The Dust Belt Rising

In the 1930s, Dust Bowl refugees fled the Southern Great Plains for California’s San Joaquin Valley. Nearly a century later, the Valley itself — along with agriculture and tourism-dependent communities across California, Arizona, and Nevada — is becoming a new dust bowl. Six converging forces are driving the decline: water depletion, tariff destruction of export markets, soaring input costs, climate extremes, collapsing consumer demand, and immigration enforcement that is dismantling the workforce these economies depend upon. Unlike the 1930s, when migration served as a brutal safety valve, today’s Americans are locked in place — household mobility hit its lowest rate ever recorded in 2024. This report maps the highest-risk cities and regions, examines what recovery looks like when the forces of decline are not merely economic but geological, and asks the Dust Bowl’s central question: which communities will adapt, and which will simply empty out?