Who Believes in Climate Change? Insurance Companies..

New York Times writers invited readers to submit their experience with climate related Home Insurance costs.

Claire Brown of the New York Times (via email):

We heard many horror stories about rate increases in places like Florida and California, where insurance markets have been turbulent for years. But we also heard similar anecdotes out of states like Ohio, Maryland and Massachusetts, where disasters are less frequent but homeowners say they’re seeing rates climb by 30 percent or more year after year.

A condo owner in Texas, a Dallas senior on a fixed income, said that her annual premium jumped to $1,239 in 2024, a 63 percent rise from the year prior, with no increase in coverage. In Minnesota, a homeowner’s rates are set to jump up to between $6,000 and $8,000 after their insurer stopped offering coverage. They previously paid $3,300. In the Colorado mountains, one reader saw their premiums climb to $8,600 last year, a more than a threefold increase over the past 15 years. They switched insurers. A homeowner in New Orleans said their total home insurance costs, including flood protection, had jumped to about $21,100 a year, up from $3,800 in 2015.

One clear theme: Readers say insurance companies are not providing clear or detailed explanations for rising rates, and a lot of people feel as if they’re paying for someone else’s risk.

“It is as though we are being held up by the mafia,” wrote one Minnesota reader who saw rates for a small homeowners’ association more than triple since 2021. “We have to have insurance, but the coverage we have is abysmal.”

Many of you described a fear that making a claim — that is, using insurance for its intended purpose — could prompt an insurer to stop offering coverage.

Several readers wrote in with stories about sticking with an insurance company for decades only to be dropped after making a single claim. Often, this meant switching to a new provider with much higher premiums.

Others are paying for home repairs out of pocket, in some cases spending thousands of dollars just to avoid insurance headaches.

“I honestly doubt that insurance will cover anything without a fight, but I still feel it is better to have insurance than not,” one Floridian wrote. “We do not ever put in any claims for anything that we can reasonably cover ourselves in order to reduce the risk of being dropped.”

Deductibles are creeping upward, especially for wind damage

When we mapped rising insurance premiums across the country, the numbers captured the total rates homeowners are paying. But they didn’t tell us anything about the plans these premiums are actually buying.

Readers wrote in to tell us that even as their premiums rise, the underlying plans are offering less coverage. Think of it as shrinkflation for the insurance market.

“Make a claim and you are penalized. There is a ‘windstorm deductible’ of 5 percent,” wrote one reader from New Rochelle, N.Y. “You know who believes in climate change? Insurance companies!”

Guardian:

Zillow, the US’s largest real estate listing site, has removed a feature that allowed people to view a property’s exposure to the climate crisis, following complaints from the industry and some homeowners that it was hurting sales.

In September last year, the online real estate marketplace introduced a toolshowing the individual risk of wildfire, flood, extreme heat, wind and poor air quality for 1m properties it lists, explaining that “climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions” for many Americans.

But Zillow has now deleted this climate index after complaints from real estate agents and some homeowners that the rankings appeared arbitrary, could not be challenged and harmed house sales. The complaints included those from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which oversees a database of property data that Zillow relies upon.

Zillow said it remains committed to help Americans make informed decisions about properties, with listings now containing outbound links to the website of First Street, the non-profit climate risk quantifier that had provided the on-site tool to Zillow.