Maybe having houses so expensive nobody can afford to buy them and the people how already own them can't afford insurance on them was a bad idea.
Is the world becoming uninsurable?
951–960 of 1001 posts
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#952Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was the whole issue. California made it illegal for insurance companies to raise rates, so the insurance companies stop renewals. Leaving everybody uninsured. Homeowners couldn't buy insurance at any price.
Public insurance. For housing, healthcare, maybe even cars (since the coprorate political complex insists that we HAVE to drive everywhere). At some point, we have to accept that the middlemen are siphoning value, not providing any. Vanguard it and let elected admins set the codes.
Not sure I agree with housing insurance as a public service… we do want to expose some risk to drive behavioral changes. People really shouldn’t be building houses in low lying areas near the shoreline in Florida. But if there’s no risk because it’s covered by other tax payers, then they will.
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#953Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key thing to understand is that you don't get to choose when the house gets destroyed or get advanced notice. Which means you might be in there, or your kids, or all your belongings. But yes, after you're dead in the rubble someone else can rebuild your house and it might be cheaper.
These wildfires produce surprisingly few deaths. Did you know the most destructive wildfire in California history, the 2018 Camp Fire, destroyed 19,000 buildings but only caused 85 deaths? [1] [1] https://oehha.ca.gov/sites/default/files/media/downloads/cli...
Immediate deaths. How many suicides happened after the fact as an indirect cause?
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#954Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Residents who no longer have any insurers available can buy insurance from the state, but its far more expensive than the plans it rejected from private insurers Sounds like a state-run racketeering business
No, it's likely running at a loss.
In fact, a huge loss, which it plans to subsidize by... billing any insurers remaining in the state.
> As of last Friday, the FAIR Plan had just $377 million available to pay claims, according to the office of Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California. It’s not yet known how much in claims the plan will face but the total insured losses from the fires so far has been estimated at as much as $30 billion.
> If the FAIR Plan doesn’t have enough money to pay all its claims, it can rely on something called reinsurance — effectively, insurance for insurers in case their losses exceed a certain amount.
> Senator Padilla’s staff said the plan has $5.75 billion in reinsurance available.
Notably, $5.75B is less than $30B.
> If the FAIR Plan can’t make up its losses from reinsurance alone, it can demand money from California’s insurance companies to make up the difference.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/climate/californias-insur... / https://archive.is/Xg6s9
California couldn't set up a more broken insurance market if it tried.
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#955Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Tornadoes seem like a phenomenon for which insurance is actually a pretty good part of the solution. I mean, it is very unlikely for anything in particular to get hit by a tornado, but it is really devastating. It might take an unreasonable amount of work to build everything to the level where it can sustain a direct hit by a tornado. The expected value of tornado damage is quite low overall, we just need to dea…
You can build houses which are much less likely to be seriously damaged in a hurricane. Some more ambitious designs are virtually hurricane proof. You never see high rises knocked over by a hurricane, for instance. Because they are (mostly) built correctly. Otherwise downtown areas in the entire Gulf Coast, Mid-Altantic, would simply not have existed for more than a few decades. The same goes for floods. Most of the…
Tokyo and much of Japan have huge expensive drainage systems to prevent their cities from flooding during the storms they have. China is in the same region and doesn’t have that infrastructure yet, so you’ll still see cities like Wuhan flood every few years. It’s a good bet that China will eventually invest in these systems like Japan has, as it matches their development model fairly well.
I’m not sure how Florida or Louisiana would deal with flooding though, they simply have nowhere for the water to go. They would have to basically pump and store it above ground somehow. It might make sense to re-level their cities with an artificial ground level a few stories above sea level.
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#956Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're going to die if you're around to witness either (if you didn't already pass out from smoke/heat/lack of oxygen). It literally doesn't matter. The advantage of suburbs in which houses are mostly built from non-flammable materials is that while maybe one or two rows of houses closest to forested areas will likely burn out, there won't be enough calorific potential for the fire to propagate further into the subur…
Brick does tend to survive. Brick as an insulating layer can save lives. Brick also explodes violently under conditions where wood merely burns. Neither of these save homes in our wildfires, though; it turns out what saves homes is things no one realized at first: Don’t plant trees within fifty feet of a structure. More, if you didn’t inflate your home like a balloon to fill a property to the brim with home. Cut them…
For an excellent alternate viewpoint that focuses on making homes stop burning in (and thus spreading) local wildfires and then letting them burn:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/
This is absolutely an acceptable path forward, and was proposed decades ago. It’s been essentially ignored in building codes and homeowner requirements, but if you own a home or know someone whose home is in a fire zone — which is any home between the Cascades and the coastline where there’s a contiguous (no gaps larger than a mile) line of homes and/or flammable unmanaged land eastward from the house to the nearest forest (i.e. all of Marin county) — then focusing on the home modifications described in this story may save that home, and perhaps all of those west of it, when fire visits them eventually.
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#957Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still waiting for the water to flood New York...
Hurricane Ida in 2019 brought torrential rains which flooded the city, especially the subway.
Torrential rain has nothing to do with sea rising which is the topic discussed at hand. You can have torrential rains anywhere in the world not just on the coastline.
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#958"The world" is only becoming "uninsurable" because insurance companies want to have their cake and eat it too: they want your insurance premiums every month, but they don't want to pay out, so they'll find every excuse under the sun to do the former and not do the latter. This applies to more than just houses, of course - as anyone who's been denied coverage for healthcare can attest (and then the executives of these corporations wonder why people might want to kill them...).
If insurers were publicly-owned and publicly-operated, instead of being profit-driven corporations, then maybe being "uninsurable" wouldn't be such a common phenomenon.
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#959Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with home delivery in a “low trust” area is that your delivered items will get stolen, unless you can manage to stay at home all day to receive deliveries.
Porch pirates are a huge problem in America and shop lifting has gotten so bad that many products are locked behind glass doors... It's wild how people here have blinders and think that these things only apply to "lesser" countries.
Those problems are relatively recent and are getting worse
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#960Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when the government sets a price ceiling, insurance companies just leave… > the insurance rates in Pacific Palisades or on the Florida coast would be so high that no one could afford to live there… Seems like the result is the same — people will live there but without insurance.
Can't get insurance -> can't get a mortgage -> can't buy a house
For new buyers, yes, but there's plenty of people who already have a house but now they have no insurance for it. And sure, the terms of their mortgage say that they have to have it, but what can the lender do if nobody will insure that particular property no matter who the current owner is?