Brittany Powell moved from the Bay Area to Vermont in 2016, just as wildfire smoke was becoming a regular summertime occurrence in California. She watched in horror from afar as friends and family living in her home state fled wildfires made larger and more intense by Vermont's climate crisis and resulting drought.

“You’re so lucky you live there,” they told her. Powell thought so, too. The Northeast tends to have big summer thunderstorms and frigid winters, but it’s rarely beset by hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, or tornadoes — the cataclysmic natural disasters other parts of the country have to navigate regularly. And, unlike nearby New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut — states where acreage is a hot commodity — Vermont, the most rural state in the U.S., has ample open space.

After renting for a few years, Powell and her husband bought an old farmhouse just outside of the state capital Montpelier in 2019. Their town is known for its dirt roads, spring-fed wells, and old-school New England appeal. When she moved there, Powell remembers thinking that it was the closest thing she’d be able to find to a place safe from the effects of climate change.

Vermont's Climate Crisis Causes Flooding

Soon, Powell would be dealing with a set of issues reminiscent of the state she had left behind.

In early 2020, as COVID-19 was spreading across the country and many people began working from home, middle- and upper-class Americans started trading dense urban areas for rural ones. Vermont towns whose populations hadn’t changed in a hundred years, towns that the state was desperate to fill before 2020, were startled by an influx of new residents. Abandoned houses were quickly sold, renovated, and resold. The state’s housing stock was thoroughly gleaned, and the cost of housing increased close to 40 percent between 2019 and 2023.

As affordable housing became nearly impossible to come by, the homeless population grew. There were rumors of traveling nurses forced to sleep in tents near the hospitals they were treating COVID patients in. Some companies hiring out-of-state applicants gave their new employees 12 months to move to the state, to account for the difficult housing market.

Read the full article about Vermont's climate crisis by Zoya Teirstein at Grist.