THE STATISTIC IS ALMOST BEYOND BELIEF: Last year, an estimated 3.3 million American adults were displaced due to natural disasters, according to the US Census Bureau. Wildfires, floods, tornadoes, and, above all, hurricanes drove more than 1 percent of Americans from their homes. While a third of those were displaced for only about a week, some half a million people never returned home. You'd think such numbers would serve as (yet another) wake-up call that climate chaos is making it unsafe to live in certain places. Instead, Americans continue to flock to the most climate-change-threatened locales in the nation. Hurricane-prone Florida, the drought-stressed Southwest, and the forested, fire-threatened Mountain West remain among the hottest housing markets in the country (see Darby Minow Smith's take on what's happening in Montana, "Sprawl Runs Through It," page 26). Combine the intensifying climate dangers with people's desire to live in places with (mostly) nice weather or (until wildfires rip through) lovely views, and you can see this is a blueprint for trouble. Climate change is on a collision course with the most sacrosanct of American conventions: the single-family home and the 30-year mortgage.
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