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:
wow, its almost as if we should cut off the heads of insurance CEOs and nationalize them all into one low cost government plan thats paid for with pennies on the dollar in taxes.
lol, who am I kidding. Idiot Americans will always prefer paying 3000 dollars for bad coverage, rather than pay 100 in taxes for great coverage.
When your insurance drops your coverage, that's your cue to GET THE FUCK OUT BEFORE YOU HAVE YET LOST EVERYTHING.
Those actuarial tables are designed from the ground up and refined over literally decades (up to around a century in some cases) to predict risk and while they're not always perfectly accurate they are clearly ENOUGH so that they have made it possible for insurers to remain profitable.
IF THEY KNOW ANYTHING THAT YOU DON'T, THEY ARE DEFINITELY ACTING ON IT.
I know you can't literally just drop everything, or fit absolutely everything that matters to you in your car in a pinch, but you WILL be better off if you've packed up and prepped for transport as many as possible of the things that would hurt you and/or inconvenience you the most to leave behind.
So for those of you who haven't already experienced total loss, learn from this. Prepare yourselves. The people displaced by this will strain many other extant failure points in our society. Shit is about to get MUCH, MUCH WORSE.
The issue isn't just local. "This is predicted to cascade into plunging property values in communities where insurance becomes impossible to find or prohibitively expensive - a collapse in property values with the potential to trigger a full-scale financial crisis similar to what occurred in 2008," the report stressed.
I know this isn't the main point of this threadpost, but I think this is another way in which allowing housing to be a store of value and an investment instead of a basic right (i.e. decommodifying it) sets us up for failure as a society. Not only does it incentivize hoarding and gentrification while the number of homeless continues to grow, it completely tanks our ability to relocate - which is a crucial component to our ability to adapt to the changing physical world around us.
Think of all the expensive L.A. houses that just burned. All that value wasted, "up in smoke". How much of those homes' value is because of demand/supply, and how much is from their owners deciding to invest in their resale value? How much money, how much human time and effort could have been invested elsewhere over the years? Notably into the parts of a community that can more reliably survive displacement, like tools and skills. I don't want to argue that "surviving displacement" should become an everyday focus, rather the opposite: decommodifying housing could relax the existing investment incentives towards house market value. When your ability to live in a home goes from "mostly only guaranteed by how much you can sell your current home" to "basically guaranteed (according to society's current capabilities)", people will more often decide to invest their money, time, and effort into literally anything else than increasing their houses' resale value. In my opinion, this would mechanically lead to a society that loses less to forest fires and many other climate "disasters".
I have heard that Japan almost has a culture of disposable-yet-non-fungible homes: a house is built to last its' builders'/owners' lifetime at most, and when the plot of land is sold the new owner will tear down the existing house to build their own. I don't know enough to say how - or if - this ties into the archipelago's relative overabundance of tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, but from the outside it seems like many parts of the USA could benefit from moving closer to this Japanese relationship with homes.
Meanwhile the insurance companies are throwing parties right now for pulling out ahead of the disaster. Probably tweaking their models to make sure they're not at risk anywhere else.
Don't worry though, the incoming administration will be working with local governments to prepare for future challenges... Or ignoring them and dismantling any and all efforts to mitigate climate disasters. One or the other.
This is what fucking insurance is supposed to be for. It's not a way of making obscene profits. It's a way of making reasonable profits providing a service people need.
The US government ought to require insurers to ensure everywhere had a reasonable cost, or get out of the fucking business. They ought to require a base rate everywhere across the nation. Let everyone see what these fuckers are up to.
In Florida the state insures the highest risk people. It's the same damn thing. Should we let the insurance companies have the low risk clients while we the people fund all the high risk clients?
That's bullshit.
Climate change makes risk unpredictable; risk makes insurance unaffordable or unavailable; no insurance makes mortgages unavailable; without mortgages property values crash
Why is it without mortgages property values crash? Is it because sellers are forced to sell to only people who can pay cash? I suppose that makes sense. And of course those won’t be “people”, those will be banks and investment companies, looking to rent the property out to tenants. So more large chunks of money are siphoned away from the middle class.
Did the CEO's house burns down in the wild fire as well?
The map below shows rates of home insurance nonrenewals in recent years. You can explore your state and areas with the highest rates in the country, including California and Western states facing wildfires and Eastern Seaboard states like Florida and the Carolinas with elevated hurricane risk.
Louisiana be like, let's add a few more refineries, and a ethane cracker plant for good measure
