Is insurance more expensive in Black neighborhoods?

Whatever reason is the frustration. Its not "whatever reason" or some huge unknown. Its decades and decades of policy including redlining and developers who openly didn't rent or let black americans buy homes and banks that openly gave black americans with great credit shittier loans while the govt bankrolled the development of suburbs for white people.

I realize I'm frustratedly typing and I think my frustration is the "aw shucks, who knows why this is happening. The data is a mess" conversation while there are entire books and sub disciplines in "subjective" research like Law, Politics, Geography, Urban development and others that could easily answer these questions and have many times over.

I think those factors would be racist explanations, so to speak – saying "it's not that insurance costs more in Black neighborhoods, it's just that Black neighborhoods have lower employment rates" only shifts the narrative of racism.

As far as I can tell, Goodcover wrote this as marketing to show that they both have less increased pricing bias toward neighborhoods that are more Black -- and also are significantly cheaper.

It's the significantly cheaper that is most surprising to me. They are about $100 a year vs. $175 a year for their competitions.

This makes me wonder -- have they managed to cut bloat by 40% or are they simply using different qualifications to restrict their insurance to lower risk people? If it's the latter, this comparison is not apples-to-apples.

I agree that this is an important distinction. But isn't there a third option: the market's not perfectly competitive and pricing isn't just driven by the cost but also what consumers will bear?

For example, this can be seen in men's vs. women's home staples. Things like razors and deodorant tend to have much higher list price for their feminine versions. This isn't because women's razors cost more to make. Nor is it because executives at P&G are misogynistic pigs.

Rather it's because these products tend to be sold by monopolistic suppliers who are trying to extract the maximum price that consumers will pay. Women tend to be burdened with more responsibilities than men, and thus have less time to carefully comparison shop.

I'm not sure if this explains the racial insurance disparity. But I could easily imagine it, and we should at least investigate the hypothesis. In particular black Americans have a lot less savings and financial cushion. They're also have lower rates of financial literacy. That probably means they're less likely to comparison shop and more likely to buy low-deductible policies that tend to be less competitively priced.

There are a lot of replies here asking about correlation with non-racial factors such as economics or crime. The fact of the matter is that Blacks in America are poorer, suffer higher rates of unemployment, lower educational attainment and are forced to live in higher crime areas as the result of decades of racist housing policies and centuries of oppression. This is reflecting that legacy. Black people pay many different taxes merely for being Black in America, this is just another in a long list. As another example, Black people pay higher tax rates due to higher relative property assessments (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/02/black-pro...).

For a more complete accounting, I recommend reading The Color of Law https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten...