Eerie Study Warns New Orleans Residents To Relocate—but How Do You Move an Entire City?

Anyone who has ever moved knows how stressful it is—so how do you relocate New Orleans' entire population of nearly 400,000 as the city faces an existential climate threat?

That is the staggering question raised by a sobering study published this month in the Nature Sustainability journal. Based on historical evidence, researchers project that New Orleans will lose 75% of its remaining wetlands by 2070. This means that, by the end of the century, the city could become an island surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists from Tulane University, Yale University, Florida State University, and Coastal Carolina University studied the impact of rising sea levels on one of the world's most vulnerable coastal zones.

By examining an ancient shoreline, scientists discovered that 125,000 years ago, when global temperatures were roughly 0.5 to 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels, the waters of the Gulf reached an area 30 miles north of modern-day New Orleans.

Considering that the global climate is now nearly 1.5 degrees warmer than in the 1800s and may be headed for an increase of 2 degrees, researchers predict that Southern Louisiana will experience a sea-level rise of 10 to 23 feet, forcing the shoreline to retreat up to 62 miles in what they call an "inevitable transformation of coastal Louisiana from land to sea."

A dire warning

While the authors of the study do not offer an exact timeline for when New Orleans might be cut off by the Gulf from the rest of the U.S. mainland, they are urging state leaders to begin planning for a managed, multigenerational relocation of the city's inhabitants and infrastructure to higher ground now, while there's still time.

"Louisiana is a canary in the coal mine," says study co-author Brianna Castro, assistant professor of urban sustainability at Yale School of the Environment. "It is one of the rare places where we’re already clearly seeing climate-motivated depopulation combined with other social and economic factors."

Since 2000, and particularly after Hurricane Katrina inflicted large-scale devastation on the region in 2005, about a quarter of Orleans Parish's population has left. Over just the past seven years, the city of New Orleans alone lost nearly 30,000 residents.

The authors of the study warn that a lack of government planning will result in a disorderly, market-driven displacement that places "disproportionate burdens" on the existing higher-ground communities set to receive the climate refugees.

Andreanecia M. Morris, executive director of HousingNOLA, a partnership between community leaders and organizations working on New Orleans' affordable housing crisis, says while these findings may shock outsiders, local stakeholders have been sounding the alarm for the past 20 years.

"We've been saying this for a while, and we've been saying this to the global community ... to environmental justice advocates, to climate change activists, we've been saying: The fight is here in Louisiana," Morris tells Realtor.com®.

As both the authors of the study and Morris admit, relocating a bustling city of 360,000 residents, as well as the more exposed surrounding parishes and low-lying bayou communities, poses a dizzying array of challenges.

Where to move?

Chief among them is the crucial need to align regional planning for infrastructure and housing development with local social services policies that can help higher-elevation communities like Baton Rouge and Monroe absorb the influx of hundreds of thousands of newcomers—a tall order even under the best of circumstances.

Assuming an average household size of 2.5 people, New Orleans is currently home to roughly 144,000 households that would need to be moved were the relocation to begin today.

To put that in perspective, Baton Rouge, the largest inland city and Louisiana's state capital, has around 89,000 existing households, and Lafayette, around 55,000.

"Even combined, they still fall short of what a displaced New Orleans would require," says Realtor.com economist Jiayi Xu. "No amount of vacancy-rate math is needed to see that the inland housing market simply isn't built to absorb that kind of sudden demand—and that's before accounting for the rest of coastal Louisiana that researchers say faces the same long-term fate."

Beyond the logistical issues lies the serious matter of people's understandable reluctance to leave the only home they have ever known.

"It's very, very hard for me as a great-granddaughter of a sharecropper who purchased the property for his children to think about my family leaving," Asti Davis Robins, director of climate justice at the Louisiana-based nonprofit Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, tells Realtor.com.

Her grandmother still lives on a tract of land passed down by her father, and Robins cannot fathom what property elsewhere could ever replace a home that stands as a monument to her family’s upward mobility and perseverance.

What's more, Robins points out that there is no precedent in U.S. history for a successful mass relocation that managed to preserve the culture of the displaced. This threat is particularly resonant in New Orleans, a world-famous cultural hub renowned for its unique history, traditions, music, and food rooted in Creole and African American heritage.

"The federal government doesn't make a lot of room to preserve culture, to preserve family, to preserve the things that people have loved about these places," says Robins.

For those willing to uproot their lives and move inland, the next big question is simple yet tough: Where do they go?

"Louisiana is heavily polluted in different places, so the places where you might move people may not be desirable to them," says Robins.

Meanwhile, areas in North Louisiana that could potentially absorb climate migrants are filling up with data centers.

"How do you make people whole in a state that is selling off their property to data centers that are 90% the size of Manhattan Island, where there may have been space to move an entire community?" she asks.

A series of setbacks

The scientists behind the study contend that if Louisiana state officials acknowledge the inevitability of the shoreline’s retreat now and begin adopting policies to set the ground for a multigenerational relocation, they can create a blueprint for other communities around the world dealing with the effects of climate change. 

“Transition planning offers significant first-mover opportunities, including the development of innovations in infrastructure and housing that is affordable for people on the move," says study co-author Jesse Keenan, associate professor in Tulane’s School of Architecture and Built Environment.

However, both Robins and Morris agree that under the current administration of Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, there is little appetite to begin planning for the inevitable future of rising sea levels. 

In fact, Morris says there have been some serious setbacks along the way, with the state government doubling down on the expansion of the oil and gas industry, and prioritizing "inequitable" tourism economy in New Orleans that leverages the city's culture for profit without investing back into its residents.

"They feel like social welfare is somehow a waste and corporate welfare is good economic policy," argues Morris. Landry's administration "only seeks to extract, not invest."

Both the advocates and the authors of the study highlight last year's cancellations of multibillion-dollar river engineering projects like the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion designed to mimic nature and redirect river mud to rebuild wetlands in an effort to buy time for coastal communities.

Originally funded with the historic BP oil spill settlement, the projects were dismantled by Landry's administration, which cited high costs.

"It's kind of an abandonment of New Orleans and the citizens there," says Robins. "We'll continue to see the coast eroding, we'll continue to see disastrous hurricanes come through because our coast is going to start to deteriorate at a faster rate because we're not investing in it."

Realtor.com reached out to Landry's office for comment on the study.

A short-sighted approach

However, the HousingNOLA director argues that politicians are not the only ones who are failing to plan for the future. Morris says that real estate developers and investors are equally short-sighted and driven by quick profit.

Instead of analyzing what a property will look like decades from now, speculators seeking to cash out are operating on a five-year horizon.

"They're not strategic in a long-term view when they're coming in trying to make a quick buck," she says.

Morris and Robins agree that for New Orleans and other vulnerable communities to survive into the 22nd century, all key stakeholders—including local, state, and federal government policymakers, business leaders, and community members—must come to the table for serious, clear-eyed conversations about climate change and planned relocations.

Instead, underfunded advocacy groups currently find themselves shouldering much of the burden of mapping out the future as the waters of the Gulf grow nearer.

"It is a hard feat for nonprofits to carry," admits Robins. "We only have so much political power."