In a Nutshell, current tenured insurance companies will get expedited permission to raise homeowners insurance rates to keep up with the reflection of costs associated with rebuilding homes.
The reason so many homeowners were dropped was because the insurance companies couldn’t raise your rates fast enough legally to keep up with there losses associated with wildfire damage.
So be prepared, you might get your old provider back, but your rates would reflect significantly higher than what they were. Probably similar to the Fair plan.
Crock of .
Friend of ours house on a few acres went from a couple thoudsand to 17,000. Had their land masticated which was part of a fuel break. Still went up to 17,000. New you give a green light to insurance companies to raise rates. The providers may come back but can u afford to insurer now is the question. Allstate we had 25 years and not one claim. Dropped like a hot potato.
It does seem to be balanced towards the insurance market. When claims rise, so do premiums.
When claims are down, the insurance market makes large profits and only lowers rates if needed due to competition. For the insurance companies, it is something akin to
“ Heads, I win or Tails, you lose “.
TLDR; You know, or should, as a wildland firefighter, the technique of efficient and effective work depends as much on your feet and legs as your upper body strength.
If you went into the workout room, and the fitness trainer said, “This so and so is weak here, there or everywhere, so that’s what everyone must do today” you would rightfully call them incompetent. How does this relate to insurance policy? Glad you asked.
I found the article’s narrative hard to follow. I suspect this may wind up in the 9th Circuit. I hope that, sooner than later, insurance rate policy rewards LG voters that get the mitigation work done, over those with religious axes to grind. We certainly don’t want a situation where everyone must pay for the negligence of a privileged few with notions of “unskilled labor” and fast-talking intellectuals who find California’s voter initiatives inconvenient.
At the risk of comparing apples and oranges, water diversions from the reservoirs to the farms in times of drought undergo conflicts of who’s interest is best served when both cannot be; the value of the lakeshore property owner, or the worker who grows the excess food that makes the luxury lifestyle possible.
Are we really in the business of subsidizing McMansions and Houses of the Holy?
Is that what this is really about? Where is the so-called revenue gain if the money is really just making a round-trip back to propping up an inflated value?
Another issue my writerly instincts can’t resist is riparian fires. As the weather gets warmer and drier there will be more river fires in direct proximity to structures. In some places, this problem was handed off and funded with organizations with fragile and eccentric leadership problems with the predictable recidivism, poor outcomes and failures that result from sketchy value propositions.
Where those organizations have collapsed, or failed, the clients are also back in the river bottoms.
This head-tilting - side-eye - I don’t know…
I think we can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time; hawkish Initial Attack, and stronger year-round fuels programs. I think this is what the insurance companies are looking for…but we also need the watchdogs and champions, when the problem is really the business plans.
According to homeowners insurance data from Quadrant Information Services, the average cost of homeowners insurance in California is $1,587 , which is lower than the national average of $2,511.
That would seem to defy common sense. A real product of the regulatory environment or not true and more wing-to-wing market ploy?
I would advise using extreme caution in using a generic quote like that. There is no supporting data to suggest whether fire insurance coverage is provided as part of either one or both of those figures. Secondly, an average does not appropriately indicate the disparate differences between WUI coverages vs. municipal coverages. Those of us who have been negatively impacted by policies being cancelled and forced to use the California FAIR Plan would be highly skeptical that we can obtain full coverage insurance for $1,587 a year, more like 6 or 7x that amount to get full coverage including multiple policies to get it done.
Why? Although this post is focused more on wildland urban interface zones, a large majority of homes in California are not in them. Outside of earthquake and minor weather events, what real risk does LA, San Diego, bay area, the central valley or the deserts have?
Is this a rhetorical question? Wages for fuels crews.
Informally, the entire weight of LAC pushed on this fire to keep it out of the city. LAC can bring the tonnage, Type 1 Engines stacked bumper to bumper, unable to keep fire from jumping over streets and burning neighborhoods. Thomas? Never heard of it! ROTFL.
…and, what are the anti-wage wings doing for these people?
If it’s a rhetorical question, do the reader a solid and finish the paragraph.
Not following the logic in your post. Any urban city in the State will have significant immediate fire resources available to it and they do utilize them. If you are referring to the Thomas fire I can speak with authority the Ca system was used to its full extent.
Defend the quoted numbers, if you like. I don’t think they are accurate. If they do reflect an argument why wages should not be a priority, and I think they probably do, I think they reflect a bias against wage-earners. A bias that is coming with an increasingly unacceptable price tag.
I’m sure there are contexts for intellectual questions, meaning information and intelligence, that don’t have to answer to wages, for example where a formal, or informal, non-disclosure rule is in force. Not here, where wages are discussed. The relationship of; wages for fuels crews, wildfire risk and insurance cost, is undeniable.
The season of suppression may be upon you, but there are, yet, longer term issues that need answers. In any case, if your discourse must avoid wages? See you at the polls.
Topic Link: Social media misinformation.
It was and wasn’t.
Yes, urban conflag is a risk, but a very minor one. Of the 19 structures destroyed or 88 damaged in the Saddle ridge fire, what percent of those were in a urban setting as opposed to a wildland urban interface. I wasn’t there so don’t have a ton of knowledge on it. It would seem from your posted map though that it failed to penetrate the urban environment.
I did work Tubbs though, where a substantially larger number of structures were damaged and destroyed. It relatively quickly got controlled though when it entered the urban core. This was a function of both terrain, fuels, and resources able to be brought in on residential roads vs
Returning to risk though, It is silly in my opinion to assume that an urban zone has similar risk than a wildland urban interface. Resources that can be brought in, infrastructure, and fuels are all substantially different.
Further, I have yet to see a single source from you that contradicts the insurance numbers as quoted. Here is the CA DOI spreadsheet breaking down insurance premiums. The average in 2021 for dwelling-owner occupied (Fire) was $1,261.84. The average for homeowners multi-peril was $1,458.47.
https://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0200-studies-reports/0250-homeowners-study/upload/A-Part-I-Data-Summary.xlsx
True, I don’t have a professional reference to directly contradict it, but that might only be because I haven’t spent any time at it, really, but just pulling things out of the news feeds that seem to have some traction on our discussions.
You could say I’m a data skeptic, I suppose. And, yes, I know there are libraries full of books detailing why evolution has made us common-sense-stupid.
Even so, I don’t think I can swallow that average, just yet. I just might not have anything more meaningful to say than, “nah.” Not because there is something essentially wrong with the whole prospect, but because I’ve seen enough of the internals of these models and systems to know that there are a hundred ways to iterate over arbitrary variables that measure things by secondary and even tertiary effects, and a lot of them are wrong, or even prejudicial.
This is an endemic problem that will remain a problem, because the obvious alternative is collecting so much data from private individuals and businesses as to deny rights of privacy. Neither sacrificing privacy, nor coercing behavior to make the models more accurate, are acceptable alternatives to the blind spots.
Even more difficult than weather, in some ways, because Nature does not go out of its own way. Socioeconomic data and AI does that all the time.
You are right, I don’t have anything other than 1st hand knowledge respective to refuting the quoted averages. However, in order to that average, there would have to be 10 people paying $1,000 per year against my amount alone. Now factor in all the other people in the State who are similarly situated as me, and the averages from 2021 do not have any basis in reality. The numbers simply do not match up mathematically. So, you can suggest that the numbers are what they are and say this risk or that risk is minimal, but that changes nothing.
There are not very many people in the rural areas all things considered. We are a very urban state. From the US Census:
Of the 50 states, California was the most urban, with 94.2% (37,259,490 people) of its population residing within urban areas.
Nation’s Urban and Rural Populations Shift Following 2020 Census
My own insurance is roughly 9 times as expensive as my brothers in the by area. But he has 6000+ people per square mile around him. I have ~100. Your 1:10 (10%) ratio is roughly have what the population of rural to urban is (~1:20).
The DOI numbers are based on legally mandated reporting from insurers. When aggregated, the average insurance cost is significantly lower than ours is because so much of the population lives in LA and the Bay area.
I will grant you that the majority of the State’s population lives in the urban settings, however, what these numbers do no reflect is those of us who the commercial insurance carriers will no longer renew or write policies for. If a carrier doesn’t write a policy for a Zone 7 or above dwelling, their stated averages are going to be substantially lower than including the costs for those us who do live in the higher zones. It’s still cherry picking what the numbers are and where they come from. And let’s be clear, the urban areas are not immune to being forced into finding other carriers or paying much higher rates. The entire Westlake Village and Thousand Oaks area which are very urban are facing these exact same issues with cancellations, not being covered for wildfire damages, etc.
For the first time, using information from rate filings from the top 10 home insurers in the state, the Chronicle is mapping ZIP code-level data on insurance premium costs across California. This data, sourced from the California Department of Insurance, includes information only from insurance carriers that have raised their rates in 2023 or 2024. All the premium costs cited are averages, meaning some homeowners in each ZIP code may pay much more — or much less — than the overall average. The averages account for the number of homes insured by each insurer. The data does not include premiums for condominiums or for policies through the California FAIR Plan.
The data covers an estimated 56% of all policies in the state. The map excludes any ZIP codes with fewer than five policies from the top 10 insurers represented.
What Californians are paying for home insurance in every ZIP code (sfchronicle.com)