordable state for homeowner’s insurance, with costs more than double the national average, according to data from the Insurance Research Council and the Insurance Information Institute. Home values are also falling near coastal areas subject to rising seas, researchers at the University of Colorado and Pennsylvania State University found.

“People still seem to be willing to buy. They’re pouring into Florida. I don’t know how high [insurance] has to go or how many times they have to be evacuated to change that,” says Lindsay Peterson, interim director of the Florida Policy Exchange Center on Aging at the University of South Florida.

‘Look at the new normal’

Greenberg counsels that retirees looking to relocate add climate issues to their scrutiny of prospective landing spots. For example, check the area’s hazard mitigation plan, usually available online from a city, town or county. “They can be frightfully boring,” he says, “but they will go into considerable detail about what places are at higher risk.”

“Look at the new normal,” says Trudeau. “What’s the average temperature? How much rainfall do you get? What are your absolute no-way things, such as I won’t move to places where it’s 110 degrees?”

Boring or not, this “should be part of the decision process,” says Janko Nikolich, codirector of the Arizona Center on Aging at the University of Arizona. “In terms of best areas to move, those would be the areas with temperate climates, without extremes.”

There are signs that traditional attitudes about retirement locations are beginning to change. Inland, elevated cities such as Asheville, North Carolina, Boise, Idaho, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Provo, Utah, are gaining ground among older adults. Fifty-six percent of respondents to insurance company Allianz Life’s 2024 Annual Retirement Survey said they were worried about the impact of extreme weather on their health and finances.

Still, if the climate continues to change as it has, it’s going to be harder to find the perfect place, Trudeau warns. “Personally, I don’t really believe a climate haven exists," she says. "Really, impacts are going to be felt everywhere.”