State Farm will discontinue coverage for 72,000 houses and apartments in California starting this summer, the insurance giant said this week, nine months after announcing it would not issue new home policies in the state
The Illinois-based company, California’s largest insurer, cited soaring costs, the increasing risk of catastrophes like wildfires and outdated regulations as reasons it won’t renew the policies on 30,000 houses and 42,000 apartments, the Bay Area News Group reported Thursday.
Being forced to have home insurance is ridiculous. Private companies jack up prices, make all the rules, and come and go as they please. We need to figure out a better system!
The only one forcing people to have homeowners insurance is mortgage companies, that want to ensure the collateral on that mortgage doesn’t disappear.
That and common sense, as even if you don’t have a mortgage, you also don’t want a disaster to make your largest asset go poof.
There is competition. That is meant to keep prices lower. But insuring people in disaster prone areas just isn’t a wise business decision.
So we need to evacuate the entire East Coast and Gulf Coast (hurricanes), the Midwest (tornadoes), the West Coast (fires), and any city built next to a river? Really?
Those areas are not at all equivalent. Florida gets flattened by hurricanes every year. California is on fire every year. Other areas get disasters but not with nearly the same frequency.
Once you get a bit farther north than Florida huricanes are not an every year thing. Sure they still happen but not with nearly the frequency that they do along the gulf coast. The midwest gets tornados but outside of tornado alley they are a rare thing. Even in the areas where they are frequent the damage tends to be more localized when they hit than with huricanes or wild fires. As far as rivers go, they do flood but that is something that can be controlled. As someone who has lived along the coast of the Mississippi for their entire life I am very aware of all of the flood prevention work the army core of engineers has put into the area and it all works. Sure it’s still a risk if there is a dam failure or an especially heavy storm but that is a once every 50 year thing not a literally every year thing. If you are living in an area that floods every year and that risk can’t be mitigated then, yes, you should stop living there.
Sometimes a comment comes along that’s so full of bullshit it’s kind of impressive.
Climate change will be doing a lot of that, like it our not.
But at the very least, the rest of us shouldn’t have to subsidize it. I’m tired of my insurance in the Great Lakes region skyrocketing because of disasters in CA or the gulf coast.
Not (re)building in areas prone to wildfires, mudslides, floods, and the like would be a good start. Otherwise, someone has to pay to rebuild when the ever more frequent disaster hits. State farm and other insurers suck in many ways, but this isn’t unreasonable on their part.