Disasters Forced 2.5 Million Americans From Their Homes Last Year

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

The numbers, issued 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 interacted with someone who seemed to be trying to defraud them. And more than a third said they had been displaced for longer than a month.

The United States experienced 28 disasters last year that each cost at least $1 billion. But until recently, the number of Americans displaced by those disasters has been hard to estimate because of the nation’s patchwork response system.

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

“A lot of people’s lives are disrupted by these events in small and large ways,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit group that focuses on advancing upward mobility and equity. “It has a really big cumulative cost that’s hard to capture. This, at least, gives us a snapshot of that.”

The displacement data were gathered in the bureau’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.