Miami-Dade tops flood-prone counties with residents moving out. It’s not the only reason
South Florida is losing more residents than it’s gaining, and a new report suggests that the frequent floods that creep into roads, parks and yards could be at least part of the reason why.
Real estate listing site Redfin released a new report Thursday morning outlining which counties around the nation are seeing the biggest shifts in residents. Miami-Dade tops the list for a “flood prone” county that saw the biggest outmigration — more people moving out than moving in. In one year, Miami-Dade lost more than 67,000 residents, the report found.
Concerns about soggy living rooms or gardens could be one reason why, the report said, combined with the skyrocketing cost of living.
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“I think the two are becoming more and more intertwined. Rising insurance costs can be tied to climate change, rising homeowners association fees,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist of Redfin. “The trend tends to be that people leave places that are unaffordable to them. Rising flood risk contributes to unaffordability.”
The report reviewed movement data from July 2023 to 2024 and ranked a county as floodprone if it was one of the top 10% in the county for percentage of homes with a high risk of flooding. In Miami-Dade, about 36% of homes are at risk of flooding. That house-by-house rating comes from First Street Foundation, a company that researches climate change risk and real estate.
Redfin partners with First Street to make that flood risk rating — on a scale of 1 to 10 — available on all of its home listings. When they two companies first started working together, Redfin ran an experiment where it only showed half of potential buyers the risk rating of their prospective homes. Those buyers ended up making offers to buy homes with lower risk than the people who didn’t see the ratings, the research found. That finding, Fairweather said, explains why the company believes at least some of these recent moves are influenced by the potential risk of flooding.
“From that experiment we know that people are changing their decisions about what homes to buy when they’re aware of the flood risk,” she said.
However, while the data is clear that more people are moving away from Miami-Dade than moving in, other experts say that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a slam dunk to say flooding is the reason why.
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David Kelly, a professor of economics at the University of Miami who has researched climate change and real estate value, said it’s difficult to disentangle all the different reasons someone might move away from Miami-Dade.
A large chunk of the moves could be people who packed up and headed to Miami during the pandemic’s remote work push. Now, with return to office mandates multiplying across the county, plenty of those new residents could find themselves back where they started. Or, they could be fed up with Biscayne Bay overtopping their sea wall a few times a year and flooding their garage.
“It’s all so tricky because there’s so many things going on in Miami,” he said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the effect was in there somewhere.”
Kelly said he thinks the higher cost of living is probably a bigger driver of the outflow of people than anything flooding related, partially because Florida has “artificially low” insurance rates thanks to massive subsidies for the National Flood Insurance Program and Citizens, the state’s home insurer of last resort.
“Those sorts of implicit or explicit subsidies really prevent the full effect from being seen in the data,” he said. “If they ever changed that to charge people the real cost of living down here and you had to pay out the wazoo, things would change very rapidly.”
This story was originally published November 6, 2025 at 8:30 AM.
