Disasters forced 2.5 million Americans from their homes last year

An estimated 2.5 million people in the United States were forced from their homes by weather-related disasters in 2023, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

The figures, published on Thursday, paint a more complete picture than ever before of the lives of these people in the aftermath of disasters. More than a third said they had experienced at least some food shortage in the first month after being displaced. More than half reported that they had been in contact with someone who seemed to want to deceive them. And more than a third said they had been displaced for more than a month.

The United States experienced 28 disasters last year, each costing at least $1 billion. But until recently, the number of Americans displaced by these disasters was difficult to estimate because of the patchwork nature of the country.

Understanding the human toll of disasters, and not just the financial costs, is becoming increasingly urgent as climate change boosts extreme weather, experts say.

“Many people’s lives are being disrupted in small and large ways by these events,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit focused on promoting upward mobility and equality. “It entails very large cumulative costs that are difficult to map. This at least gives us a snapshot of that.”

The displacement data was collected in the agency’s Household Pulse Survey, which aims to measure how emerging social and economic challenges are affecting Americans. The survey added questions about disasters in December 2022.

That first results, released in January 2023, showed that approximately 3.3 million people had been displaced the year before. According to the latest set of responses, collected in January and early February, 2.5 million people said they had been displaced at some point last year.

The year-to-year change is most likely a normal fluctuation, experts said, and could also reflect some limitations of the study.

Different versions of the survey are sent periodically by text message and email to more than a million households simultaneously. The survey is a self-report and takes approximately 20 minutes. The number of people who respond can vary from about 40,000 to 80,000. The Census Bureau then assigns weights to the responses to make them representative of the broader population.

The Census Bureau notes that “sample sizes may be small and standard errors large.” But experts say the results still provide some of the best available figures on displacement.

“It’s a bit of a grain of salt,” says Dr. Rumbach, who has a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning. “But at the same time, it is a data set in a world where we don’t have many good data sets.”

Hurricanes remained the most cited cause of displacement, followed by floods and fires. Florida, Texas, California and Louisiana all allowed hundreds of thousands to flee their homes.

An accurate count of those displaced by disasters is elusive because aid agencies and nonprofits only know how many people they serve, leaving out displaced people who do not ask for help and communities that receive no aid at all. For example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency only responds to events that receive a federal emergency declaration.

“That’s just a small part of the total disasters,” said Dr. Rumbach. As an example, he pointed to flooding that destroyed a handful of houses and other so-calleddisasters with little attention‘ which often affect more rural communities. “There’s no incentive for people to add all these together,” he said.

But the Pulse survey tries to do that, said Dr. Rumbach, even though some researchers are reluctant to draw very broad conclusions.

“The concepts themselves: what is a disaster? What is displacement? – are really left open to the interpretation of the survey respondent,” says Elizabeth Fussell, professor of population studies at Brown University.

The study lists fire among the “natural disasters” that can lead to displacement, for example, and some experts say it’s not hard to imagine someone choosing to do so after a house fire. Dr. Fussell also noted that while previous federal surveys counted those who permanently moved from their homes after a disaster, “displacement” in the pulse survey could refer to a one-day departure.

While respondents can choose to say they “never returned” to their homes, experts warned that the short-term nature of the survey could make it difficult to determine the true number of permanently displaced people.

The data also shows that the people who experience the worst disasters often come from communities with less political power and who are victims of discrimination. Black people and Latinos are the most displaced, and poorer people tend to be displaced longer, experts say. That is amplified for people in those groups who also identify as LGBTQ, according to one analysis.

“There are many federal agencies that are well aware that climate change is happening and that it will manifest itself as weather-related disasters,” said Dr. Fussell. “It is necessary to understand the magnitude of this.”