Thousands of Los Angeles homeowners were dropped by their insurers before the Palisades Fire
Thousands of Los Angeles homeowners were dropped by their insurers before the Palisades Fire
About 1,600 policies for Pacific Palisades homeowners were dropped by State Farm in July, the state insurance office says.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the article:
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Insurance companies are scummy but the headline phrasing makes it seem like they JUST canceled the policies....but no, it was 6 months ago.
As much as I want to hate them for it, can you really blame them? Insurance operates under the measured assumption that most people won't have to use it for some major. When wildfires become probable, it's almost guaranteed to cost them exponentially more than homeowners paid in premiums.
Even if insurance cost $50,000/year, it would take several years of payments to cover the payout. And California has wildfires yearly.
Especially for the palisades $3,500,000 homes.
At $50,000 a year it would take 70 years of payments.
Well, it should be proportional to the value they're covering * the risk of loss, so they're probably paying much more than $50000/year.
For some reason you made me think of banks being covered by government insurance. In a way you'd think the government would also insure land, seeing as that's one of the main things they protect.
The logistics would probably be horrible for that type of thing though.
Government can print money when appropriate and not abused. Payments directly to the general public are the best type of stimulus. Take a bad situation and make it a stimulus.
Part two though has to be that they are not allowed to receive a payout more than once or make it illegal to build new construction in wildfire zones until they have figured out the forest management issues.
Practically everywhere is a wildfire zone though. Yes we need much more forest management, infrastructure hardening, fire resources, etc, but giving folks a one time payout and then they move to another area that gets destroyed and now they don't get support doesn't seem helpful since we can't really predict what will burn. It's simply harder than e.g. flood mapping.
There aren't really forestry issues at all.
You don't have to drop the entire area though, you just have to drop forest fires as a claimable item.
Then people can make a decision on if that's okay for them, or try to find someone else.
I know some areas have laws mandating certain minimal coverages. I wonder if the insurers would even be allowed to issue policies that didn't cover wildfires.
If that's the case, we might see some laws changing in the near future.
Would this not most likely still cause the same kind of financial collapse in the housing market that was mentioned as a possibility in the article linked by OP? If it is not possible to get insurance for an event (i.e. wildfire) that is likely(/definitely going) to occur, then I imagine buyers/real-estate developers would be less inclined to pay high prices in those regions.
You just can't live any place and in such a fashion as shall certainly result in a loss
I'd think so, but just to a lesser extent?
I think we're likely to see a collapse of housing markets in places like CA and FL no matter what.
This is why insurance shouldn't be for profit.
I think you might have missed the point.
I mean it would be great to have some kind of socialised home insurance that wasn't "for profit", but such a scheme should still refuse to insure homes which are likely to burn down.
That probably sounds good in your head. But you are only thinking of fires. What if they just pick the highest risk factor for every house and refuse to cover that. Then what would be the point of the insurance. And if you consider all the houses that are a high risk for something... fire, hurricane, flooding, high winds, tornadoes, earthquakes... you aren't left with many houses.
What a silly thing to say.
Obviously, if one insurer refused to cover what ever thing, they would lose all their customers to other insurers who covered sensible risks.
The point is, you can't insure against risks that are too likely to occur.
Let me rephrase. If they refused to insure any house that was a high risk for one factor. That would be a very sizable chunk of the country. Even if they only refused to insure it for the thing it was high risk for, it would make unsurance on the house pointless. Flood zones and wildfire zones particularly are expending every year. Hurricane zones used to be ok to insure because hurricanes didn't hit too hard too often. But they are stronger and more frequent, so much of Florida has a very short list of insurers which will trend to zero in the near future. While I agree everyone should move out of florida because of the shitty politics, that isn't really practical.
The cost of insurance needs to equal the risk though.
If a house is going to get burned down every year, who pays to re-build it?
It isn't practical to expect everyone to move out of florida, but climate change is impractical.
Thats why i pointed at building codes. Require building that will survive the threat. Then people will have to pay more for them which discourages people from building in those areas at least.
Maybe. That doesn't really help all of the existing buildings though.
No it doesn't. Those people need to be essentially bailed out if/when their house is destroyed. Most of them had no idea what they were getting into when they bought it. And we bail out companies, so why not people. But that buy out should be to buy the land for a reasonable price, or if they want to rebuild, they will have to sink extra money of thier own into meeting the requirements of new buildings for that area. In some areas they may want to incentivize rebuilding to the new standard, in some they wouldn't. Insurance as it is now, only pays to rebuild such that it can burn down again. So even raising the price on that doesn't solve the problem. It will just end up with the cost of insurance being wrapped into the mortgage eventually.
The houses are worth a whole lot less money given the risks of extreme weather and fire.
This was entirely predictable. It's been well publicised for decades.
Bailing out companies is obviously not the same as bailing out people.
I'm not really sure it's as easy as "building to a new standard". For suburbs prone to inundation it may be that there's little that can be done on the residential property itself.
I think the core of this issue is money. It's going to cost a lot of it for people to live in these risky areas.
In my view, living in those places should not be subsidised by everyone else. That means everyone else's insurance premiums should bear the cost of those heightened risks. If someone wants to build a house to a higher building standard in order to have it insured then so be it.
Insurances need to cover their expected cost with the rates, otherwise they won't be able to cover in case of an incident. Nobody will run an insurance expecting a loss, and you can't force anyone to.
The alternative is like when we had flood that the state bails out the boomers who bought houses when they were cheap in areas where insurance won't insure because of risk, paid with taxes by people like me who have a hard time acquiring property because taxes and other cost are so high due to decisions their generation and earlier ones made.
Of course, this is somewhat exaggerated; they also pay taxes. But it's also not completely wrong.
In the particular case of a previous colleague's house getting flooded, I always had to think of the fact that she chose to fly a certain route for work to save about 2 hours because it's just so much more convenient than the train.
I mean it would have happened with it without her flying, but still thought about it.
They could cover a lot more if they didn't need to make billions in profit. But your general concern is valid. What stops people from building in extremely high risk places. The answer should be federal building standards. If a house is built in a high risk area, it must have mitigating features that protect it from the high risk, or it can't be built. Local building codes already do this sort of thing. So this is just an extension of something already done. Most people don't know which areas are high risk for what. So don't penalize them for getting duped. And in many cases the house wasn't in a high risk area when built. So there needs to be funding to upgrade those houses to reduce the risk. That should come from the industries that profitted on ignoring the effects of thier industry in exchange for great profits.
As much as I want to hate them for it, can you really blame them?
Yes; go sue big oil who fucking knew since the 60’s climate change was inevitable if nothing changed. Make those fuckers pay dearly.