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Thousands of Los Angeles homeowners were dropped by their insurers before the Palisades Fire
(www.cbsnews.com)
Perhaps the most interesting part of the article:
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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Insurance companies are scummy but the headline phrasing makes it seem like they JUST canceled the policies....but no, it was 6 months ago.
As much as I want to hate them for it, can you really blame them? Insurance operates under the measured assumption that most people won't have to use it for some major. When wildfires become probable, it's almost guaranteed to cost them exponentially more than homeowners paid in premiums.
Even if insurance cost $50,000/year, it would take several years of payments to cover the payout. And California has wildfires yearly.
Yes; go sue big oil who fucking knew since the 60’s climate change was inevitable if nothing changed. Make those fuckers pay dearly.
This is why insurance shouldn't be for profit.
Insurances need to cover their expected cost with the rates, otherwise they won't be able to cover in case of an incident. Nobody will run an insurance expecting a loss, and you can't force anyone to.
The alternative is like when we had flood that the state bails out the boomers who bought houses when they were cheap in areas where insurance won't insure because of risk, paid with taxes by people like me who have a hard time acquiring property because taxes and other cost are so high due to decisions their generation and earlier ones made.
Of course, this is somewhat exaggerated; they also pay taxes. But it's also not completely wrong.
In the particular case of a previous colleague's house getting flooded, I always had to think of the fact that she chose to fly a certain route for work to save about 2 hours because it's just so much more convenient than the train.
I mean it would have happened with it without her flying, but still thought about it.
They could cover a lot more if they didn't need to make billions in profit. But your general concern is valid. What stops people from building in extremely high risk places. The answer should be federal building standards. If a house is built in a high risk area, it must have mitigating features that protect it from the high risk, or it can't be built. Local building codes already do this sort of thing. So this is just an extension of something already done. Most people don't know which areas are high risk for what. So don't penalize them for getting duped. And in many cases the house wasn't in a high risk area when built. So there needs to be funding to upgrade those houses to reduce the risk. That should come from the industries that profitted on ignoring the effects of thier industry in exchange for great profits.
I think you might have missed the point.
I mean it would be great to have some kind of socialised home insurance that wasn't "for profit", but such a scheme should still refuse to insure homes which are likely to burn down.
That probably sounds good in your head. But you are only thinking of fires. What if they just pick the highest risk factor for every house and refuse to cover that. Then what would be the point of the insurance. And if you consider all the houses that are a high risk for something... fire, hurricane, flooding, high winds, tornadoes, earthquakes... you aren't left with many houses.
What a silly thing to say.
Obviously, if one insurer refused to cover what ever thing, they would lose all their customers to other insurers who covered sensible risks.
The point is, you can't insure against risks that are too likely to occur.
Especially for the palisades $3,500,000 homes.
At $50,000 a year it would take 70 years of payments.
Well, it should be proportional to the value they're covering * the risk of loss, so they're probably paying much more than $50000/year.
For some reason you made me think of banks being covered by government insurance. In a way you'd think the government would also insure land, seeing as that's one of the main things they protect.
The logistics would probably be horrible for that type of thing though.
Government can print money when appropriate and not abused. Payments directly to the general public are the best type of stimulus. Take a bad situation and make it a stimulus.
Part two though has to be that they are not allowed to receive a payout more than once or make it illegal to build new construction in wildfire zones until they have figured out the forest management issues.
There aren't really forestry issues at all.
Practically everywhere is a wildfire zone though. Yes we need much more forest management, infrastructure hardening, fire resources, etc, but giving folks a one time payout and then they move to another area that gets destroyed and now they don't get support doesn't seem helpful since we can't really predict what will burn. It's simply harder than e.g. flood mapping.
You don't have to drop the entire area though, you just have to drop forest fires as a claimable item.
Then people can make a decision on if that's okay for them, or try to find someone else.
Would this not most likely still cause the same kind of financial collapse in the housing market that was mentioned as a possibility in the article linked by OP? If it is not possible to get insurance for an event (i.e. wildfire) that is likely(/definitely going) to occur, then I imagine buyers/real-estate developers would be less inclined to pay high prices in those regions.
I think we're likely to see a collapse of housing markets in places like CA and FL no matter what.
You just can't live any place and in such a fashion as shall certainly result in a loss
I'd think so, but just to a lesser extent?
I know some areas have laws mandating certain minimal coverages. I wonder if the insurers would even be allowed to issue policies that didn't cover wildfires.
If that's the case, we might see some laws changing in the near future.