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by Enginerrrd
544 days ago
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I disagree. In my area several insurers have pulled out because of "fire risk" in areas with very little fire risk. (In one case, we're talking about a coastal home, well outside of any 100-year sea-level rise risk, where peak temperatures in the summer are typically in the 65 F, things never dry out, and the house is 4 blocks from the fire station.) The problem is that the state mandates they use certain maps to assess risk, so the insurance company can't really use their own data to produce maps with higher resolution. So they pull out entirely rather than selling me insurance at a fair value. That is NOT "the market working as intended". That is state regulation creating a market inefficiency, making people and businesses less able to actually adapt to climate change. |
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If you're talking about a coastal California home, the risk you're facing is the overall risk across California as a whole. The California insurance regulator is requiring insurers to continue to offer coverage in fire-prone areas in addition to fire-rare areas. All insurance products are based on statistical averages. This is a question of what homes are included in that statistical average. If insurers are required to offer products to customers in fire-prone areas, then insurers need to include statistics on fire-prone area homes when pricing for all other homes.
If California changes its rules and stops requiring insurers to offer insurance in fire-prone areas, huge regions of California would become uninsurable for fire, which means mortgages cease to be available in those regions, which means housing prices collapse, which means politicians and the state insurance regulator get voted out of office.
For elected officials, if the choice is whether to have all non-fire-area homeowners somewhat pissed or to have all fire-area homeowners carrying pitchforks into the legislature, they'll take the somewhat pissed option every time.