For generations, the American Dream has been sold as a house with a white picket fence - a tidy little wealth-building machine you ride to retirement and your kids' college fund. Sierra Isley, 26, bought into that vision: two years ago she and her girlfriend Jamie tried to buy a three-bedroom brick house with lots of natural light and a big tree out front as they moved from Philadelphia to Asheville, North Carolina. With help from their parents, they put down a deposit and got their offer accepted. Then came the closing papers and a complication: the house had a huge lien on it. After consulting lawyers, they broke the contract and went hunting for an apartment instead.
It was a blessing in disguise. One month later, while they were still unpacking boxes and building furniture, the remnants of Hurricane Helene turned Asheville into a disaster zone. The basement of their apartment flooded; some of their neighbors' homes were destroyed outright.
The picket-fence bargain was always more precarious than advertised. But as fires and floods damage homes and drive up insurance rates, pouring your life savings into a house has become riskier than ever. In a report called "Property Prices in Peril," the firm First Street projected last year that climate risks could knock nearly $1.5 trillion off the value of American homes by 2055. Sociologist Rebecca Elliott put it bluntly: for some people, "the American dream of homeownership may become a nightmare."
Americans are starting to notice. Exclusive polling for Grist from the think tank Data for Progress found that 58 percent of likely U.S. voters believe climate change will hinder their ability to achieve the American Dream over the next 20 years - including 42 percent of Republicans. The survey suggests people are worried climate change will raise the cost of living, a concern widespread enough to sway the midterm elections on Tuesday.
The irony is rich: fossil fuels have long been marketed as essential ingredients of the American "way of life." Starting a century ago, oil and gas companies ran extensive campaigns tying their products to comfort and prosperity - a narrative repeatedly deployed by politicians and oil executives to thwart climate action. President Donald Trump's administration has often said efforts to rein in fossil fuels threaten the American Dream; earlier this year, when it scrapped Biden-era rules to cut emissions from cars along with the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate climate change, it touted the effort as "restoring the American Dream." But the fossil-fueled American Dream is busy destroying itself. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil, and gas have ushered in a new period of precarity, undermining the promise that each generation will do better than the last. Scientific reports warn that climate change "imperil[s] the quality of life" for U.S. communities, disrupting livelihoods and cultural traditions. Either Americans reimagine what the American Dream means and abandon the oil-soaked version of prosperity, or climate change will dismantle it for them.
Isley's memories of Helene are still fresh: hauling water from their flooded basement up to the toilet to flush it when the water ran out; driving to Jamie's parents' house in Atlanta and holing up in a room with both cats until they couldn't take it anymore; coming back to Asheville and cooking in a Crock-Pot with disposable liners because even once the water was running again, it wasn't safe to wash dishes with. Two years later, she browses Zillow for fun but looks at homes through a post-disaster lens. "Now I have that fear in the back of my mind - anywhere near a river, or even a stream, if there's a little bit of water on the map, I'm like, 'Oh, no,'" she said. Jamie is trans, and after Trump was elected in 2024 the two briefly entertained moving somewhere with more protective policies, like California. Isley's mind immediately went to wildfires. Out of the question.
Isley had fled hurricanes before, living in Florida during college, and thought she'd be safe tucked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Asheville was supposed to be a "climate haven," somewhere that would fare better than the rest of the country as the world warmed. Those promises shattered when almost 14 inches of rain fell on Asheville over three days in September 2024. The French Broad River overflowed its banks, flooding homes and destroying parts of the town's River Arts District. In western North Carolina, more than 74,000 homes were damaged, and only about 4 percent had flood insurance, resulting in $9.5 billion in uninsured residential property losses. Home values in western North Carolina have declined since the storm, especially in the hardest-hit counties: Asheville's average home price shrank 5 percent over the past year, while the national average rose 1.2 percent.
To some degree, housing markets are already pricing in the risk. Homes within FEMA's high-risk flood zones sell for 2.8 percent less, on average, than they otherwise would, according to a 2023 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The researchers found homes exposed to flood risk were still overvalued by between $121 billion and $237 billion - and they identified Appalachia as a hot spot of overvaluation, one year before Helene hit. The devaluation of homes in high-risk zones is unfolding unevenly and causing "tremendous social harm," said Elliott, a sociology professor at The London School of Economics and Political Science.
Homes are billed as wealth-building vehicles, but they can become traps. After Superstorm Sandy devastated New York City and the New Jersey coast in 2012, many homeowners couldn't sell for enough to buy a new place, leaving them stranded. Even homes untouched by disaster risk losing value as more people grow wary of floodplains, storm-exposed coasts, and wildfire-prone areas. "Those homes could become, in effect, economically worthless even before they are physically uninhabitable," Elliott wrote in a study on property values and climate change.
Insurance is supposed to be the safety net when you take on a huge mortgage debt. Douglas Heller, director of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America, called it "the safety net for the American Dream." But insurance rates are part of what makes homeownership unaffordable for so many. Since 2020, property insurance costs have ballooned almost 80 percent, with the average single-family mortgage holder now paying $209 per month. Homeowners in the riskiest areas pay substantially more, and many in California have been dropped by their insurers. Home insurance rates are rising faster in the Midwest than any other region, driven by the costs of severe storms. "We are, for a lot of people, on the edge of a dysfunctional insurance marketplace," Heller said. The more extreme weather is only part of the story: he argues the industry has become a "climate opportunist," using climate change as an excuse to justify excessive rate increases.
People relying on Social Security who own condos around Lake Tahoe are particularly vulnerable to rising rates, said Andrew Engler, founder and CEO of Rock Rose Risk, who helps Californians protect homes against wildfire and lower their premiums. They face ballooning homeowners association payments - to share the cost of insurance in a risky wildfire area - on a limited paycheck. If they try to move, their properties are worth significantly less because of the huge HOA bills, Engler said. Economists estimate that rising insurance costs linked to disaster risk have reduced home price growth by more than $40,000 in the most hurricane- and wildfire-prone ZIP codes.
Renting might make you more nimble, but it doesn't insulate you. One reason rents are going up is that landlords' property insurance rates are increasing. "Whether you are a homeowner or a renter, we're all paying for living under the increased risks of climate change," said Caroline Nagy, associate director of housing policy at Americans for Financial Reform. That makes it harder to save for a home - if that's even a good idea anymore.
Walking around her neighborhood these days, Isley sees evidence of Helene everywhere - banners reading "Asheville Strong," shirts that say "WNC Strong." One of the most surprising things about disasters is how people rise to the occasion and come together. After Helene, with power and cell service knocked out, Sierra and Jamie walked all around town talking to neighbors to learn what had happened; people congregated at the fire station where there was fresh water. "It's hard to put into words what that experience was like, but I've never felt more of a community, and really having to lean on my neighbors and feeling like my neighbors were leaning on me," Isley said.
While the American Dream is usually all about independence and personal freedom, living through a disaster reveals how people depend on each other. The experience can prompt people to hold tightly to what they have, doubling down on protecting their communities, said Nick Tinoco, a sociology researcher in a doctoral program at the University of California, Los Angeles, who interviewed survivors of the 2018 Woolsey Fire in Los Angeles County. Some residents he talked to organized volunteer fire brigades and plan to stay behind to defend their neighborhoods during future fires.
As supposedly safe "climate havens" like Asheville experience more disasters, the idea that people can simply move out of harm's way is losing its grip. "I think we have to just reckon with the fact that we're going to have to make people secure in the places that they live," Elliott said. She thinks it's time to rethink the bargain of the American Dream - the expectation that so much of a person's economic future depends on the fate of a single structure. Many young people already define success differently: an Ipsos poll last year showed 46 percent of baby boomers associate homeownership with the American Dream, but only 13 percent of Gen Zers do, suggesting room for its defining features to change.
Sierra and Jamie couldn't help wondering what happened to the house they'd almost bought, and drove over to check it out soon after Helene hit. It was still standing, but they couldn't see whether there was damage hidden inside. "Who knows if it" - and, presumably, who knows if anything else about the American Dream still stands either.