Duluth, Minnesota

When the American Indian Community Housing Organization opened a 29-unit low-income development in downtown Duluth, more than 400 people applied. That ratio: 400 to 29.

People are moving to Duluth. The population hit 87,990 in 2024, the first sustained growth after decades of decline. Realtors report working with families fleeing California wildfires and East Coast floods. The median home price jumped 59% since 2018 to $292,000. One realtor tells buyers to "put your running shoes on because it's going to be a mad dash to get to that house."

What's happening here is messier than the coordinated climate planning everyone talks about when they call Duluth a climate haven. A city discovering what it can handle only by being tested.

The gap keeps showing itself. Duluth is supposed to be a model of climate preparedness, a city thinking ahead. What's actually happening: housing shortages, EPA-mandated infrastructure repairs, normal municipal budgeting responding to immediate pressures.

In March 2024, University of Michigan researcher Derek Van Berkel announced plans to work with Duluth on implementing urban planning strategies for climate migration. Eighteen months later, there's no documentation of actual implementation. Van Berkel himself called the notion of a climate haven "a little bit aspirational."

The city is fixing water infrastructure because the EPA mandated $42 million in repairs. Approving housing developments through normal permitting processes. In July, officials presented research showing Duluth needs at least 8,700 housing units over the next decade. That's to keep up with current growth, not prepare for future climate migration.

The city is adapting. Just not in the coordinated way we imagine adaptation should happen.

Climate adaptation is happening through the most boring municipal processes imaginable. People are moving here. Brad Iwen came from California in 2022, drawn to "wild places and fresh water." Jamie Alexander relocated her family from San Francisco after the 2020 wildfire season. They're finding housing somehow. The city is growing. Infrastructure is being upgraded. All of it through reactive governance responding to immediate needs rather than proactive climate planning.

The ambivalence about being labeled a climate haven shows up everywhere. Mayor Emily Larson told the New York Times:

A local columnist wrote:

Maybe this is what climate adaptation actually looks like for most places. Not coordinated planning and proactive preparation, but responding to growth as it happens, fixing infrastructure when it breaks, building housing when the market demands it.

The constraints are real and visible. Duluth is long and narrow, hemmed in by Lake Superior and steep hillsides. There's no adjacent farmland to convert into subdivisions. Construction is complicated by bedrock.

Former city councilor Roger Reinert, now a state senator, has acknowledged that "life-long Duluthians are already being priced out of existing homes." When AICHO opened that 29-unit development, more than 400 people applied. Housing director Kristi Stokes said simply: "More than ever, we have people living outside."

Climate migration is already happening, in small increments, through individual decisions to move that add up to population shifts. By the time a city realizes it's becoming a destination, people are already there, looking for housing, driving up prices, testing infrastructure capacity.

The planning tools exist to model different migration scenarios. The frameworks are available. Cities could theoretically prepare before climate migrants arrive.

Except climate migrants aren't a separate category arriving all at once. They're people moving for the same reasons people have always moved: better opportunities, safer conditions, places they want to live. Now climate is part of that calculation. You can't plan for that because it's not an event. It's a gradual shift that becomes visible only after it's already happening.

University of Minnesota Duluth researchers who studied local stakeholders captured the tension: "We have to figure those issues out for the people we have before we add climate migrants."

The climate migrants are already here. They're the people applying for those 29 housing units. They're the ones driving up home prices. They're testing whether Duluth's infrastructure, built for the city's 1960s peak of 107,000 residents, can actually support the growth everyone keeps talking about.

What Duluth is teaching other potential climate destinations: what happens when you become a destination before you're ready. When the narrative about your city's climate-proof future arrives faster than your ability to house the people who believe it. When adaptation happens not through the frameworks researchers develop but through the accumulated decisions of people moving, cities responding, infrastructure being tested, communities discovering their limits only by reaching them.

We want proactive planning, coordinated responses, cities that prepare before crisis forces them to adapt. Watching Duluth navigate growth it didn't orchestrate, serve people it didn't expect, discover what its infrastructure can actually handle only by testing it—this might be the only story that's true. The one most cities will recognize when they look around and realize they've become climate destinations without ever deciding to be.