Scientists often rely on global climate models and high-level data to anticipate which regions of the world will face flooding, droughts, and other hardships in the future. We use those models to communicate the urgency of climate change and to provide a general sense of which regions are likely to be high-risk "hotspots," and therefore potentially uninhabitable in the future. Yet, as we learned during the 2019 Managed Retreat Conference at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, that approach isn't always welcomed by communities at risk. Top-down modeling approaches can contribute to a climate determinism that minimizes the potential for human ingenuity to find creative, locally appropriate solutions. Privileging likely future climate impacts can also come across as tone deaf in communities that have suffered redlining and racist land grabs.