The Split Village

Everyone has moved to Mertarvik. That is the headline, and it is true, and the problems have only changed shape.

After roughly forty years of planning, waiting, and building, the approximately 400 residents of Newtok, Alaska, have completed the nine-mile crossing of the Ninglick River to their new village site. Newtok is a ghost town now. The houses stand empty. The water plant is shut down. A diesel generator still powers the cell tower. The most documented climate relocation in U.S. history is finished, and nearly a third of Mertarvik's population lives in temporary housing.

Ninety people in eighteen tiny homes, 800 square feet per family. Rosemary John left a three-bedroom house in Newtok to move her husband and five children into a unit where the ceiling in the loft isn't tall enough for her twin eighteen-year-old sons to stand. Mold is building in the corners where the heat doesn't reach. After six months.

For years, the defining tension of Newtok's relocation was geographic: families at the old site, families at the new one, and a tribal council paying to operate two villages on a budget that couldn't handle one. The governance trap was brutal and specific. Announcing departure signaled to funders that the old site wasn't worth maintaining. But the new site, with no population yet, couldn't qualify for infrastructure investment either. The community was caught between two funding logics, neither of which recognized the reality of being in transit.

That trap has changed form. Everyone is at Mertarvik now. The old site is empty. And the funding to complete the new site has stopped anyway.

What arrival looks like

The power plant can't keep up with demand. A two-week outage hit in September 2025. A cold snap in February 2024 had already caused a three-day blackout that froze and burst pipes at the water plant. Sewage from the school, health clinic, and construction dormitory has been backing up for more than a year.

And an independent inspection of the permanent homes found that seventeen houses built by one contractor have unsalvageable foundations and don't meet minimum code requirements. There had been no official inspection before this one. KYUK, the regional public radio station, hired the inspector themselves.

Xavier Paniyak moved his daughters across the river in 2024. His new house isn't moldy. His asthma symptoms are receding. "Even my girls noticed I'm not grabbing for my rescue inhaler," he said. He used Albuterol inhalers regularly in Newtok because the mold in his old walls affected his breathing. The blue house with the red metal roof at the end of Mertarvik's main road is real. So is the sewage in the school basement. Both of those things are what arrival looks like.

The vacuum

The Newtok relocation has been funded by a patchwork of dozens of grants from at least seven federal agencies over twenty years. The Denali Commission managed the project starting in 2016, then ceded control to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 2022 after the BIA announced a $25 million grant from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The inconsistent oversight, according to experts who worked on the relocation, is directly connected to the construction failures. It's also unclear whether the latest federal grant can even be used on housing, because the BIA labeled it an infrastructure grant and doesn't define housing as infrastructure.

Jackie Schaeffer, Climate Initiatives Director at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, has worked alongside state and federal agencies on the move for years. Her assessment:

The structural problem underneath the accountability failure is older and more fundamental. A 2009 GAO report found that no federal agency was in charge of planning, coordinating, or administering funding for community-level relocations. Seventeen years later, that finding still holds. "There is no manual for relocation of communities anywhere," Schaeffer said.

As of KYUK's reporting in mid-2025, the community was facing its third consecutive summer without new housing construction. The Trump administration did not respond to the reporter's requests for comment. The BIA's program page lists Newtok as "ready for implementation." What that means operationally, with no announced funding and a removed task force report, is a question nobody in the federal government appears willing to answer on the record.

The first relocation

Andy Patrick is seventy-seven. He is one of only two people in Mertarvik who remember Kayalivik, the old village where his family lived before the BIA came.

When Patrick was a toddler, the federal government sent a barge loaded with construction materials up the Ninglick River to build a school. The barge got stuck near present-day Newtok. So the BIA built the school there and told the residents of Kayalivik they had to send their children to it. The community consolidated around the school. That was the first relocation. It was not voluntary.

The Yup'ik had lived on this coast for roughly eleven thousand years, moving seasonally along the Bering shoreline following salmon, seal, and berries. Federal schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ended that pattern. Barge accessibility determined where the schools went. The schools determined where the villages formed. The villages became permanent. And now the permanent villages are washing into the river.

The BIA's vocabulary for the current move is careful. "Voluntary." "Community-driven." The language is deliberate, and the history it's responding to is specific.

What the safe ground costs

Mertarvik sits on higher, rockier ground. The erosion that consumed Newtok can't reach it. But the higher ground is different ground. Less of the traditional foods grow there. The subsistence practices that define Yup'ik life are disrupted by the move's success itself. The village is on safe land. The safe land doesn't grow what fed them.

The community rejected any proposal to relocate to Anchorage or farther from their ancestral territory. "If they do that, they will cease to be Yup'ik," residents told reporters. Naunraq, Andrew John, the incoming village council administrator, has said plainly: "It's not just about the preservation of our culture, it's preserving our way of life."

Fourteen homes designed by the Cold Climate Housing Research Center understood this. They included space for cutting fish, dressing moose, hosting the large family gatherings that structure Yup'ik social life. The inspector rated them highly. The seventeen homes with failing foundations, built by a different contractor under different oversight, did not include these considerations. Fourteen houses built for a community continuing its life. Seventeen built to close out a contract.

What the map shows now

Shishmaref voted to relocate in 2016. Kivalina has been trying for decades. Communities across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta are watching Mertarvik to understand what relocation actually looks like when it happens. What they see is a process that took forty years, cost upward of $160 million, moved roughly 400 people nine miles, and delivered them into a housing crisis, a power crisis, and a federal funding freeze.

As one expert involved in the project put it to KYUK: "If we can't move 300 or 400 people in a timely fashion and put them in safe and healthy homes, how are we ever going to be able to respond to a city the size of Miami's need to relocate because of a rising sea level?"

One village moved. The map changed for every community watching. What it shows is that the United States has no institutional capacity to do this, has spent two decades proving it, and has a growing list of communities that need it done.

Elder Albertina Charles was one of the first to cross the river, back in 2019. She looks at the erosion that took Newtok and says:

There is no putting them back. Mertarvik is what forward looks like, and the people there are still going.