The climate is changing and is affecting regions we knew would be impacted by climate change 30+ years ago. The insurance companies cannot make a profit (and thus would not choose to operate) in these areas now that they're being impacted by climate change. On one hand this seems like the market working exactly as it should be. People should've moved out of these regions in the last 30 years given the information about climate change, but they didn't.
On the other hand many of the people living in these regions don't really have the means to move away and they're the ones disproportionately affected by all of this.
I disagree. In my area several insurers have pulled out because of "fire risk" in areas with very little fire risk. (In one case, we're talking about a coastal home, well outside of any 100-year sea-level rise risk, where peak temperatures in the summer are typically in the 65 F, things never dry out, and the house is 4 blocks from the fire station.)
The problem is that the state mandates they use certain maps to assess risk, so the insurance company can't really use their own data to produce maps with higher resolution. So they pull out entirely rather than selling me insurance at a fair value.
That is NOT "the market working as intended". That is state regulation creating a market inefficiency, making people and businesses less able to actually adapt to climate change.
The other hand, while very sad, is an investment mistake of each individual. 'How could I have known' is same as complaining certain stocks lost its value unexpectedly and retirement savings are now halved. In fact, most of these places were not OK decades ago but folks love cheap real estate and who gives a fuck about some doomsaying science, the cheaper the better, what could go wrong right?
Either insurances mark given county incorrectly, and some competition will eventually catch up or they marked it correctly. Now just because somebody invested in bad property (or property became bad), why should some private company bear this mistake outside contract? I don't see a reason, I wouldn't do it neither.
Real estate, often massive, ain't some Geneva convention-enforced basic human right, just an investment. Maybe good old 'if its too good to be true maybe it isn't' mantra is valid also here? Be smart folks, not greedy.
Also if the home on photos is really the one article is about, I don't see any meaningful bushfire protection. That would be at least 30 meter clear cut perimeter with just rocks between forest and house - no dry grass, pine needles etc. I see forest literally ending next to house itself, thus actual 0 protection. Yeah in a frequent fire country that house is a disaster waiting to happen soon.
Part of the issue is state boundaries (at least in the US case).
If someone moves from Florida to Georgia, or California to Colorado, then the former state loses their tax base (even in FL: sales/corporate tax).
So it sets up a musical chairs scenario where the state in question has every incentive to keep the game going.
Which will ultimately mean (a) using state revenue to balance out insurance plans and/or (b) outright fraud and shifting the risk burden onto someone else (looking at you and Fannie/Freddie, Florida).
> The climate is changing and is affecting regions we knew would be impacted by climate change 30+ years ago. The insurance companies cannot make a profit (and thus would not choose to operate) in these areas now that they're being impacted by climate change. On one hand this seems like the market working exactly as it should be. People should've moved out of these regions in the last 30 years given the information about climate change, but they didn't.
The businesses[1] invest in fossil fuels. Meanwhile the humans keep living in dead-end locations for emotional and illiquid nonsense reasons, like “my parents” or “my job” or “stability for my children’s upbringing”. Then when the stove gets too hot Capital can just move. No skin off its back.
Yeah that sounds exactly like the market that I know is supposed to be working.
How do you feel about the denialist argument that since people still buy expensive waterfront property, climate change is not a big deal?
My interpretations would probably be some combination of
- information asymmetry leading to demand distorting upward
- the people who are buying the property have priced in the loss relative to their utility and will be relatively unaffected should they be left holding the watery bag
This isn't because of climate change. It's because of bad laws combined with the housing chickens coming home to roost.
On the legislation front, a series of court cases and legislation combined with weak oversight meant that something like 70% of the nation's roof insurance claims were in Florida. There was clear fraud in many cases. Because of this legislation was introduced that made it difficult for any homeowner to file a legitimate claim. Combine this with under-capitalization by insurers and weak oversight and it's just a mess.
But the big one is housing. It's too expensive. And this is another inevitable consequence. It used to be that housing depreciated. That no longer seems to be the case. The replacement value is only going up. This is the foreseeable outcome of years of government policy designed to increase home values.
Ultimately we need to stop treating housing as an investment, as your retirement nest egg. All this does is steal from the next generation. That's it. Withholding shelter (ie housing) either by limiting supply through regulation and legislation or simply by pricing people out is state violence.
Housing prices need to come down. Hoarding housing needs to be massively disincentivized. We need to stop giving massive tax breaks to homeowners. None of this is popular but without major reform we're headed down a bad road.
Canada is heading towards crisis at the moment and many of its problems can be tied directly back to soaring house prices.
The consequences of high house prices are everywhere too. More expensive commercial real estate means businesses need to recoup that cost through higher prices.
I’m glad to hear mention of roofing claims finally. I live in Florida, my insurance shot up. No claims, I live away from the water. I paid for my own roof. But a lot of people around me got free roofs, and I remember getting constant calls for “free roof inspections.”
The issue here has less to do with climate change itself and more to do with a combination of regulatory and economic factors. While left-leaning outlets might point to climate change as the primary cause, the reality is more nuanced—similar issues are visible in other sectors, such as health insurance. Here are a few key points to consider:
- Insurance Company Consolidation: As the industry consolidates, large insurers gain the ability to strategically drop unprofitable market segments. This allows them to improve profitability, but it often leaves consumers in those markets with fewer or no options.
- Regulations: Some states, like California, have introduced stringent requirements that compel insurers to continue providing coverage, even in high-risk areas. In response, many insurers have opted to exit these markets entirely. Consolidation has made this easier for them to implement at scale.
- Lack of Investment in Disaster Prevention: Across both Democrat- and Republican-led states, we’ve seen a decline in state and federal spending on preventive measures for natural disasters. This shortfall exacerbates the risks insurers face, further disincentivizing them from operating in high-risk areas.
> The issue here has less to do with climate change itself and more to do with a combination of regulatory and economic factors.
The issue is not that the insurance regulations have tightened or changed. The issue is that the climate risks have heightened and the regulations have NOT changed to match the heightened climate risks.
Small increases in average temperature of the air leads to large decreases in average moisture content of brush and vegetation, making fires more common and more likely to impact more homes. The insurers have the data, that's why they are acting the way they are. Fires are more common and fires are larger. Not politics. Actuarial data compiled by insurance companies. If you've spent any time with insurance CEOs, you'll know they are not bleeding heart liberals. They tend to be very conservative and very data driven. And they have the data and it impacts their business.
The regulatory issue is that, to prevent historical forms of bad behavior on the part of insurers, state regulators require that insurers can only set pricing for fire insurance (for example) on the basis of historical data, not on the basis of forward-looking projections. That's the right thing for regulators to do in normal circumstances, when the risk environment isn't changing, but if the risk environment is changing it means you as an insurer will need to pay out money in the future at a higher rate than you did in the past, but you can only collect money based on lower historical payout rates. You are, in practice, required by the regulators to now offer your product at a loss not because the regulations changed but because the average daily temperature is increasing ever so slightly but just enough to significantly increase your cost. You don't want to offer a product at a loss, so you leave the market.
As to why insurance is a regulated industry, in large part that's because insurance is one of the few products the government requires you to purchase, distorting the market, and also in large part because there are massive asymmetries of information between consumer and provider - insurance companies have much more information about risks than insurance customers do, which prior to regulation led to abusive practices on the part of the insurers, in ways that led voters to say "this is a problem that needs to be fixed."
All big problems are hard, and insurance regulation is a big hard problem. If you just say "the environment is changing, so insurers should be able to set prices based on forward-looking projections" you help with the climate pricing increases but are likely to get other unrelated bad behavior at the same time (forward-looking projections are notoriously easy to fudge or fake in ways that are massively favorable to the person making the projections). If you don't allow for forward-looking projections, you lose insurers, if you do allow for it, you get abuses. "Just do it the right way" is much easier to demand in a blog post or comment thread than it is to deliver in legislation.
Isn't that just how they hedge bets? Their performance is correlated with the claims they receive. If fossil fuels perform poorly -> less environmental damage -> less claims. And vice versa
Unfortunately this article is a miss as it does not compare those investments to their entire portfolio size. Renewables have made great strides but the world still runs on the backs of fossil fuels.
Property insurers are even more intense about it than life and business insurers. Berkshire Hathaway and State Farm Insurance are each something like $100B in fossil fuels.
As it's only tangentially mentioned in the article people should know that in many (most?) places insurers can't raise prices commensurate with risk making "nonrenewal" their only option.
These regulations have reasonable origins because as a mandated product it's pretty tempting to price gouge, but there's no exception for circumstances where the price really should be 3x the historical cost.
This is the massive failure that exists in many states. You are unable to raise rates but the risk has increased and premiums must increase. Both CA and FL are huge losers in this regard. Heavy regulation on rate increases but then happy to create underfunded state policies for their constituents.
So if property price drops completely because insurance do not want to insure, it should make buying houses in cash and avoid mortgage easier right? House becomes a cheap commodity, everybody can then buy a house again, insurers can insure them again because they are cheap. The market correct itself.
"A deal too good to be true" will reveal it's ugly head in this case. Insurance wants to cover a near sure thing. You can trick buyers into buying something uninsurable, once. And then they'll be forced to sell at a large loss. Once those stories start making it into media buyers will be far more cautious.
Most likely, these houses will get bought by corporations to be rented out. They'll have the resources to self-insure. And at the next natural disaster the building falls down, renters are homeless, and what gets built in it's place will be 2x the price.
They'd need to be so cheap that rebuilding (or maybe even repairing) are not things people would care to do. For a $40k house, in today's dollars, it might just be a risk I wouldn't care to rebuild if there's massive damage; just move away. Someone would have to take care of cleanup/removal though.
I see where you're going, and sort of think it could happen in some areas, but regulations might not permit that any time soon, even if 'pure' market conditions might call for it.
Interesting to think what this might do for the 'tiny house' market. Start zoning more places where people can put up $30k tiny houses. You might still need insurance for protection against personal injury on/in the property, but rebuild/repair wouldn't need to be a factor.
Everyone (with some degree of savings, which really isn't everyone) will be able to buy a house in an area where that housing and local infrastructure will be regularly devastated. Areas with a more amenable climate will continue to have insurable mortgages and inaccessible housing prices.
So if the 'problem' is _simply_ that people can't buy houses, I guess it's solved? If one words it more carefully - people can't buy houses that allow for a greater degree of economic stability and wealth accumulation - then no, problem not at all solved.
> insurers can insure them again because they are cheap
I believe the main part of what the insurance payout covers is rebuilding. And rebuilding is what's expensive, moreso now than ever. So I think housing prices would crash in an uninsurable area because you might be able to buy cheaply, but you couldn't afford to rebuild when something happens.
Houses can't become a "cheap commodity" unless there are revolutionary new construction methods and/or alternative materials. E.g. something like cheap 3D printing of structural walls, ubiquitous robots, pre-fab modular rooms and roofs, etc and cheaper material alternatives to wood, concrete, tile, asphalt shingles.
Without a technological leap, traditional construction techniques will always have the baseline costs of paying expensive humans to rebuild the property. The labor costs of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, HVAC installers, roofers is ~50% or more of a house construction budget.
This means houses will always be "expensive" in relation to the average Starbuck's barista paycheck because of Baumol's "Cost Disease":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Put another way, we've known for several hundred years in math that the derivative of x^2 is 2x. Disseminating that knowledge should be cheap. And yet the cost(salaries) of calculus teachers and math professors (and the associated textbooks) keep going up instead of down. That's the "cost disease" similar with building houses.
That's why a bunch of insurers abandoning the market doesn't won't change the economics enough for houses to become cheap commodities. Houses prices may adjust with lower sales prices but it still won't drop to "cheap commodities" level pricing. e.g. Florida condos' prices drastically fall because the Surfside collapse triggers law requiring millions in maintenance and rising hurricane insurance rates ... Starbucks baristas still can't afford those discounted condos.
However, to your point about "market forces" creating a new equilibrium in prices... you can buy houses in Detroit for $1 but that does come with other issues:
In theory, sure. In reality the racket between insurers, government and banking will find strings to pull so that that never happens. They're in on every deal. They're gonna fight tooth and nail to prevent the precedent of getting cut out.
I don't think it's fundamentally uneconomical to live in these places. It's just uneconomical in the current "nobody has any responsibility for anything it's all just financialized away" status quo in which it's ok to have plastic siding over a plastic-wood structure and shrubbery all about status quo. People will have to return to the "old ways" of corrugated steel, clapboard (or masonry or cement board) and super short grass and dirt for large distances around structures.
One of my relatives has a single level house directly on a coastal waterway in Florida. Never had any problems since it was built in the 60s, then in 2 of the last 8 years the inside has gotten inundated with storm surge from a major hurricane, requiring a complete interior gutting. Their neighbors houses both got destroyed and now one is on stilts and the other is on a six foot mound.
He keeps repairing because he is a general contractor and the house has history to him.
It is tradition to contest the annual re-evaluations of the assessment of your home as that's exactly how your property taxes are based. The only time it is good for an owner's property's assessment to go up is when they are wanting to sell it. The rest of the time, they are constantly fighting to keep it low specifically because of taxes.
You must live in a state without property taxes, or you just have no idea how they work. Either way, this is exactly how property taxes work.
In my state, homes are assessed using true cash value (TCV) when the property is sold and then the taxable value is adjusted annually. If the property values within a neighborhood decrease (e.g. due to uninsurability) then that would be reflected in the taxable value.
Take a look at Detroit and surrounding area property values in the late 1980s and 2008-2012.
With such a significant drop in market value (can't get a mortgage on uninsurable property) the properties will just be abandoned, and twice as fast if the taxes aren't reassessed downward.
The climate firms are also faking data to protect their clients home values in places like Florida. The models are so wrong it's ridiculous. The amount of fraud going on from home insurance is astronomical.
What I hate, most of all, is that it's so often mandated -- and, yet, at the same time, so complex and annoying to attain. Half the time I need to buy some BS insurance for my business, I can't even purchase it online, I need to fill out a 20-part form and then "Speak with an Agent," who will resist giving me all of my options and make purchasing a personal ordeal.
I had considered, in a half-serious way, setting up an "insurance" company (probably incorporated in Sealand) that sells "basic packages" for very low prices -- and when you "speak with an agent," explicitly tells its customers that it will never pay out any claims. It would be nothing more than a fig-leaf, so that you can tell third parties, "yeah, I have insurance, don't bother me about it."
It would probably be illegal, which is sad. I just don't want to be annoyed and don't like being forced to deal with grifters.
That's how it works in Poland. A client required me to get an insurance for my 1-person contracting company, and I was able to get a policy that only covers trivial things like spilling hot coffee on someone, but none of the software risks. The client was satisfied (they're a giant bureucracy, and the the contractor procurement people just needed any policy to be able to tick a box), while I spent minimal cash.
> well supported scientific explanations that are politically unpleasant—you need to pay more for energy, criminals are low IQ and low impulse control
Do you mean to say that low IQ and low impulse control are the "well supported scientific" explanation for crime?
That seems wildly improbable. Ted Kaczynski being the obvious counterexample, but there are many other premeditated criminals who are intelligent. And that's only if we narrow "crime" to mean violent crime against people/things, but if we add in financial crimes/fraud/etc. this becomes even more easily disprovable.
If you draw all those events, the insurrance withdrawl, the perma-wars, the coups and djihadist groups on a globe, do they form a equatorial ring and can you measure the expansion rate of the red zone?
To save the climate, it is best to live on 20 to 30 square meters per person. So I always like it when people do not build new houses.
Currently, the living space per person is still expanding. Seems to be running into a wall or resources or deficit of clean energy.
idbehold|1 year ago
On the other hand many of the people living in these regions don't really have the means to move away and they're the ones disproportionately affected by all of this.
Enginerrrd|1 year ago
The problem is that the state mandates they use certain maps to assess risk, so the insurance company can't really use their own data to produce maps with higher resolution. So they pull out entirely rather than selling me insurance at a fair value.
That is NOT "the market working as intended". That is state regulation creating a market inefficiency, making people and businesses less able to actually adapt to climate change.
jajko|1 year ago
Either insurances mark given county incorrectly, and some competition will eventually catch up or they marked it correctly. Now just because somebody invested in bad property (or property became bad), why should some private company bear this mistake outside contract? I don't see a reason, I wouldn't do it neither.
Real estate, often massive, ain't some Geneva convention-enforced basic human right, just an investment. Maybe good old 'if its too good to be true maybe it isn't' mantra is valid also here? Be smart folks, not greedy.
Also if the home on photos is really the one article is about, I don't see any meaningful bushfire protection. That would be at least 30 meter clear cut perimeter with just rocks between forest and house - no dry grass, pine needles etc. I see forest literally ending next to house itself, thus actual 0 protection. Yeah in a frequent fire country that house is a disaster waiting to happen soon.
ethbr1|1 year ago
If someone moves from Florida to Georgia, or California to Colorado, then the former state loses their tax base (even in FL: sales/corporate tax).
So it sets up a musical chairs scenario where the state in question has every incentive to keep the game going.
Which will ultimately mean (a) using state revenue to balance out insurance plans and/or (b) outright fraud and shifting the risk burden onto someone else (looking at you and Fannie/Freddie, Florida).
keybored|1 year ago
The businesses[1] invest in fossil fuels. Meanwhile the humans keep living in dead-end locations for emotional and illiquid nonsense reasons, like “my parents” or “my job” or “stability for my children’s upbringing”. Then when the stove gets too hot Capital can just move. No skin off its back.
Yeah that sounds exactly like the market that I know is supposed to be working.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42450560
mikrl|1 year ago
My interpretations would probably be some combination of
- information asymmetry leading to demand distorting upward
- the people who are buying the property have priced in the loss relative to their utility and will be relatively unaffected should they be left holding the watery bag
jmyeet|1 year ago
On the legislation front, a series of court cases and legislation combined with weak oversight meant that something like 70% of the nation's roof insurance claims were in Florida. There was clear fraud in many cases. Because of this legislation was introduced that made it difficult for any homeowner to file a legitimate claim. Combine this with under-capitalization by insurers and weak oversight and it's just a mess.
But the big one is housing. It's too expensive. And this is another inevitable consequence. It used to be that housing depreciated. That no longer seems to be the case. The replacement value is only going up. This is the foreseeable outcome of years of government policy designed to increase home values.
Ultimately we need to stop treating housing as an investment, as your retirement nest egg. All this does is steal from the next generation. That's it. Withholding shelter (ie housing) either by limiting supply through regulation and legislation or simply by pricing people out is state violence.
Housing prices need to come down. Hoarding housing needs to be massively disincentivized. We need to stop giving massive tax breaks to homeowners. None of this is popular but without major reform we're headed down a bad road.
Canada is heading towards crisis at the moment and many of its problems can be tied directly back to soaring house prices.
The consequences of high house prices are everywhere too. More expensive commercial real estate means businesses need to recoup that cost through higher prices.
bashmelek|1 year ago
switch007|1 year ago
House prices are a cancer on society
tlogan|1 year ago
- Insurance Company Consolidation: As the industry consolidates, large insurers gain the ability to strategically drop unprofitable market segments. This allows them to improve profitability, but it often leaves consumers in those markets with fewer or no options.
- Regulations: Some states, like California, have introduced stringent requirements that compel insurers to continue providing coverage, even in high-risk areas. In response, many insurers have opted to exit these markets entirely. Consolidation has made this easier for them to implement at scale.
- Lack of Investment in Disaster Prevention: Across both Democrat- and Republican-led states, we’ve seen a decline in state and federal spending on preventive measures for natural disasters. This shortfall exacerbates the risks insurers face, further disincentivizing them from operating in high-risk areas.
yodon|1 year ago
The issue is not that the insurance regulations have tightened or changed. The issue is that the climate risks have heightened and the regulations have NOT changed to match the heightened climate risks.
Small increases in average temperature of the air leads to large decreases in average moisture content of brush and vegetation, making fires more common and more likely to impact more homes. The insurers have the data, that's why they are acting the way they are. Fires are more common and fires are larger. Not politics. Actuarial data compiled by insurance companies. If you've spent any time with insurance CEOs, you'll know they are not bleeding heart liberals. They tend to be very conservative and very data driven. And they have the data and it impacts their business.
The regulatory issue is that, to prevent historical forms of bad behavior on the part of insurers, state regulators require that insurers can only set pricing for fire insurance (for example) on the basis of historical data, not on the basis of forward-looking projections. That's the right thing for regulators to do in normal circumstances, when the risk environment isn't changing, but if the risk environment is changing it means you as an insurer will need to pay out money in the future at a higher rate than you did in the past, but you can only collect money based on lower historical payout rates. You are, in practice, required by the regulators to now offer your product at a loss not because the regulations changed but because the average daily temperature is increasing ever so slightly but just enough to significantly increase your cost. You don't want to offer a product at a loss, so you leave the market.
As to why insurance is a regulated industry, in large part that's because insurance is one of the few products the government requires you to purchase, distorting the market, and also in large part because there are massive asymmetries of information between consumer and provider - insurance companies have much more information about risks than insurance customers do, which prior to regulation led to abusive practices on the part of the insurers, in ways that led voters to say "this is a problem that needs to be fixed."
All big problems are hard, and insurance regulation is a big hard problem. If you just say "the environment is changing, so insurers should be able to set prices based on forward-looking projections" you help with the climate pricing increases but are likely to get other unrelated bad behavior at the same time (forward-looking projections are notoriously easy to fudge or fake in ways that are massively favorable to the person making the projections). If you don't allow for forward-looking projections, you lose insurers, if you do allow for it, you get abuses. "Just do it the right way" is much easier to demand in a blog post or comment thread than it is to deliver in legislation.
ksynwa|1 year ago
https://consumerwatchdog.org/insurance/top-10-us-insurance-c...
epoxia|1 year ago
infecto|1 year ago
ttyprintk|1 year ago
iandanforth|1 year ago
These regulations have reasonable origins because as a mandated product it's pretty tempting to price gouge, but there's no exception for circumstances where the price really should be 3x the historical cost.
infecto|1 year ago
prmoustache|1 year ago
Problem solved?
yardie|1 year ago
Most likely, these houses will get bought by corporations to be rented out. They'll have the resources to self-insure. And at the next natural disaster the building falls down, renters are homeless, and what gets built in it's place will be 2x the price.
lowercased|1 year ago
I see where you're going, and sort of think it could happen in some areas, but regulations might not permit that any time soon, even if 'pure' market conditions might call for it.
Interesting to think what this might do for the 'tiny house' market. Start zoning more places where people can put up $30k tiny houses. You might still need insurance for protection against personal injury on/in the property, but rebuild/repair wouldn't need to be a factor.
Octoth0rpe|1 year ago
So if the 'problem' is _simply_ that people can't buy houses, I guess it's solved? If one words it more carefully - people can't buy houses that allow for a greater degree of economic stability and wealth accumulation - then no, problem not at all solved.
japhyr|1 year ago
I believe the main part of what the insurance payout covers is rebuilding. And rebuilding is what's expensive, moreso now than ever. So I think housing prices would crash in an uninsurable area because you might be able to buy cheaply, but you couldn't afford to rebuild when something happens.
In the end, we'll all be climate refugees?
jasode|1 year ago
Houses can't become a "cheap commodity" unless there are revolutionary new construction methods and/or alternative materials. E.g. something like cheap 3D printing of structural walls, ubiquitous robots, pre-fab modular rooms and roofs, etc and cheaper material alternatives to wood, concrete, tile, asphalt shingles.
Without a technological leap, traditional construction techniques will always have the baseline costs of paying expensive humans to rebuild the property. The labor costs of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, HVAC installers, roofers is ~50% or more of a house construction budget.
This means houses will always be "expensive" in relation to the average Starbuck's barista paycheck because of Baumol's "Cost Disease": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Put another way, we've known for several hundred years in math that the derivative of x^2 is 2x. Disseminating that knowledge should be cheap. And yet the cost(salaries) of calculus teachers and math professors (and the associated textbooks) keep going up instead of down. That's the "cost disease" similar with building houses.
That's why a bunch of insurers abandoning the market doesn't won't change the economics enough for houses to become cheap commodities. Houses prices may adjust with lower sales prices but it still won't drop to "cheap commodities" level pricing. e.g. Florida condos' prices drastically fall because the Surfside collapse triggers law requiring millions in maintenance and rising hurricane insurance rates ... Starbucks baristas still can't afford those discounted condos.
However, to your point about "market forces" creating a new equilibrium in prices... you can buy houses in Detroit for $1 but that does come with other issues:
https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ja3lm/e...
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-catch-to-buying-the-1-homes...
potato3732842|1 year ago
I don't think it's fundamentally uneconomical to live in these places. It's just uneconomical in the current "nobody has any responsibility for anything it's all just financialized away" status quo in which it's ok to have plastic siding over a plastic-wood structure and shrubbery all about status quo. People will have to return to the "old ways" of corrugated steel, clapboard (or masonry or cement board) and super short grass and dirt for large distances around structures.
alex_duf|1 year ago
It depends if the problem is the insurance or the climate
georgeburdell|1 year ago
He keeps repairing because he is a general contractor and the house has history to him.
jmclnx|1 year ago
Now that is the funnest quote I have seen in 2024. I would love to know what government will lower your property tax if your house value falls ?
I have never seen that happen ever nor do I know anyone who has seen that happen over the past 40 years.
dylan604|1 year ago
You must live in a state without property taxes, or you just have no idea how they work. Either way, this is exactly how property taxes work.
ellisv|1 year ago
Take a look at Detroit and surrounding area property values in the late 1980s and 2008-2012.
aaronblohowiak|1 year ago
zdragnar|1 year ago
With such a significant drop in market value (can't get a mortgage on uninsurable property) the properties will just be abandoned, and twice as fast if the taxes aren't reassessed downward.
kylebenzle|1 year ago
lightedman|1 year ago
Plano, TX.
ttyprintk|1 year ago
kittikitti|1 year ago
goneri|1 year ago
BriggyDwiggs42|1 year ago
notTooFarGone|1 year ago
BIG CLIMA IS OUT TO GET YA.
robocat|1 year ago
Anyone have ideas on how to invest in other securities/properties to self-insure?
mensetmanusman|1 year ago
Homes should be an expense, not an asset.
_1tem|1 year ago
nojvek|1 year ago
That 100 or so trans folks in prison can’t access the bathroom of their choice or get healthcare they need.
Millions spent on supposed woke war to show the Dems they are “anti-woke”.
Senator Rick Scott who was caught with pants down embezzling billions in insurance fraud was voted again.
Florida did this to themselves.
A_D_E_P_T|1 year ago
What I hate, most of all, is that it's so often mandated -- and, yet, at the same time, so complex and annoying to attain. Half the time I need to buy some BS insurance for my business, I can't even purchase it online, I need to fill out a 20-part form and then "Speak with an Agent," who will resist giving me all of my options and make purchasing a personal ordeal.
I had considered, in a half-serious way, setting up an "insurance" company (probably incorporated in Sealand) that sells "basic packages" for very low prices -- and when you "speak with an agent," explicitly tells its customers that it will never pay out any claims. It would be nothing more than a fig-leaf, so that you can tell third parties, "yeah, I have insurance, don't bother me about it."
It would probably be illegal, which is sad. I just don't want to be annoyed and don't like being forced to deal with grifters.
badpun|1 year ago
rayiner|1 year ago
[deleted]
keybored|1 year ago
sofixa|1 year ago
Do you mean to say that low IQ and low impulse control are the "well supported scientific" explanation for crime?
That seems wildly improbable. Ted Kaczynski being the obvious counterexample, but there are many other premeditated criminals who are intelligent. And that's only if we narrow "crime" to mean violent crime against people/things, but if we add in financial crimes/fraud/etc. this becomes even more easily disprovable.
freen|1 year ago
InDubioProRubio|1 year ago
a3w|1 year ago