> Homeowners are flocking to the likes of Florida and Texas, despite the growing threat of climate-related weather disasters, according to data from LexisNexis Risk Solutions reported by the New York Times.
> Property insurance costs are rising across the country, with premiums up an average of 21 percent since 2015. Those bumps are significantly higher in states that carry more climate risk, however, including Florida (57 percent) and Texas (40 percent).
https://therealdeal.com/national/2023/05/08/sun-belt-climate...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/realestate/home-insurance... | https://archive.is/RRTW7
https://impactlab.org/map/#usmeas=absolute&usyear=2020-2039&...
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2023/03/23...
> The president of one of the world’s largest insurance brokers warned Wednesday that climate change is destabilizing the insurance industry, driving up prices and pushing insurers out of high-risk markets.
> Aon PLC President Eric Andersen told a Senate committee that climate change is injecting uncertainty into an industry built on risk prediction and has created “a crisis of confidence around the ability to predict loss.”
> Reinsurance companies, which help insurers pay catastrophic losses, “have been withdrawing from high-risk areas, around wildfire and flood in particular,” Andersen told the Senate Budget Committee.
> He added, “Just as the U.S. economy was overexposed to mortgage risk in 2008, the economy today is over exposed to climate risk.”
https://www.eenews.net/articles/growing-insurance-crisis-spr...
> Florida came first. Then Louisiana.
> Now an insurance crisis that has swept across the Gulf Coast is spilling into Texas, where increasingly scarce property coverage has forced tens of thousands of coastal homeowners to buy policies from a state-chartered insurance program.
For example, houses in New Orleans should be nearly $0 because of the risk, but since FEMA will rebuild your house in a flood, they aren't. There are houses there where FEMA has paid out 10x the current value because they've been destroyed so many times.
I understand people have attachments to their place of birth or upbringing, and that's fine. But the house prices should reflect that. Imagine instead of the home costing $300,000 and you have to get a loan for that, the house costs $300 but they give you a loan for $300,000 to rebuild if it gets destroyed. This would cause people to gravitate towards homes that are less likely to be destroyed because then you don't have to take on the $300,000 loan. It's standard risk aversion.
Some people are just in a bad place though altogether.
I don't know a good way to differentiate between the two.
They probably shouldn't be, though: https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/june-2017/climate-chang...
My ex-partner’s a geologist. She hated that article.
Seems to me you did not.
> I don't really agree that it makes sense to individualize risk like this so that one person gets completely ruined by freak occurrences.
An earthquake in California is not a freak occurrence. A fire in a fire prone area is not a freak occurrence. A hurricane in Florida is not a freak occurrence. A sink hole in Florida is not a freak occurrence. People not living in those areas should not be forced to subsidize those that do. It's not like people are being dropped in large numbers yet or that State Farm was the only insurer.
> Maybe if we're talking about particularly high-risk zones, but the entire state of California, inhabited by 44mn people and spanning more than half the West Coast, should be left out to dry?
Maybe California makes it too hard to refuse service to only certain people and this is the only way to handle it? Do you honestly believe they would leave money on the table if they didn't have to? There are other insurers there.
I don't know if this is California's intention, but I think limiting premiums is more effective at discouraging homes existing in hazardous areas than high insurance where the rich would simply lay the insurance. When fires burn through inhabited areas, state agencies have to attend to them to save lives, independent of insurance premiums. This costs the state money.