I moved to Kansas from New York City to be safe from flooding, afford a bigger house, and put roots down

• Landscape architect Jason Beury, 40, moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Kansas City, Kansas, in 2020.
• He factored sea level rise and affordability of homes to buy into his search for a new location.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with architect Jason Beury about his decision to move from Brooklyn, New York, to Kansas City, Kansas. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

As a landscape architect, I can work anywhere I want. So if I want to build equity in the property, New York City is not the place, both because New York City is so expensive and partially because of climate change.

Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was kind of a wake up call for me. Seeing the damage. Seeing the lag in response and lines at gas stations. Driving through parts of Manhattan without power. It was pretty creepy.

In New York, there is this kind of a lingering sense that if some major emergency happened and people had to evacuate, that would likely be impossible. New York is where the action is, but at the same time, there's a stress that goes with that. It can be like a din, like a background noise.

It was more the pandemic that prompted my partner and me to move to Kansas, but the climate criteria factored in where to go.

My partner and I asked, "Do we want to ride this out? Or do we want to go somewhere else? And if we go somewhere else for five to 10 years, do we want to deal with some kind of coastal or low-lying area?"

We decided no, we don't want to deal with that.

Our desire for a more resilient area led us to Kansas

There's kind of a sweet spot in the Midwest, pretty much from Kansas City and up north to Chicago.

On the coasts you're getting more powerful hurricanes, coastal flooding, and sea level rise. It's happening at a rate that nobody really knows. Every time they measure it, the rate is increasing.

Then, anywhere kind of southeast like Oklahoma City you're getting 110- to 120-degree temperatures for several weeks out of the summer, whereas in the past it was a few days. Same with North Texas, those areas are hotter than they've ever been.

If you look at the whole country, Kansas City is probably one of the spots in the next few decades that will have a fairly mild experience of climate change issues.

It has more consistent rainfall, more consistent weather. Yes, it's still getting hotter, and spring and fall are getting shorter. But you don't have these prolonged, endemic dangers, like in areas where all of a sudden there's a forest fire and there wasn't one 10 years ago.

We could afford to buy a home in Kansas, even with high mortgage rates

We moved in 2020 from a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn we rented for $2,200 to a three-bedroom house in Kansas City we rented for $1,400.

Last year, our landlord was going to raise the rent to $1,800. We said we can get a mortgage for that even with the interest rates being 6%. So that kicked off the search.

We found a little house listed at $206,000, a two-bedroom, two-bathroom brick house from the 1920s in Strawberry Hill in Kansas City, Kansas. It's got a good foundation. It's lasted 100 years and the condition it's in it'll easily last another 100.

There's a grocery store down the street and a park about a 15-minute walk from the house that's at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers, kind of a Lewis and Clark spot.

There's a lot of people that may end up moving to Kansas City from Texas or Colorado or California.

There's a sense that the city is growing. There's a lot of activity. There's a lot of new construction. I see a lot of potential for future buildings and future investment in design.

Have you moved because of concerns over the climate crisis? Contact reporter Dan Latu at dlatu@insider.com.