Flooding is separate from typical US home insurance and many homeowners are not adequately covered
As millions of US residents begin working to file insurance claims on their homes in the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, many could be denied, particularly if their homes were damaged by flooding.
A quirk in the US home insurance market is that flood insurance is separate from typical home insurance, which usually covers wind damage from hurricanes but not flooding. Homeowners must purchase flood insurance separately if they want their homes protected against flooding.
And many don’t. In some areas where Hurricane Helene hit the hardest, less than 1% of homes had flood insurance when the storm hit. In Buncombe county in North Carolina, home to Asheville, only 0.9% of homes had flood insurance, according to data from the Insurance Information Institute.
The number of people with flood insurance in Florida, which was hit by Hurricane Milton two weeks after parts of the state were battered by Helene, is higher than in other parts of the country. But still, the take-up is low. In Sarasota county, which took a direct hit from Milton, just 23% of residents have flood insurance.
Insurance companies get away with the most fucked up shit as a matter of course and nobody holds them accountable.
Insurance companies have a conflict of interest inherent in their business model. They make money by taking your money up front and then paying you back as little as possible at a later date. Any way to weasel out of paying up, especially in a big event like a hurricane, is a huge money saver for them. And most people are desperate. Their house is gone. They aren’t in a position where they can argue and sit on the phone for hours and work it out.
Also as soon as they pay you out they either jack up the rates to recover what you paid or drop you entirely as you’re no longer profitable. It’s such a massive conflict of interest
And then, even if they do pay out, they just jack up your rates to make it all back. That’s if they don’t just drop your coverage completely.
We need some kind of ACA for regular insurance, where unless people are literally building in a swamp or the bottom of a crater near a lake/river they should be just automatically covered.
Florida is uninsurable, that’s kinda the issue.
There’s a reason so many big insurance companies have left Florida. And honestly I don’t really want even more Federal money going to rebuild in the most common path of ever rising hurricane intensity.
I want Federal funds set aside to move people out of Florida in homes elsewhere for those who want it. If you want to rebuild your house in the path of the hurricane you can do it on your own dime.
Not sure how we relocate basically everyone in the South though. And what about tornado alley, do we move all those people also? And then you have wild fires and earthquakes, do we move all of California also? I get what you are saying, but getting millions of people to move states or across the country isn’t a simple thing. And what do we do with all the then empty previously “high valued” real estate? I do think we ultimately have to do something as global warming continues to cause humans issues at what seems like an accelerated rate, but we also have an alarming number of people that do not want to address it (or that even deny it happening).
From your previous post, your answer to your question is: You don’t move them. Instead you skyrocket the rates of insurance on the rest of the nation so that people can continuously have their houses in high risk area destroyed and rebuilt while the rest of the country pays for it. This is what an “ACA for home insurance” would do.
A more realistic approach would be to change the building codes to accommodate specific natural disasters for that geography. You want to build a house in the woods? Now you need a significant fire break around the house and need to build the house out of fire resistant materials if you want coverage. This is discussion of building regulation changes is already occurring. Same thing for houses in hurricane areas. If you want to build there, you have to build houses that will survive there and not be destroyed by the inevitable conditions.
None of this large transition is completed overnight, but it has to start happening now. What we have now is unsustainable.
I think housing like this might be a smarter move than trying to move millions of people (or leaving them homeless).
First, I like those homes, but there’s a HUGE problem with your proposal.
From your linked article:
"But these features come at a cost. According to the community’s website, the homes are selling for $1.4 million to $1.9 million, compared to other new homes in the area priced for at least $600,000. "
Who are you suggesting pays for each person currently in FL to get a $1.4 million to $1.9 million home?
Well I would assume some of that comes from the lower volume of building the homes, with less people in construction in the area possessing the skills/materials to do so. Perhaps if the government put money towards volume buying materials and securing contractors able to build them, the price could come down to “market” values. I would think insurance companies would also see it as a win not having to payout as much for those that can actually be insured (and maybe makes it so more people can actually be covered making the graph go up).
I could be way off and the pricing of those homes are just unable to come down to an acceptable $ value, but government/insurance money would be put to better use looking to build more future climate safe homes as close as possible to the above model instead of today’s standard.
You’re agreeing with 90% of my post you indicated you disagreed with.
Economies of scale for materials would reduce costs slightly, but my understanding is the biggest cost of home building is land first, then labor. Material cost is surprisingly lower on the list. Labor costs are only going up, not down, and in our home building example labor doesn’t get less expensive when you scale up.
There’s a UK scheme called Flood Re that does this kind of thing. If you’re more than a certain probability of flooding, you need to go with an insurer that’s backed by the government’s reinsurance policy.
That’s basically how US flood insurance works. The entire country is mapped out in flood zones based on a every 100 year occurrence. If you’re in the zone you’re required to buy insurance… but it’s bullshit. They have a bunch of inland people paying the same rate as the people’s houses that are on the coast and flood every 5 to 10 years.
To be fair… They would have been happy to have sold these people food insurance. How many would have purchased it even if they knew more about it? How keen are you to listen to your insurance company trying to “upsell you shit you don’t need?”