This story is the third feature in a Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future. There’s a modest hill in Seneca Bowen’s yard that gently slopes upward, away from an inlet that leads into southeastern Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. In 2012, when Hurricane Sandy ripped through Long Island, those few feet of elevation were the only thing standing between the flood waters and Bowen’s house. On a recent August afternoon, Bowen and I walked around his land as he recalled how Sandy wiped away the small beach at the edge of the property, where Bowen grew up swimming and fishing. Bowen showed me exactly how high the water came that year: 100 yards past the usual high tide mark. In the years since, that beach has become a grassy wetland that floods regularly, encroaching ominously on his home. Bowen, who is 36, lives on the Shinnecock Nation reservation on the eastern end of Long Island, where his community is facing a dire situation. About half of the Shinnecock Nation’s 1,600 tribal citizens live on an 800-acre reservation that includes 3,000 feet of shoreline on Shinnecock Bay. Of the roughly 250 homes within Shinnecock territory, around 50 are on the coast and in immediate danger from rising sea levels and increasing flooding. Powerful storm surges, which are also becoming more frequent, make all of this even worse. “We’re running out of space,” Bowen, who is the treasurer of the Shinnecock Nation Council of Trustees, told me. “Our population is going up. We haven’t been able to acquire more land.” But water isn’t the only thing hemming the Shinnecock in. In every direction, they are surrounded by the multimillion-dollar homes of Southampton, sometimes mere feet from the border of the Shinnecock Nation. As Bowen stood facing the water at the edge of his land, he pointed out the Southampton Yacht Club, a private club directly across the water from his home. “We’re surrounded by some of the most wealthy people in the country and then you have us sitting here struggling to just make ends meet,” Bowen said. “I mean, hell, I’m a council member and I live paycheck to paycheck.” For nearly 400 years, since Southampton was settled in 1640, the Shinnecock have fought to stay where they are. Now, climate change is making the fight to stay on their homeland even more difficult as sea levels rise and storms grow stronger and more frequent. In the past few years, the Shinnecock have employed a combination of strategies to protect themselves against rising seas, like planting beach grass to strengthen dunes and developing oyster reefs to blunt tidal energy. But unless the pace of climate change can be slowed, these solutions will not be enough to save Shinnecock lands, which currently represent only a fraction of their ancestral territory. The tribe’s 2013 climate adaptation plan predicted that nearly half of the Shinnecock reservation will flood after a major storm in 2050. Forecasts have only gotten worse since then. “At some point — I don’t want to say in the near future, but certainly by the time my kids are old enough to be in charge — half the rez is going to be underwater,” Bowen said. “We obviously don’t want to leave our homeland, but at some point we’ll probably be forced to do that.” What Bowen is talking about is known as managed retreat: the strategic relocation of people or communities away from areas vulnerable to climate impacts like flooding. Centuries of colonization have robbed Indigenous nations of most of their land, but as the Shinnecock grapple with climate change and retreat, they’re pursuing a solution that’s radical in the face of contemporary history: expanding their territory. “[Other] Council members and I have realized that we need to start making some serious money so that we can start purchasing land, not just for commercial use, but for residential purposes,” he said. Unsurprisingly, most people are not excited about having to move away from their homes, especially when the impacts of climate change can sometimes feel abstract. But projections show that more people in the coming years — those who live near the coast, in overgrown forests, or in paths of destruction like tornado alley — may be forced to relocate. On Shinnecock territory, coastal areas represent such a large portion of their land that they will feel every inch they lose. Even without storms, Gavin Cohen, the Shinnecock Environmental Department’s natural resource manager, estimates that at least 7 percent and 15 percent of the current Shinnecock territory will be completely lost to water by 2050 and 2100, respectively. While all of Long Island, including Southampton Village, is projected to lose land, many of these communities have more land to fall back on, not to mention more resources to deal with climate change. [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/MHHW-1ft.png?quality=90&strip=all] [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/MHHW-7ft.png?quality=90&strip=all] The map on the left shows what 1 foot of additional mean average sea level rise would look like in the area near Shinnecock Bay; the image on the right shows what 7 feet of additional mean average sea level rise would look like. | Source: NOAA.gov The Shinnecock are far from the only ones who will need to deal with this. Around 129 million Americans — nearly 40 percent of the population — live in coastal communities. Even if the world can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the average sea level in the US could still be about 2 feet higher in 2100 than it was in 2000. With less aggressive climate action, projections show that sea levels in the US could rise by over 7 feet by 2100. Sea level rise at these rates means that millions of Americans will have to move, which will lead to devastating impacts on roads, schools, and other critical infrastructure. By 2050, for example, damaging floods are predicted to be 10 times more frequent than they are today. “It’s getting bad, and it’s only going to get worse because Mother Nature is far more powerful than we are,” said Sunshine Gumbs, project manager of the Shinnecock Ethnobotany Project. In July, the Atlantic hurricane season got off to a deadly start when Hurricane Beryl, the earliest Category 5 storm on record, made landfall, leading to dozens of deaths and billions of dollars in damage. The hurricane season, which NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center forecast to be above normal, extends to the end of November, and many of the strongest storms may be yet to come. These storms come with violent winds, storm surges, and rainfall that can cause flooding and other damage in coastal communities. As climate change makes these storms more frequent and more devastating, many more coastal communities must reckon with their increasingly precarious positions. But relocating an entire community is an enormous task. When Shavonne Smith, the director of the Shinnecock Environmental Department, thinks about possible relocation, she thinks about her massive extended family, nearly all of whom live on the reservation. “How do we take as many of us together as we can?” she said. “Because when people say that, you know, ‘you just have to move,’ it’s not that simple just to move. It’s not like me moving by myself. We’re talking whole families. How do you have somewhere for whole families to restart again?” --- Why I wanted to write this story I met Bowen at the end of a day trip I took from my apartment in New York City to Shinnecock territory, about an hour and a half east. I was especially interested in learning about the Shinnecock because of where I come from. I’m a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe on Martha’s Vineyard, another wealthy East Coast vacation destination. For decades, my tribe, like the Shinnecock, has coexisted with some of the country’s richest families. The dynamics in these communities is complex, and climate change is exacerbating social and economic inequality. I knew that the Shinnecock Nation’s conversation about managed retreat — the prospect of retreating away from the coast, from their ancestral lands, to protect themselves from rising seas — would sound a lot different from the conversations happening in adjacent communities. I wanted to explore the story of a place and its people who have, despite decades of economic pressure and racism, maintained sovereignty over their land yet are forced to reckon with the effects of climate change today. — Joseph Lee --- Smith, who has worked for the tribe for nearly 20 years, says she understands that some people may never leave, even as the waters reach their door. But she believes it is her job to prepare everyone for what’s coming and give them the tools to make choices. To do that, Smith has partnered with Malgosia Madajewicz, a Columbia University economist who is running a three-year study of community adaptation to coastal flooding. The study consists of four community workshops and is designed to help the tribe develop a multifaceted response to flooding. After just one workshop, Madajewicz says she is already finding valuable lessons in the Shinnecock approach. “They’re really planning for a few generations, whereas in other communities, there’s often a time horizon that revolves more around political cycles and is much shorter,” Madajewicz said. “If we have a hope of rescuing life from this crisis, protecting it into the future, we have to lengthen our planning horizons.” But relocating an entire people — especially around some of the most expensive real estate in the US — will take a massive amount of money and land. If the Shinnecock do buy more land for the community to relocate to, they would prefer for it to be in their ancestral territory, which covers thousands more acres and several adjacent towns. But Bowen says he and a few others have floated the idea of land in the Catskill Mountains, a forested area about a hundred miles north of New York City, and far from Shinnecock ancestral land. Leaving Shinnecock lands would be devastating, Bowen says, but buying land in the Hamptons is prohibitively expensive and rife with nimby — not in my backyard — opposition. In the past five years, the Shinnecock have embarked on a number of economic ventures, such as a gas station and travel plaza, only to see them delayed by lawsuits and local opposition. Bowen says they have had to fight for every dollar and permit, especially for proposals on land that the Shinnecock own outside of the reservation, in nearby Hampton Bays. “Every project that the tribe has ever tried to do has been slowed or stopped by some special interest group that’s in this area, by the town or the village itself,” Bowen said “What should have been a money-making opportunity has now turned into a revenue stream that goes to our lawyers to fight our battles in court.” As a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe on Martha’s Vineyard, I’m used to the juxtaposition of tribal communities and wealthy summer homes, but the level of ostentatious wealth on display in Southampton was jarring, even to me. On Southampton’s main street, I walked past real estate offices advertising homes in the tens of millions of dollars. I saw summer crowds flocking to boutique shops and restaurants. Minutes from Bowen’s home are verdant streets where tall hedges shield multimillion-dollar homes, pools, and tennis courts from view. Despite living just minutes away, Shinnecock territory residents are excluded from resident parking rates for Cooper’s Beach, a nearby beach that proudly advertises its recent ranking as one of the top beaches in the country. William Manger Jr., the Mayor of Southampton Village, did not respond to a request for comment. On the reservation, Bowen says that the median income is around $30,000, which is a tiny fraction of what some Southampton homeowners likely pay to maintain their manicured lawns. To be clear, that’s just the grass, not the horses, private chefs, cars, boats, or any of the other trappings of Southampton wealth. “As soon as you walk off of our territory, we’re surrounded by millionaires and billionaires,” Bowen said. “You know what that does to a person?” Michael A. Iasilli, the Southampton Town Council liaison for the Shinnecock Nation, is trying to build bridges with the tribe. He acknowledged that some Southampton residents outwardly discriminate against tribal members. This October, Southampton Town will recognize the first Shinnecock Heritage Day, an initiative led by Iasilli, which he says is part of a broader mission of healing old wounds, educating the town about Shinnecock history, and finding ways for the tribe and the town to work together. “Look, they’re not going anywhere, and they were here before us,” he said. “And so I think we really need to try to work as best as we can with the most honest and sincere effort to really build this relationship together with them. I’m really hoping that we can, but it’s going to take time.” According to Iasilli, Southampton has the resources and the Shinnecock have the vision. Southampton already has funds in the form of its Community Preservation Fund and a Community Housing Fund. These are the kinds of financial resources that Seneca Bowen and the Shinnecock government are trying to build up. When I visited in August, Cohen, the Shinnecock natural resource manager, showed me drone pictures he had taken of the Shinnecock coastline. The alarming images showed just how close the water was to encroaching on not just homes but the powwow grounds and other important gathering places. The cemetery, which sits just feet away from Shinnecock Bay, has already flooded on multiple occasions. Charles Cause, a 26-year-old Shinnecock musician, thinks that the cemetery flooding more severely could be the trigger that fully wakes up the community to the dangers of climate change. “I think once that starts to happen, you know, people are going to kind of get that, ‘holy moly, this is real’ feel and we’re going to take a lot more action on things,” he said. Even as she leads community conversations around relocation, Shavonne Smith is not ready to leave either, even though she understands there may be no other option. “This is all I’ve ever known,” she said.

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In 2021, the US cut child poverty by as much as 40 percent using one of the most effective anti-poverty tools the country had ever devised: the expanded child tax credit (CTC). By sending unconditional monthly checks of up to $300 per child to the nation’s poorest families — including those with little to no income who had typically been excluded from such programs — the “child allowance” lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty who would’ve otherwise been left behind. Arguments against such programs that give unconditional cash usually assert that it’ll drive low-income people to quit their jobs, ultimately harming the economy. But research found little to no drop in employment rates as a result of the expanded CTC. Yet despite a flurry of support from prominent economists and recipients alike, politicians failed to reach an agreement to make the temporary expansion permanent, and Congress let it expire at the end of 2021. Some concerns that sank the program’s political chances, like Sen. Joe Manchin’s worry that recipients will spend the cash on drugs, don’t hold up to the abundant evidence. But there are still some economists who remain skeptical, unmoved by the steady stream of positive research on short-term programs — which they concede looks very good. Their concern, however, is with the distant future. “My main problem with a permanent CTC,” said University of Chicago economist Bruce Meyer via email, “is that it would reverse the work-based welfare reforms of the ’90s that dramatically increased employment and were associated with a decline in the share of kids growing up in single-parent families.” The thinking goes like this: As parents receive strings-free cash, many of their incomes will indeed be pushed above the poverty line. At first. But some will also choose to work less, others will divorce more, and fraying the twin threads of marriage and work in low-income communities will ultimately harm children’s prospects for upward mobility. The initial anti-poverty benefits would, generations down the line, be swallowed up by unintended consequences. By concentrating their concerns on the far future, they render much of the growing base of short-term research moot, especially in terms of convincing holdout politicians, like Manchin, whose insistence on adding work requirements to any expanded CTC is what killed the child allowance. Enter a new working paper from Elizabeth Ananat and Irwin Garfinkel, two economists at Columbia University. Expanding on work they first published in 2022, their research surveys long-run cash and quasi-cash transfer programs (like food stamps) in the US in an effort to predict the overall effects of a child allowance over the very long run. Instead of the grim and jobless future forecast by expanded CTC critics, they find that a future shaped by a permanent child allowance is well worth the investment. Ananat and Garfinkel found that the total long-run benefits to society of making a child allowance permanent outweigh the costs by nearly 10 to 1. While the paper may not sway skeptical economists, the dramatic returns could still help build political momentum to pass the policy. And it at least shows that researchers are now taking the long-run concerns raised by critics seriously. What a return on investment of 10 to 1 for an expanded CTC actually means Ananat and Garfinkel’s original cost-benefit calculations did not make for light reading. Although the paper was well-received by her colleagues, the problem, Ananat said, is that no one else read it. So they built a homepage for their research on Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy’s website, and as new relevant studies on the subject come out, they’ve been updating their findings. This most recent 2024 working paper reports on the updated results of their earlier work, while trying to offer a more widely accessible version of their research. Their promise of a 10 to 1 return is, frankly, massive. For every $100 or so billion the child allowance would cost the government each year, society would reap additional long-term benefits of about $929 billion. Those dollars represent benefits like improved child and parent health and longevity, higher future earnings for children, and reduced crime and health care costs. There would be an effect from the small dip in employment that their calculations predict, and a resulting decrease in tax revenue — but it would amount to just $2.4 billion. That’s a drop in a bucket overflowing with almost a trillion dollars in benefits. But the nuances of such long-term returns can be difficult to convey. “A little bit shows up in the first few years in the form of reduced [child abuse and neglect], reduced hospitalizations, and those sorts of things,” said Ananat. “But most of it doesn’t show up until the kids grow up. So that requires a very patient type of investor.” Imagine Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidential election in November, and immediately upon taking office implements a child allowance (as her recently unveiled economic agenda intends). That would cost roughly $97 billion for 2025 alone. But at the end of the year, if you tallied up all the benefits, you wouldn’t see that $929 billion that Ananat and Garfinkel calculated anywhere. It could be decades before the full value of that nearly one trillion is actually realized. --- What is refundability? Usually, a tax credit gives Americans a break by lowering the amount of taxes they owe. But that means someone who doesn’t owe any taxes — like someone who is unemployed and has no taxable income — won’t benefit from the credit. Currently, the child tax credit (CTC) excludes about 19 million children from the lowest-income families, because they don’t earn enough to qualify for the full benefit. The American Rescue Plan made the CTC “fully refundable” through the end of 2021, which meant that even parents with no income, so who owe no taxes, still received the full value of the benefit. In other rich countries that style child benefits this way, they’re known as “child allowances.” --- Notably, though, it’s not a one-time deal. According to Ananat and Garfinkel, every year that the child allowance is in place will reap another $929 billion in long-term benefits. So if you take the Tax Foundation’s estimate that Harris’s child allowance would cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years, Ananat and Garfinkel’s work suggests over that same time period, it would accrue something like $9.3 trillion in long-term benefits. “The CTC is worth so much money in the future, that even though some of it only happens 50 years from now, it’s still worth $10 for every dollar you spend today,” said Ananat. The child allowance is fully refundable, meaning the full value goes to the poorest families, without a work requirement. (The current CTC is only partially refundable, which means that parents must first earn income before qualifying for the benefit.) But Ananat and Garfinkel also crunched a second set of cost-benefit calculations on a partially refundable CTC, matching recent CTC compromises that boost the payment amount while keeping a work requirement of some sort. They find that doing so would reduce the annual cost to $31 billion, while also reducing the total annual social benefit to $131 billion. That means that adding work requirements shrinks the program from a nearly 10 to 1 return on investment, to just over a 4 to 1 return. And those benefits would exclude children who are in the deepest poverty — the very ones who need such help the most. Now, converting a variety of outcomes into dollar valuations, and assigning benefits that will come in the future a value for the present, is tricky business. These estimates should be held lightly. But if they’re even in the right ballpark, then every year we don’t implement a child allowance is an absolutely massive missed opportunity. We’d experience as much as a 40 percent drop in child poverty immediately, and begin layering on trillions of dollars in long-run benefits. Critics and the econometric alternatives There are basically two ways to try and predict the effects of a child allowance in the deep future. Either way, you’re dealing with serious ambiguity. Like Ananat and Garfinkel, you can scour the existing evidence from similar long-run programs that have raised family incomes in the US, tabulate a comprehensive list of all their documented benefits and costs, calculate a per-$1,000 effect size for each cost and benefit, and then apply those values to a hypothetical child allowance. To do that, they looked at past long-run programs like pension programs for mothers from before the New Deal, the 1960s rollout of food stamps, a series of US guaranteed income experiments through the ’70s, and expansions in the 1990s to the earned income tax credit. Notably, none of these programs are actually a CTC. And although each policy was chosen because it does a similar thing — effectively raises a family’s income — each took place in a different social and economic context than whatever the 2030s and beyond will look like. The other way to try and predict hypothetical economic futures is to use the economist’s version of a magic eight ball: the econometric model. These are mathematically constructed versions of reality, where fuzzy human behaviors have been translated into precise probabilities and equations. In these computational worlds, you can plug in a variable of interest, like a child allowance, and statistically churn out a prediction of its impact. Then, economists scrutinize the assumptions of the model, and debate how much insight those results can offer about the actual meatspace world that we all live in. That’s how Bruce Meyer, Kevin Corinth from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and their colleagues predicted that replacing the old CTC, which incentivized work, with the expanded CTC that provides low-income families the benefit no matter whether they’re already working or not, would ultimately “do more harm than good.” Specifically, that it would drive 1.5 million working parents to quit their jobs altogether, and cap the anti-poverty impact at 22 percent, rather than the 40 or so percent seen during the temporary expansion. Those numbers all hinge, however, on controversial assumptions coded into the model about how likely people — low-income single mothers in particular — are to stop working if they get an extra few hundred bucks per month from the CTC. Other models using different assumptions find much lower reductions in work, including Corinth’s own colleagues from the AEI, who predicted the effect on employment would be only a fifth as strong, with 296,000 parents quitting their jobs rather than 1.5 million. In each case, these models are reflections of their coded-in assumptions. Like extrapolating from other policies in different historical eras, “Taking a given change in the [child] tax credit’s incentive to work and plugging in a labor supply elasticity is a fraught enterprise,” Jain Family Institute research associate Jack Landry told me last year. When I asked Meyer about the Ananat and Garfinkel study, he dismissed it as “very selective” in its literature review. And Scott Winship, who directs the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the AEI, said via email that “you’re more likely to find that a policy is worthwhile if you simply assume the largest potential costs don’t exist (in this case, worsened child outcomes in the long run from reduced parental work and increased single parenthood). That’s what they do.” There is, of course, no perfect way to predict the future. Otherwise I’d have cashed out of the stock market with millions by now. But that’s where critics of a permanently expanded, fully refundable child tax credit are now situating their case. Advocates can either follow them into the future, arguing that long-run benefits will outweigh long-run costs. Or, they could instead focus on building the political momentum necessary to pass a policy that will always have its detractors, while unambiguously helping millions of kids in the present. Will a child allowance in the US ever exist anywhere other than the future? Vice President Kamala Harris has already announced that bringing back the expanded CTC is part of her planned presidential economic agenda. Ananat emphasized that “this isn’t a politically motivated” study, but that even if her research won’t convert skeptical economists, it can still be helpful to those working on political organizing. She said,“People can see this and feel inspired, like, ‘Oh, 10 to 1, that’s worth making more phone calls for.’” I’m not optimistic that economists will ever strike a unanimous agreement about the future of an expanded CTC (though it’s worth emphasizing that to the degree consensus does exist, it certainly is in support). Even if they did, how much stock should we really place in specific predictions that span decades? The world is unpredictable, and seemingly more so every year. The decision to implement a child allowance will always have to be made under some degree of uncertainty. Trying to predict the impact of a child allowance decades into the future is always going to be a balancing act of ambiguity and speculation. Peering into the economic models that raise concerns about how desirable a future shaped by a child allowance really is, you find a latticework of tenuous assumptions. Similarly, critics say that when you look under the hood of the 10-to-1 return on investment claim, you find a selective literature review. But the flood of research on the temporary expansion washed away most uncertainty about the short term. Canada’s had a child allowance for years, and it doesn’t look to be hastening a grim and jobless future. A guaranteed huge drop in child poverty in the short term, plus the potential accrual of trillions of dollars in additional benefits, sounds like a worthwhile bet to me. And even if slouching employment among recipients did start to cause concern in a decade or two, and researchers came to suspect the child allowance was to blame, the wonderfully certain thing about public policy is that it can always be changed.