The skyrocketing cost of insurance premiums in Florida is leading residents to drop their insurance, consider selling their home, and even move out of the state, according to recent reports.
For years now, the sunny, vibrant state has been a magnetic destination for many Americans—a phenomenon which has been driving up demand for housing, especially during the pandemic, as well as home prices.
But while Florida was the number one state in the country that people moved to in 2022, it was also the one with the highest number of residents wanting to relocate, according to a SelfStorage.
Insurers aren’t really to blame here. Florida is a fundamentally high-risk place to build and live now, and will continue to get worse for the foreseeable future due to climate change. Even a non-profit insurer would need to price Florida insurance at a premium, lest its funds be exhausted when the inevitable category-6 hurricane hits the state.
Arguably the ones most to blame (after the fossil fuel industry, for putting us in this position in the first place of course) is corrupt politicians and developers who allow such shoddy construction in the state in the first place.
We don’t just allow construction in risky places, we subsidize it. If you’re an owner or developer and you wanna put your own money at risk by building in risky places, you should be allowed to do that. Just don’t expect me to pay for it through taxes and FEMA flood insurance.
Maybe it’s not quite comparable to the situation in California, now that I think about it. Florida has always been in the path of devastating hurricanes for as long as I can remember. There is a degree of assumed risk living there. In California, these massive wildfires almost never happened and now suddenly it happens every year without fail no matter how hard we try to contain them. I live in an area that has never been hit by a wildfire, but because California as a whole has been hit so hard so many times recently, rates get raised to untenable levels and State Farm won’t even write you a policy. It’s completely mad.
Like, I get it, it’s not the insurance company’s fault that we live in the path of predictable destruction, but there has to be a better solution than “move somewhere else if you don’t like it”. I wonder if we can learn something from studying the insurance models of other countries that are prone to disaster (Island nations in Asia that are frequently hit by typhoons, for example) and adapting that to how policies are tailored here?
The category of hurricane isn’t the problem, it’s the frequency. 5 category 2s are way worse than 1 cat 4 or 5, in terms of economic cost, typically.