Home Insurers Are Fleeing California

With State Farm, “the largest property-insurance company in the country retreating from the country’s largest property-insurance market,” it’s becoming abundantly clear that homes in California, Arizona, and other western states are becoming uninsurable thanks to growing threats from wildfires and other disasters.

Curbed writer Alissa Walker points out that the dire situation has been compounded by decades of housing policy resistant to density that “has historically pushed new development into the flammable fringes of cities known as the ‘wildland-urban interface’.”

For Walker, the solutions offered by the state, such as creating its own insurer for high-risk areas and providing guidance for real estate developers and cities, are just band-aids. The crisis requires a bigger, less politically palatable action: “The state should simply not allow people to live in high-fire-risk areas in the first place.”

The burgeoning crisis isn’t unique to California, Walker adds, and other places should take note. “Insuring the uninsurable in the face of increasingly pervasive climate risk will be a challenge everywhere and not just for wildfires.” 

According to a Yahoo News article by Ben Adler, insurance rates for some Florida homeowners have doubled in the last year “with some insurance companies threatening to drop them if they don’t make expensive alterations, such as a new roof made of hurricane-resistant materials.”