“Where Should We Live” – a new class on cities, migration and climate change

I’m teaching two classes at UMass Amherst this spring. One is the latest incarnation of my “Fixing Social Media” class, which I launched late in my time at MIT and brought with me to UMass. It’s becoming “Fixing Platform Power” as we’re expanding our focus from social media to include AI chatbots and generative tools.

The second one is brand new: it’s a seminar about housing in the US, with a focus on climate change. It’s called “Where Should We Live?” and it’s a chance for me to try and combine some threads I’ve been working on for the past several years. I’m interested in how Americans have been moving South and West for decades, towards cheaper housing and job opportunities, but also towards heat, water shortages, hurricanes and wildfires. Some of America’s most popular cities are becoming transformed by climate change – will we see a reverse migration to the Great Lakes and a repopulation of the Rust Belt? Or will how we live change more than where we live?

I’ve been researching a book for some years now about the Rustbelt and “legacy cities” of the Northeast and Great Lakes, exploring my conviction that this part of the US is undervalued and underappreciated… but I’ve also learned that a strong intuition and a lot of reading is not the same thing as a book project. I’m teaching this class to get some feedback about what questions and possible solutions resonate with my students, and also to see how it feels to make some of these arguments out loud.

Here’s the syllabus as it currently stands – I’d love thoughts and input, with the caveat that there’s a reason (discussed below) why it needs to be light on reading.

Honors seminar: Where Should We Live?

It’s really hard to afford a place to live in the United States.

Housing stress is the idea that one can be under financial stress from housing prices if the cost of rent or a mortgage is more than 30% of a family’s income, and under extreme housing stress if those costs are more than 50% of income. 31.3% of American households are housing stressed, and almost half of renting households (49.7%) spend 30% or more on housing.

(Massachusetts does badly according to these numbers – we and Connecticut have a lot of stressed renters, though the problem is concentrated in the south and west – California is the worst, followed by Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia and others.)

Housing stress is most severe for folks who’ve got low incomes. The New York Times recently reported a profile of Junior Estrada, a minimum wage worker who lives in Los Angeles, where it would require 98 hours a week of minimum wage work to afford a $2100/mo one bedroom apartment. So he lives in a $750/mo storage unit without water or electricity.

Why is housing in the US so unaffordable? The three most common answers are interrelated: interest rates, a post-2008 construction gap and overregulation… or the perception of overregulation.

Before the 2008 financial crash, builders started construction on roughly 2 million housing units a year. That crashed to just over half a million a year in 2009, and as of last year, it had only recovered to 1.35 million a year. As a result, there’s a shortage of millions of homes in the US right now – Zillow estimates that number at 4.7 million.

It’s going to take at least a decade to clear that housing shortfall – there just aren’t enough builders in America to build all the houses we need. (And Trump’s crackdown on immigration is especially hurting the building trades, and tariffs with Canada are making construction materials more expensive – if you wanted to increase housing costs, those two policies would be a good way to do so.) The lack of supply increases housing costs, as does the cost of borrowing money – interest rates are roughly twice as high now as they were immediately after the pandemic. Combine the increased house price with the increased borrowing cost and in some markets, it costs as much as twice as much to buy a house as it did before COVID. Interest rates contribute to a “lock in” effect – if you have a house with a 3% mortgate, it would take a LOT to get you to sell that house, since you’re going to face a 7% rate on the new house.

There’s a set of commentators who argue that the main barrier to housing construction is overregulation, pointing to expensive and highly regulated cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York) as evidence that cities should adopt looser regulations to encourage housing growth. While deregulation is a popular argument for conservative policymakers, the facts on the ground are more complex than that model – many places where housebuilding is only lightly regulated have low construction costs, but also shrinking populations. In other words, it’s possible to be lightly regulated, cheap and still not a popular destination for new homebuyers – think upstate New York, St. Louis MO or much of the rustbelt. “Superstar” cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco may face a double whammy: they have low supply as well as regulations that make it hard to build.

Assume for the moment that policymakers magically do all the right things: they rezone to allow higher density, they create accommodations for ADUs, they subsidize low-income housing. (Or, if you lean to the right, imagine they reduce regulations, cut interest rates and require only market-rate construction.) There’s still a giant problem looming on the horizon from climate change.

Since its inception, the United States has spread south and west. For the 19th century, the idea of “manifest destiny” powered expansion, providing an ideological framework of white, Christian supremacy to justify the ethnic cleansing of native Americans and the purchase of territory from France and Spain. There were complex layers of financial and ideological motivations at work, from the ways the railroads opened the west to the annexation of Texas as a slave state. Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune urged young people to “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country”.

The World Wars slowed this expansion, as Americans flooded the factories of the northeast and midwest to build supplies the world’s military needed. After WWII, western states actively courted factories with promises of “business friendly” (i.e., anti-union) regulatory climates. Phoenix, followed by Houston and others, pioneered the idea of the “growth city”, with few zoning laws and few barriers to sprawling suburban development. What resulted was a radically different form of city than the metropolises of the Great Lakes: not only are “growth cities” like Houston, Phoenix or Jacksonville less dense than cities like Chicago or Detroit at their peak population, they are less dense than Detroit now, after it lost two thirds of its population from its peak in 1950s. These cities are organized around cars, not public transit, and around detached homes in suburban enclaves. And LOTS of them are in areas that are vulnerable to climate change.

Wildfires in California have been especially destructive because people have been moving to the “wildland urban interface”, a place where human dwellings are starting to be built in previously unoccupied land. Wildfires that would have reshaped landscapes but not directly affected humans are now displacing tens of thousands of people… and almost 7 million Californians live in especially fire-vulnerable areas.

Other communities are being transformed by rising waters and by the risk of seasonal storms. Lake Charles, LA is shrinking due to residents fleeing damages from successive hurricanes and rainstorms, and federal and state officials are offering to buy properties most at threat for flooding, a program called “managed retreat”. The homeowner’s insurance market in Florida nearly collapsed due to risks from climate change, primarily hurricane risk. The governor is now luring insurers back by making it harder for homeowners to recover damages from their insurers.

Some risks are likely to affect the most vulnerable citizens first: extreme heat is survivable if you can afford air conditioning, but is leading to the deaths of homeless people and people who live in substandard housing like RVs in states like Arizona. In 2024, Phoenix experienced 113 consecutive days with temperatures of 100F or above, turning sectors of the population nocturnal: construction crews routinely work in the middle of the night, both because it’s safer for workers and because building materials like concrete cannot correctly cure in the heat.

Many US cities are less vulnerable to climate change. They include the “rustbelt” cities along the Great Lakes – Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee – which are blessed with ample fresh water, moderate summer temperatures and insulation from coastal storms. These cities are often dense and walkable, characteristics that are popular in European cities… but most of these cities are either losing population, or growing more slowly than cities to the South and West.

Climate change is gradual, and its effects on where we live are bound to be slow: people move to where jobs are available, to where houses are inexpensive and where they feel like they can live “the good life”. It’s easy to predict that cities like Duluth will eventually become the new Austin, but much harder to know when it might happen.

Will the American vision of “the good life” change as the climate changes? Will we see Americans turn from suburban sprawl to walkable density, or will rising heat send us further into our cars and homes and out of our communities? Will political forces like the Trump administration’s war on immigrants reshape cities like Minneapolis that have built identities around immigration?

The goal of our class is understanding what factors – economic, environmental, cultural – that shape where we live and help us understand how our country and the world might change in the next few decades… and how we might steer those changes.

Each week, students will post a question brought up by the readings, which we will use to shape class discussion. Students will write a final reflection paper of 5-7 pages, offering a prediction for what the most exciting cities for US college graduates to move to will be in 2050, based on the factors discussed in class.

(For my academic friends – if this and the readings seem light, it’s because this is an unusual class. It’s a one credit honors seminar – there will be fifteen students from majors ranging from chemistry to turf science to accounting. The goal is to create a common ground where everyone can meet for discussion – my big challenge is not over-assigning reading, and not dominating the discussions.)

Week 1: Meeting each other, discussing this blog post and questions of where we have lived and where we want to live.

Week 2: What if you can’t afford a place to live?
Rising home prices and rising inequality mean many Americans are homeless or have substandard housing, including those who work full time. We know that housing people is the best path towards addressing a variety of social problems – what do we do when millions of people can’t afford a place to live?

Required reading: “In L.A., $750 a Month to Live in a Backyard Storage Unit”, by Livia Albeck-Ripka (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/us/california-backyard-housing-rent-storage-unit.html)

Optional reading: “The New American Homeless”, Brian Goldstone (https://newrepublic.com/article/154618/new-american-homeless-housing-insecurity-richest-cities)

Week 3: How did we get here?
How did American houses become a vehicle for speculative investment? Who thought lending money to people without proof of income was a good idea? How did mortgage backed securities burn down the global financial system?

Required listening: Alex Blumberg, Adam Davidson and This American Life: “The Giant Pool of Money” – https://www.thisamericanlife.org/355/the-giant-pool-of-money

Week 4: Why is it so hard to build a house?
Unlike almost every aspect of American business, the construction industry isn’t getting more efficient. Why do Americans have such a hard time building houses, and what lessons might we take from Sweden or Singapore?

Required listening:
Stephen Dubner, “Why Is It So Hard (and Expensive) to Build Anything in America?”: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-it-so-hard-and-expensive-to-build-anything-in-america/

Week 5: Why Are Americans Moving South and West?
Between 1910 and 1970, five million Black Americans moved from rural areas of the South to industrial centers of the North in a demographic shift called “The Great Migration”. Less discussed is the move of White Americans from these Northern cities south and west, to the Sunbelt. What caused this shift – which is still ongoing – and what does it mean for where and how we live?

Required reading: Katherine Jewell, “Rise of the Sunbelt South” (PDF)
Michael Hiltzig, “America’s decline in life expectancy speaks volumes about our problems”, https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-04-05/americas-decline-in-life-expectancy-speaks-volumes-about-our-problems

Week 6: How is the climate changing where we can live?
Attributing specific fires, storms or hot days to climate change is a challenging task, but there is broad consensus that America is getting hotter, drier in some places, wetter in others, and more prone to catch fire. How is climate change likely to change where we want to live and where it’s safe to live?

Required reading: Abrahm Lustgarten, “Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration”, https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-change-will-force-a-new-american-migration

optional reading: Abrahm Lustgarten, “The Great Climate Migration”, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html

Week 7: What happens when it’s too hot to go outside?
It’s so hot in Phoenix that the zoo opens at 6am, so visitors and the animals can go into air conditioned comfort by early afternoon. What happens to the unhoused and those in substandard housing in a city too hot to live in?

Required reading: Jeff Goodell, “Can We Survive Extreme Heat?”,
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/climate-crisis-goodell-survive-extreme-heat-875198/

“As Phoenix Heats Up, the Night Comes Alive”, Marguerite Holloway
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/phoenix-heat.html

Week 8: What if it’s time to leave?
Louisiana is shrinking as sea levels rise and more of the low-lying state ends up under water. St. Charles Parish is losing population rapidly… and those who want to stay are discovering the state and federal government would like them to move away, in a strategy called “managed retreat”.

Required listening: Emmett Fitzgerald, “Unbuilding the Terrace”, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/nbft-04-unbuilding-the-terrace/

Week 9: What if you can’t sell your house?
For most Americans, their home is their most valuable asset. But an increasing number of American homes are uninsurable, which means that a natural disaster could be a financial disaster. And uninsurable homes are very hard to sell – what happens to people stuck with houses in dangerous places as America’s insurance market copes with climate change?

Required reading: Christopher Flavelle, “Insurers Are Deserting Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen”, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/18/climate/insurance-non-renewal-climate-crisis.html

Optional reading: Claire Brown and Mira Rojanasakul, “A Climate ‘Shock’ Is Eroding Some Home Values. New Data Shows How Much.” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/19/climate/home-insurance-costs-real-estate-market.html

Week 10: What if we’re thinking about this all wrong?
What if we could start from scratch, build dense, walkable cities where people most want to live? What if we did it in secret, backed by tech billionaires?

Conor Dougherty, “The Farmers Had what the Billionaires Wanted”, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/business/economy/flannery-california-forever-solano.html

Optional: California Forever website – https://californiaforever.com/
Jan Sramek, “”California Forever” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElhxzUO7YQM

Week 11: What if cities we left in the 20th century are the most exciting cities of the 21st century?
Legacy cities – cities of 50,000 or more people where the population has decreased 20% or more – line the banks of the Great Lakes and are sprinkled through New England. These cities have the challenge of supporting their infrastructures with fewer taxpayers… but they also have buildings, art and history that serve as a powerful legacy.

Required reading: Ethan Zuckerman, “Legacy Cities: an extended remix of my talk at PopTech 2022”, https://ethanzuckerman.com/2022/10/28/legacy-cities-an-extended-remix-of-my-talk-at-poptech-2022/

Optional reading: Alan Mallach and Lavea Brachman, “Regenerating America’s
Legacy Cities”, https://ti.org/pdfs/LegacyCities.pdf

Week 12: What if immigrants are already showing us the best places to live?

Massachusetts has one really successful urban area, and a whole lot of struggling secondary cities. The state coined the term “gateway cities” to describe cities that could serve as affordable “gateways” for immigrants coming to New England. But it’s far from clear that these cities are working as well as we might hope for economic mobility.

Required reading:
Trajan Warren, “Gateway to prosperity: What’s next for Massachusetts’ Gateway Cities?”, https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2026-01-20/gateway-to-prosperity-whats-next-for-massachusetts-gateway-cities

Optional reading:
Muro, et. al., “Reconnecting Massachusetts Gateway Cities” (PDF)

Week 13: Wrap up – quick overviews of everyone’s final papers, goodbyes

I’m excited to teach this, in part because it’s going to force me out of my pedagogical comfort zone. I overprepare for classes – I usually have two hours worth of slides for a 45 minute lecture. For this class, I’m trying not to use slides at all – I’ll read the articles, re-read other articles they make me think of, and come prepared to facilitate conversation, not to lecture. We’ll see how long I can keep that up… fortunately UMass students are smart and brave, particularly the honors students, and I’m especially interested to hear how people three decades younger than I am are thinking about these questions.

The post “Where Should We Live” – a new class on cities, migration and climate change appeared first on Ethan Zuckerman.

Source: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2026/01/21/where-should-we-live-a-new-class-on-cities-migration-and-climate-change/