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Originally published by Capital B.

By the time Latonya Floyd came outside, the photographer’s lens was already pointed toward her family’s home.

There was “no knock, no hello,” she said.

When she asked what he was doing, he replied that he was “just getting pictures of the property,” for his boss, a real estate investor.

The Floyds had lived in that house for three generations, through racial uprisings in the 1960s, ’80s, and in 2020, the crack cocaine epidemic, and all that came with being called “the hood.” They were not selling.

Soon after, her parents installed the fence she’d long asked for.

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Before, neighbors cut through the yard on their way to church, kids drifted between houses without knocking, and Sunday dinners stretched across porches and into the street. Now, a locked gate stands where people once walked freely.

What felt like rudeness that day was part of something larger and tied to climate change.

Miami now leads the nation in home purchases paid for in all cash, with investors showing up unsolicited and buying out longtime Black-owned homes. It’s partly because with rising seas threatening oceanfront properties, developers and wealthier residents are rebranding inland, long-neglected Black neighborhoods like Floyd’s as the new safe bet.

Since 2023, half the houses on her block have sold, including the pastel mint one next door. Three doors down, a rental that went for $800 a month in 2021 now asks for $2,200.

The process has a name: climate gentrification.

Miami’s Black neighborhoods sit on a natural limestone ridge about 8 feet above the coastline, and as floods intensify and fears around sea level rise grow, wealthier residents along the water are moving uphill toward them. It is pricing out Black residents and pushing them into other lower, more flood-prone areas.

Already, in less than 15 years, the city’s share of Black residents has dropped to roughly 10% from about 17%.

“It is crazy to think that [climate change] is a part of the shift we’re seeing, the gentrification,” Floyd said.

The truth is, this may become routine all across the country. By the end of the century, researchers estimate that climate events will force more Americans from their homes than the Great Migration. Across Miami’s metro area, more than 1 million people may be displaced.

For some, the future looks like a foregone conclusion. But in Miami’s Black neighborhoods, residents are trying to show it doesn’t have to be. They want to turn their fight to stay put into a playbook for other coastal communities.

Groups like Struggle for Miami’s Affordable and Sustainable Housing and long-standing formations such as Power U and the Right to the City Alliance are building community land trusts, fighting evictions, and pushing the city to write equitable development practices into its climate and housing plans. They want a climate future where the blocks Black Miamians struggled to attain remain theirs and become cooler, safer, and more affordable for everyone, not just for those with the money to move uphill.

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The night Hurricane Andrew came ashore in August 1992, there was a belief that it could kill the city. In some ways, it did.

It was just the third ever tropical cyclone to make landfall in the continental U.S. as a Category 5. Fifty-four people died on the coast.

South toward Biscayne Bay and Homestead, the landscape looked like a bomb had gone off, whole blocks scoured down to their concrete slabs.

Inland, in Overtown, the grid of streets and shotgun homes Floyd grew up wandering with cousins and friends was battered with shattered windows and downed power lines — but intact. “Hurricane Andrew was a monster,” she said. “But it wasn’t the same here” as along the coast.

The climate safety in Black neighborhoods was not intentional, but it also wasn’t accidental.

Long before anyone put the words “climate gentrification” together, Miami officials placed the railroad and industrial sites inland, and then in the 1930s pinned Black neighborhoods to them —........

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