Least surprising news ever
The most predictable crisis ever:
Households in Florida, the third most populous state in the US, have been grappling for some time with a property insurance crisis that is making home ownership unaffordable for many.
Now why might that be? Because Florida is doomed. It’s like trying to get fire insurance on your house when it bursts into flames. It’s like trying to buy car insurance after you rear-end another car. It’s like trying to buy life insurance when you’re dead.
After at least six insurers went insolvent in Florida last year, Farmers on Tuesday became the latest to pull out of the Florida market, saying in a statement that the decision was based on risk exposure in the hurricane-prone state.
Because Florida is doomed.
“Hurricane insurance is critical to being able to continue to live in Vero Beach,” Brown, in his 60s, says. “In 2004 and 2005 we were hit twice, at a time when we were fortunately covered by Citizens.”
Since then, however, Citizens’ eligibility rules for property insurance have changed: homeowners are now only eligible for their policies if available premiums from private insurance companies are more than 20% higher than the premiums for comparable coverage from Citizens.
Citizens did not return requests for comment.
“Citizens fired us, and we had to take insurance with a private company – for 20% more,” Brown says.” That company then increased prices by 40% and then last September, in the middle of the hurricane season, went bankrupt and we lost all coverage. I panicked and called every insurance broker I knew. They all said getting cover was impossible now.”
Because Florida is doomed.
The insurance industry relies on low risk. Millions of people get fire insurance, and most of them never need it. If the risk of fire or floods or crashes is too high then it ceases to make sense to sell insurance.
Although demand for properties in Vero Beach has been rising dramatically since the pandemic, people who have been unable to secure insurance for their properties, Brown says, are now fearing this will reduce the value of their homes.
“The houses on either side of me have been on sale for six months. I guess not many people can afford to pay $10,000 a year or more on insurance, and hurricanes are becoming stronger and more frequent here.”
Because Florida is doomed.
I just don’t understand why insurance companies might not want to insure property in Florida.
Do you have any idea?
Well, I do, but I’m bashful about spelling it out.
People buy property in a coastal swamp, and then want someone to bail them out when their property floods. People buy property in a desert, and insist they must have more water than the rest of the country. In Nebraska, we have tornadoes. Our insurance covers the tornadoes. But the damage ratio per customer is a fairly consistent calculation, and companies aren’t going broke insuring them…yet.
My husband and I decided to live far enough inland in Maine to not have to worry about flood insurance. We rejected two homes that were in a floodplain.
People shouldn’t build in a floodplain anyway. It’s bad for the ecosystem.
But wait, didn’t Florida outlaw climate change and sea level rise? And still this is a problem? What did I miss?
I mean, as a road sign nearby says, “It’s called floodplain because it floods.”
That reminds me, I have a picture somewhere in my collection that I took around Christmas of 1980. It’s from the Everglades road, with a sign reading “Rock Reef Pass Elevation 4 feet”. It’s the highest point on the road leading into Everglades National Park. That place is just flat, no ifs or buts about it.
I’ve been told that some national park employee had a T-shirt made with the text “I crawled across Rock Reef Pass in the dead of winter”.
It’s because “wokeism” has infected the insurance industry. Cultural Marxists have taken it over. DeSantis will soon settle their hash.
You could of course build a house that wouldn’t get blown down in a hurricane, but that wouldn’t stop it getting flooded in the storm surge, or swallowed by a sinkhole, or just drowned by rising sea level. Did someone mention that Florida is doomed!
My husband recently retired from a Midwest-based Property/Casualty insurance company. He tells me that about 25 years ago they looked into the possibility of going into Florida — and soon decided it was a very bad idea. The problem wasn’t just the expense of the hurricanes, but the bizarre and restrictive regulations the state was putting on the insurance industry back then.
Apparently there was something called the “Excess Profit Law.” If an insurance company made “too much” money, they were required to give it back to the consumers. Let’s be super fair and stop greed. But one of the ways that companies manage to cover large losses some years is by making up for this other years. If they weren’t allowed to do this because they would cross an arbitrary line of “excess profit,” it was a virtual guarantee that they were going to lose money over the long run. There was no incentive at all to do business in Florida.
I’m not sure if this applied to personal lines as well as commercial— or if and when this was ever dropped — but short-sighted lawmakers looking to please voters (temporarily) probably didn’t help matters today.
Florida isn’t doomed. Not at all. It will still be there; it will make a lovely sandbar.
I used to live near the highest point in Delaware, near the PA border, 449 feet. Pretty low, but only the second lowest high point among the states. Florida’s high point, Britton Hill (sic), is only 345 feet.
@11, sure, but the landform can change to a sandbar and still be a landform. Florida is a State though. A place that functions as a home, place for commerce, work, and recreation for millions. When it becomes a sandbar it’s only one of those. Doomed.
@12, nearly 40 years ago I was walking Able Tasman National Park and was right at it’s northern tip when I met a couple of Danes, ‘Is that the Southern Alps?’ they asked. I looked around ‘What? Where?’ There. Uh, no. That’s a hill. Turned out the highest point in Denmark is only around 560 feet, which meant that Gibbs Hill at 1,635 feet seemed substantial, and the slightly more distant Mt Evans at ~3,800 feet huge. Frames of reference are everything.
Rob, It may be 560 feet if they can actually work out out where it is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM8yUKwPjwA
Ophelia @10 I stand corrected! 3 feet, not 4. Or did that change since 1980?
All too true, but pretty much everywhere we build is bad for the ecosystem. Every time the Red River Valley of the North floods, which is frequent because it flows north and the snow and ice melt and drain first in the south and the waters try to flow north to the mouth, which is Lake Winnipeg, This causes a lot of backflow. I remember a flood in 1967 that in Northern Minnesota, where I live, the water spread from the river to my hometown about 15 miles east of it.
But the floods deposit silt, which makes for fertile farmland, like the Nile Delta, and cities such as Grand Forks, Fargo, and Winnipeg, grew naturally as transportation centers for the crops. In 1967 the Manitoba government completed the Red River Floodway to prevent Winnipeg from flooding. I am sure that would be done for Grand Forks and Fargo, but it’s pretty expensive.
The Red River is an interesting river, because it began as the outflow from Glacial Lake Agassiz. Lake Agassiz was formed from the meltwater following the Younger Dryad and and outflow formed the Warren River south towards the Mississppi. It created a huge channel, but near where the Bois De Sioux River is now the source of the Red River, the silt from the outflow piled up and eventually became an obstruction for the river, which interrupted the Warren River. The Red River is essentially a reverse flow of the original Warren River, which is why it flows north now into Lake Winnipeg (what is one of the remnants of Lake Agassiz.) The southern section of the Warren is now the Minnesota River. While the Red River is a relatively young river, being only 11,000 years old, one of the features that makes it seem to be an old, meandering, lazy river is that in flowing north it’s on a relatively flat flood plain.
In 1997 the flooding was immense – 500 year flood. We had a mild winter and an early thaw, until. During the thaw, water was running down towards the river through the various ditches and channels that lead to the river, but the ground was still frozen so the wetlands couldn’t absorb the flow as it does in most years. And there was a blizzard. A major blizzard with huge snowfall totals threw a spanner in the works. The water that had begun it’s travels towards the river froze into a thick layer of ice under the snow. So, when the blizzard melt began, there was more rapid flood melt running on top of ice towards the still frozen river. And as the spring melt continued and the river slowly melted northwards there was just too much water for it to handle. Fargo, Hillsborough, Grand Forks, and Pembina (and their Minnesota sister cities Moorhead, East Grand Forks, Oslo) where inundated. Grand Forks took it worst because of the gas lines that burst and caught fire downtown. Firefighters couldn’t access it. I was in Grand Forks a few years later, during the rebuild, and I didn’t recognize it at all. Almost all of the old building had been destroyed.
But we build in the flood plains because the land is so rich. The Red River Valley of the North was called the Breadbasket to the World due to all the cereal grains that grew there, and sugarbeets provide nearly as much refined poison as Cuba did. The ecological toll is immense, and in large part because of the wetlands that have been plowed over, which would normalize the spring flow and reduce flooding. My family had some great farmland up there, about 20 miles from the River. It was a muddly clay soil, and there was a mix of woods (which are effecting as wetlands) and farm. When Dad sold his land in the 1970’s a corporate farmer came in, and plowed over the woods land turning it all into wheat acreage. He poured all kinds of chemicals on it to make it even more fertile, but only lasted a few years. It took about 20 for it to recover and the farmer who owns it now is getting some good crops from it again. The woods will never recover, though. And the spring floods will rush.
Mike, I would agree that building anywhere damages the system. But some ecosystems are more fragile than others, and we insist on “taming” them. We refer to any land or water not used by humans as “wasted” or “unused”. The Florida Everglades is home to hundreds of named species, but is seen as “unused” or “empty” anywhere there are no human built areas.
The problem is, when you have 8 billion people in the world, you cannot build sustainably. You cannot work with nature. You can only destroy, because you need more homes, more homes, more homes. With those homes comes shopping malls, schools, roads, power plants, etc.
Please don’t mention the poorer countries; yes, they have fewer shopping malls, smaller homes, etc, but they are not living in Florida, which is the topic of discussion. Also, even with smaller houses, etc, there are too many people in the world to build sustainably.