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Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

"A moratorium on insurance price increases during the pandemic only heightened tension within the insurance industry."

Insurers have no control over either construction costs nor wildfire risk. All they might do is adjust premiums to accurately reflect those costs. By raising premiums they discourage people from continuing to live in fire-prone and/or high construction cost areas.

Instead we put a price cap, taking away that mechanism, leaving insurers at the mercy of rising risk and costs, and preventing people from feeling the incentives to change things.

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Frankly, if the state of California believes it knows better than the insurers how to fairly price risks to its citizens’ homes, it should offer that insurance itself.

As they’re doing with energy, they could implement progressive premium schemes for income redistribution purposes.

The richer public services and lower inequality should keep the state’s population boom thundering on.

Wait, no. That's the worst world. The state will simply pour taxpayer money into this and people will keep extracting it and throwing into a literal fire.

Please God no. I already lose more than I get to the government in taxes on every marginal dollar I make.

Don’t worry, every decade or so there’s a good reason for Congress to rescue the states from their foolish fiscal decisions (see also: public employee pensions).

Somehow, though, the “bailout” boogeyman is never called out for the states, even though they got hundreds of billions of essentially no-strings-attached “Covid relief” dollars from the Feds.

Subsidies to state governments are inevitable while the federal government retains monetary authority, and uses it to create continual monetary inflation.

The idea that individual states could have fiscal responsibility and no funding from the feds would require that the federal reserve stop that fountain of new money. But the economic priests have decided that this must never happen, lest the plebs stop having to work as much.

I believe OP was sarcastic in their comment about California nationalizing industries and making fees based on equity. In particular the "population boom thundering on" was quite obvious sarcasm, given that California has been in a steady decline.

Oh I should have detected that haha!

the State does in fact provide a reinsurance scheme of sorts - disaster designations and the release of funds...the Federal government provides a reinsurance scheme under that when they designate Federal disasters and release funds

not sure the State is equipped to take over the first level of insurance...go to the DMV some time and ask if that is who you want to deal with when you have roof damage from hail etc

They don't bail out the insurance companies though, so those companies have no incentive to play ball in CA if it's unprofitable or risky to them.

the unspoken and incredibly politically toxic truth is that a lot of people's homes, including many whole towns, are simply at too high of a wildfire risk to continue existing. there is no price that makes them a good risk for an insurer, and the state would rather those people moved somewhere else because they don't have enough firefighting resources to protect all the outlying sprawl.

a price cap on insurance means that properties in the urban cores should be able to continue to get policies, and properties in the woods will be essentially uninsurable. if you can reduce the number of houses being built in the woods, you can let a wildfire burn without having the bad press of losing so many homes.

Have we considered whether standard best-practice wilderness management, like controlled burns, can address issues like this, or is that still ignored/dismissed?

My understanding is that the current liability structure makes most potential controlled burns effectively impossible. I think you’d need an act of Congress to limit liability as long as certain easily justiciable standards were met.

One of the big fires last year I heard about was a controlled burn that turned into an uncontrolled burn so I guess it is not being totally ignored.

good topic but ugly truth behind it -- a US Interior agency near New Mexico had a scheduled controlled burn on the books.. apparently they can schedule things multiple years in advance.. but .. the drought got worse and covid hit. The department had personnel and morale problems.. lots of uncertainty.. they stalledxxxxx "waited patiently" for two more years as the drought got still worse but the documents describing physical risk were not updated.

The Federal department executed the burn and it went wild, and is the largest fire in recorded history in that area now, taking out an entire town plus other structures and causing the evacuation of Los Alamos National Laboratories at the same time. you can find the details easily.. there is a 70 page "final report" from the agency perspective. This is reality.

The simple reality is that not only does human incompetence get in the way of safety here, but burns probably just aren't a very viable option.

Historical controlled burns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in...) worked because they happened frequently and kept fuel in check while encouraging trees that were resistant to or even dependent on low grade fires. Fuel loads are dramatically higher than historically however.

Now we've also got massive areas of forest dieback due to climate-driven bark beetle outbreaks. Trees that do survive burns but are stressed by them are more vulnerable to pests, just like drought stress. https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/bark-beetles-and-climate... So controlled burns even done effectively may still result in unwanted tree dieback.

A much safer potential cure here would be a massive increase in targeted grazing on federal land to reduce understory fuel loads, but this is also a nonstarter politically in many areas especially in National Parks. We are still maintaining this myth of virgin wilderness untouched by the hand of man.

State and federal government simply isn't competent enough to handle this given the political realities in a democratic system. Basically what's going to happen is that the most vulnerable communities will get scorched out of existence, and we're just going to have to live with the impact of more wildfires until nature sorts itself out. Americans just can’t psychologically accept being told they don’t get to develop anywhere they want.

> Fuel loads are dramatically higher than historically however.

Yup! I live in the Sierras. Everyone in this thread talking about controlled burns needs to say "California has just spent a century pursuing a policy of fire suppression" a few times.

The fuel loads are insane, these fires have been turning into giant firestorms with their own weather systems in a matter of 2 or 3 hours during the summer. I've watched it happen a few times, frightening. I suspect you can't solve this problem with fire because even if you are burning the brush wet there is still enough fuel to dry the forest out and burn it to ash.

I personally think the state should tell insurers that they only have to provide insurance in wildlands if the home/property meets stringent fire safety rules around defensible space. My house isn't even in the coniferous forest (I live in the chaparral) and it has set backs, greenzones, the works. I get so frustrated when I'm watching news coverage of the fires and the house is surrounded in pine duff and has giant pine trees right next to it.

> much safer potential cure here would be a massive increase in targeted grazing on federal land to reduce understory fuel loads

Yeah, my dad, a California native, who studied forestry at Davis always says that the solution in millions of goats. Ironically this spring the local Sacramento news reported that there was a shortage of goats to clear brush and that was just for commercial landscaping in the greater metro area. So not only is not feasible because of green hand wringing but also because we just don't have adequate goats.

How do we get more goats? Clearly they can reproduce until we have too many goats for the brush that needs to be cleared, but then do Americans like goat meat?

The simple answer is that either we pay for them using the money we would have spent on controlled burning, or we give away the grazing rights for free at least.

Most ranchers who do brush control grazing get paid for doing so. This is the opposite of the federal policy today, where ranchers have to pay for grazing rights on BLM land. Not to mention the fact that some places we used to graze sheep on like Yosemite or Sequoia National Parks have a blanket ban on commercial grazing.

Instead, what we have is wildlife conservation groups killing bills to expand grazing in CA. https://mountainlion.org/2021/04/29/ab434-california-state-p...

> wildlife conservation groups killing bills

that's not the start of a conversation that finds solutions. Obviously there is lot of hurt and urgency, also there have been a lot of bad bills, also there is a lot of private land grab on public property, also the existing policies have led us here.

AND.. when I read the actual research, there is far more already known, than anyone at the negotiating table seems to know.. so you get bullies and spies, angry side comments and behind-the-scenes demands..

far, far too late to just call the other side of the table uncomplimentary names, if you are serious about this.

Conservation groups like the Mountain Lion Foundation or the Sierra Club are legitimately terrible at advocating for balanced, holistic solutions. They’re the literal definition of special interest groups.

There should be alignment of interests between environmental groups and rural people who don't want their communities destroyed by wildfire. Neither of them want the forests burned down. Instead, these groups pursue a singleminded focus on attacking anything that doesn’t comply with their dogmatic pursuit of wilderness untouched by anything other than recreation.

Sierra Club appears to be a mixed blessing at this point, granted

controlled burns require weather conditions that allow them to be done safely, as well as people knowledgeable enough to keep them controlled. and the amount of the time in the year when temperatures are cool enough and the ground is dry enough keeps shrinking. controlled burns are only really a solution for a very small percentage of a space as big as california if you want to do them safely. What they sometimes do up here in canada is just monitor and let the fires burn out of control as long as they're not moving towards a populated area, to reduce fuel in a large area. but you can only do that as long as the area is truly unpopulated, if one person builds a cabin in the woods you have to move to suppression.

as i understand it, there's been a fair bit of progress in the last couple years regarding best practice for wildfire protection in populated areas. you can do a lot by removing underbrush and building firebreaks around a town, as well as relatively simple measures like disallowing cedar-shake roofs. there's probably a future where properties in towns that implement strong wildfire protection plans can continue to be insured, and towns that don't cease to exist. but that only solves the problem for towns, i don't see what can be done for properties in the woods outside a town's firebreak.

I’d imagine that it is feasible to defend any area with greater than x people per square mile from fire, aye? At some point you could install multiple fire hoses per block, build river beds to create fire breaks, and clearcut the surrounding area, no?

Sure, at far greater cost than the houses themselves. Who pays for that?

We wouldn’t debate fire risk with a city as dense as Manhattan. There is a cutoff where the population density and size makes fire prevention/risk management economical.

That cutoff is probably two orders of magnitude higher density than these places that are burning.

That depends on where you are talking about. In SoCal with the Mediterranean climate and relatively few forests, it would probably work. Brush clearance is already a thing and it’s possible to step it up a lot more and enforce on absentee land owners that don’t do it.

NorCal with the thick forests, you’d need to clear cut so much, you’d be irreversibly altering the landscape and will probably get other bad things for it, such as erosion and landslides. The vegetation will also try to grow back aggressively (NorCal is a lot wetter than SoCal). So you’d end up doing this over and over again. It’s unlikely to be economical.

The northeast is full of managed landscapes. It’s not necessarily cheap to do, but it’s also not expensive. However we do not generally have landslide risks.

> build river beds to create fire breaks

Ah, I see you've never tried to do anything involving water or drainage in California

In california you also have to deal with CARB (Air Resource Board) and get allocated burn days. They are so few that even when conditions allow no burns happen because of this logistical nightmare: https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-he...

Firefighting resources are already stretched thin. Adding more bureaucracy on top of these tough logistics make any preventative burns impossible to plan since CARB can just deny it the last minute.

CARB performs a useful function (acid rain anyone?), but if you asked most people in CA, I suspect wildfires will come in a lot higher on the list than smog from occasional burns. With uncontrolled fires, even more smoke and who knows what else goes into the air already.

I’m sorry I have but one upvote to give, but those who aren’t local don’t seem to have any notion of how stringent environmental and air quality regulations are in California in this arena.

Nobody wants the LA smog of the 1970s back, but controlled burns are largely impossible much of the year due to their effects on air quality.

Wildland firefighters - of whom I count several among my cousins - are between a rock and a hard place on this issue. They spend more of each year in “fire season” in part because they cannot pollute the air during “not fire season” with controlled burns.

Thank you and your family for their service and protection to all of us!!!

Hopefully one day we get a study that shows the fires end up spewing even more pollutants than any controlled burn, so the net effect of not doing these controlled burns is likely a lot worse.

Of course they are too chicken shit to take more aggressive action against the real emissions problem: cars.

Allowing new pollution spewing gas guzzlers to continue to be produced and sold until 2035 is absurd. They should ban production in 5 years and ban use by 2035.

> ban use by 2035

For personal vehicles that would hit the sector of population least able to afford an EV. Incentives and cash for clunkers type programs work better than forcing a financial burden on folks.

The other problem is that we don’t yet have good alternative to heavy diesel trucks. Sweden is experimenting with some cool options and we need a similar infra investment: https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/05/09/sweden-is-building-... and https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...

The problem is that the last article is from 2016. All the investment is still going to long battery ranges and such, when if we built infra like this, trucking companies would switch due to much lower costs.

Best practice wilderness management is to not allow people to build houses there.

> there is no price that makes them a good risk for an insurer

To a naive mind that doesn't know much about insurance this sounds untrue. I'd be willing to insure houses myself with as many funds as I could get at 33% of the property value per year, for example.

How much do you need in savings to handle the maximum number of properties destroyed in a once per hundred year, bad year? If the number is greater than 100% of home value, clients are better off holding savings funds.

There's also the correlated risk issue.

Say 10% of your claims are against some natural disaster, and they will either not get triggered at all, or all get triggered at the same time. That's an uncomfortable situation - this is what is called catastrophe risk. Ideally as an insurer you want lots of uncorrelated risks and the strong law of large numbers is on your side.

Insurers typically outsource such catastrophy risks (to some extent anyway) to reinsurers, ie insurers to insurers, but (a) that's not a hard guarantee of risk mitigation and (b) they still have to pay for it.

I can imagine that in this whole quagmire, and considering what people would pay for insurance, it's easier to just pass.

That is what reinsurance is for

Oh gee. Thanks for repeating what the parent said...

Who's going to pay that much for insurance though?

No one. That's the point of using a market to tell you where it makes economic sense to build a house.

Politically though if those houses are uninsurable, if there is a big fire, the government will bail the homeowners out, so it’s effectively zero cost fire insurance.

Unfortunately if people ever realize that, even in CA the answer will be "bulldoze all the trees"

I think that’s unrealistic. If you want to get rid of the fuel for fires, the best way is prescribed fires. If things get that bad, we’ll just see the regulations around prescribed burns loosened, the way they should be anyways.

Nah, if you bulldoze the trees, you get fire-based shrubs in however many years and those aren't necessarily better.

Also, California cities don't even have the money to bulldoze the trees in an N-mile radius around them. California did log the entire Sierra Nevadas a hundred years ago, yes but those trees were valuable and there actually weren't as many of them (due to the fire ecology). A hundred years of fire suppression forestry and logging have turned the Sierras into a giant thicket - filled with small trees and shrubs with no market value, not easy to remove and ready to explode.

> California did log the entire Sierra Nevadas a hundred years ago

insufficient detail, plus people lied in writing to get paid in Sacramento because "who could know"

basically a BS statement, right?

Are you saying they didn't log all those trees? I don't know the specifics, but I know that where I am up in Oregon there is very little of the old growth left. Almost everything got logged at one time or another. We still have plenty of forests, but they are all second growth.

Yep, in New Zealand, we're already looking at managed retreat in seaside / riverside communities that are proving untenable in the face of increasing erosion/flooding events due to climate change.

We have a national disaster insurance entity[0], but coverage from them is tied to insurance from an insurance company. So as insurers start to refuse to insure houses at proven high risk of natural disaster, then the EQC coverage isn't applicable either.

It will suck for some communities, but it's the reality of climate change that some of those changes are gong to suck.

And I just can't believe that California, like Australia, has allowed so much residential development in ecosystems where fire is a natural part. Not sure if it's the triumph of hope over facts, or just plain ostriching.

[0]: https://www.eqc.govt.nz/about-eqc/

Except the state normally (I have no idea of the current situation with California) won't let the insurance companies accurately price the high risk areas because the voters will scream at the insurance bill.

Eventually it reaches a point where the state puts so much burden on the insurance company that they decide it's uneconomic to operate there and leave. Any insurance company refusing to write should be interpreted as a whack with a clue-by-4.

Interestingly this is already happening in Florida, where repeated hurricane damage and high levels of fraud has led to the exodus of pretty much all national insurance companies. https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/floridas-insurance-crisi...

So that one was almost entirely fraud driven - there literally were contractors going around door to door after the hurricane, offering free roofs regardless of damage.

My guess is that it's a structural dynamic - something like a hurricane is bound to trip the cat reinsurance thresholds for all the insurance companies, which means they have very little incentive to actually verify claims/monitor fraud, since it's the reinsurers eating that cost.

Insurance fraud is just high in Florida in general. The same can be seen in auto and health.

A less distorting mechanism is for CA to provide re-insurance to cover the massive catastrophic risk, while allowing providers to service the everyday risk. CA already backstops earthquake insurance in a similar way.

You do lose the market signals about the real cost to insure when you do this though. Ultimately we have to change where we build but that's a HUGE undertaking and it's unclear where the political will for that will come from.

Source on the fact that CA backstops earthquake insurance? I have heard over and over again that earthquake insurance isn’t worth the exorbitant price because the carriers will be bankrupt in any actual catastrophic quake.

Isn’t capping insurance a regressive scheme when it comes to insurance. Poorest areas aren’t located high fire risk areas. These are single family homes. It’s like how Florida and federal flood insurance subsidizes insurance for beach front homes.

Also makes sense, the state is responsible for dealing with wildfire prevention. If insuring is done by them, they’re now doubly so incentivized.

> it should offer that insurance itself

Which it's going to do with insulin, but the market for that seems broken. The property insurance market is pretty competitive.

> As they’re doing with energy, they could implement progressive premium schemes for income redistribution purposes.

Except that they’re doing a horrible job and PGE continues to rob people with impunity.

We have this in Florida, a non-profit insurer of last resort. Eventually, we will have a year with enough hurricane damage that it will wreck the entire economy, because so many homes have been built that cannot be reasonably maintained.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Property_Insurance_Co...

They kind of do — at least, at the end of the market where insurers aren’t willing to do it for the price California allows: https://www.cfpnet.com/

> if the state of California believes it knows better than the insurers how to fairly price risks to its citizens’ homes, it should offer that insurance itself.

Behold, the California Fair Plan:

https://www.cfpnet.com/

Technically not a State agency. They force registered insurers to participate in a pool and insure homes. It should be called "California Forced Plan" or something worse.

In practice, it's a horrific thing. I know people paying $6,000 per year for home insurance when, in other parts of the State you can insure a home for $800 per year.

Fires, you say?

Yeah, no, not a single bush burned in their neighborhood in 30 years.

What happens is that some incomprehensible grouping of State, City, County...whatever agencies get together and declare entire regions as high fire hazard zones. That's pretty much a license to rape and pillage.

Check out the map:

https://osfm.fire.ca.gov/media/6636/fhszs_map.pdf

The whole thing is, from my perspective, a horrific authoritarian overreach.

Why do I say this?

Look at those areas and research how many homes exist in them compared to the rest of State. Then get data on how many homes per year burn down due to brush or forest fires. That part is important. You cannot count homes that burned down because a 3D printer caught fire in the garage or someone started an oil fire while cooking and could not put it out.

If you are going to classify an entire region as an extreme fire danger region, you'd better have lots of fires caused by events well outside anyone's home. You know, brush fires.

The truth of the matter is that the numbers don't justify any of this. They are taking advantage of people.

There are approximately 12 million housing units in California [1]. Out of those, between 2005 and 2022, some 65,000 structures were lost o wildfires.

That averages out to about 0.03% properties lost per year to wildfires.

And that number is deeply skewed by abnormal way-out-of-the-norm activity during three out of 18 years. If we take out these three data points we go from 65K properties lost down to 20K. Which means somewhere in the order of 0.01% of properties lost to wildfires under normal circumstances.

So, somewhere between 0.01% and 0.03% lies a sensible estimate. And for this ridiculous number they castigate a massive portion of the CA population with this high fire risk rating that causes their premiums to explode.

There's a lot more to this [3]. If you look at home fires at a national level (over 300K per year), the leading causes are cooking and heating equipment. And yet, once again, with 140 million housing units in the US, that number represents 0.2% of the housing units per year.

In other words, if we are going to talk about averages (not always a good idea), the national average for homes burning down due to fires not related to wildfires, is TEN TIMES greater than the percentage of housing units burned down in CA due to wildfires.

Conclusion: People are getting robbed. Insurance companies are just fine.

[1] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/housing-stat...

[2] https://headwaterseconomics.org/natural-hazards/structures-d...

[3] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/house-fire-stati...

They do, at least for earthquake insurance: https://www.earthquakeauthority.com/

CA has required since the 80s that insurers that offer homeowner insurance also offer earthquake. However, after the ‘94 Northridge earthquake, 93% of insurers had either stopped offering or greatly restricted their property insurance underwriting in CA.

Now the CEA sells two thirds of the earthquake insurance policies in CA.

So if the insurance companies don’t step up and underwrite, CA may very well do just what you said.

So then how about this: Ballot measure to pay high risk residents to move.

Long term tax burden goes down, nobody lives in the hot zone

I wonder how it could work with existing fallow real estate that isn’t in those fire prone areas

So, how would some organization help move all those at risk people into existing vacant real estate in a way that benefits the at risk homeowner?

It's like all the complaints about PG&E.

Don't like the way PG&E operates? Take it over and make it a public utility.

State Leg: crickets chirping.

As always, it is politically expedient to attempt to control prices, and usually wins votes from people who are interested in only short term results or do not understand how markets work.

Adjusting supply and demand, however, inflicts a lot more pain, so it ends up being a last resort, if even that.

> attempt to control prices

Indeed, and they insist on doing so in the most fine-grained, bureaucratic way imaginable:

> Established in October 2022 and touted as a first of its kind, the state program requires insurance providers to discount policies for property owners who mitigate wildfire threats by installing fire-rated roofs, enclosing eaves and creating ember-resistant zones. Insurance companies have 180 days to submit a wildfire risk assessment or score, which the state can appeal.

If they can't find insurance does that not still count as an incentive?

the same thing applies to eviction moratorium, there are a lot of financial institutions, big and small, are targeting mom and pop landlords who cannot withstand the non paying tenants. The owners sold at a cheaper price given the promise of no headache and the institutions have lawyers on retainers. Seen this played out many times, I even got involved in a JV deal for one. It's insane how californians complain about high rent prices, with insanely high risk like this of course there needs to be a high return, not to mention the nimby limiting the supply.

Lots of people where I live can't get their current homes covered by home insurance, as a fire destroyed 1,000+ homes a few miles away in a matter of hours.

Are these people to abandon their homes outright?

They don't need to abandon their homes, but those homes are becoming uninsurable without heavy subsidies (like FEMA flood insurance). Houses should simply not be built in many of these places.

They don't have to, if they don't feel they need insurance.

Isn’t it usually required if you have a mortgage?

I can't remember the specific terms of my mortgage, but as I recall, the first level was 'you must have home insurance with certain parameters including having us as a named insured, etc; if you don't, we will obtain home insurance at your expense'. But I don't know what the recourse is if home insurance is unobtainable.

Certainly, it would be a lot harder to get a new mortgage underwritten, which makes refinancing mostly impossible and makes selling difficult.

Given that the property would be difficult to sell, I'd imagine even if the contract allows it, lenders wouldn't foreclose for lack of insurance if insurance is unavailable.

Really, I think the way to move forward on the issue that so many homes are built in areas they shouldn't be is to make available insurance policies that cover permanent relocation, rather than rebuilding in place. You can still live there until it burns down, at which time, you must move elsewhere and the lot is deemed unbuildable for the forseable future. With some sort of provision to manage windfalls from changes in conditions allowing safe construction in the future. (It's not fair if you force people out, but ten or twenty years later, let people in again; OTOH, maybe one hundred years later, it will make sense?)

> But I don't know what the recourse is if home insurance is unobtainable.

The recourse is usually foreclosure when the borrower doesn’t meet the essential terms of the mortgage agreement. It doesn’t matter why the borrower can’t get insurance any more than it would matter why the borrower couldn't make payments on the loan.

For my mortgage the terms are that the bank acquires insurance and charges me, not that they are allowed to foreclose.

They have mortgages that require them to have insurance.

Maybe. Or maybe if their municipality got serious about fire breaks, fire prevention, and invested in their fire department they would be insurable again.

No is even sure what the original source of the fire was, after a very long investigation.

Does it matter? The problem isn't that the fire started, that's always going to happen sometimes, the problem is how much it spread and how much damage it did.

The situation sucks, but their continuing to live there and be insured has to be subsidized by somebody somewhere. The area is clearly insanely risky to the point where no premium justifies offering coverage.

If coverage was offered, who should be the one subsidizing it? Private companies? No way, they never would. Government? That's just a regressive policy funneling money to a relative well-off (homeowners) group of people.

There’s always a premium. Even if 30% of home value per year. The issue is the fair price for risk isn’t something people would want to ever pay.

Nor should they. If they could pay that ridiculous rate then they wouldn’t have a problem not having insurance. You’re presenting it as someone that buys a 300k house and gets a $1500/mo mortgage doesn’t “want” to pay $8500/mo in home insurance.

It’s better insurance just isn’t available at any price. You can know going into the purchase that the home will be uninsurable so your financial picture needs to account for that.

Also in general I don’t believe you can get a mortgage without home insurance? So people buying these properties would have to come in cash.

>but their continuing to live there and be insured has to be subsidized by somebody somewhere

I think insurance companies cover customers because the customers pay for the insurance.

You're saying that because profits for insurance companies aren't at the level the insurance companies want, that they can say - because it's illegal to own an uninsured home, where people can and can not live?

That seems like an overreach of power of a private company.

>The area is clearly insanely risky to the point where no premium justifies offering coverage

Perhaps this was lost, but areas where insurance companies are deeming too risky to live is growing given climate change is real and weather patterns are shifting - sometimes drastically - to create more powerful storms.

This is just going to continue to happen in a game of Russian Roulette.

> Are these people to abandon their homes outright?

When they next burn down, yes.

about a decade ago, purchased a home half a mile away from a river. For the last 50 years, the river bank has been has been slowly moving outwards out due to erosion. I bought the house for a million, it's now worth two.

Last year, a thousand houses a few miles downstream fell into the water. This year, my insurance company cancelled my coverage, and I can't find anyone else who will insure me. What I'd like is for premiums to be raised for people who bought their homes in a safe area, to pay me my million dollars in profit when my house falls into the watter. This is my Current home. Am I supposed to just abandon it because no one will buy it?

So, the answer to your question, is yes. Home prices go up and down. Yours is now worth zero because of your bad decision. It is not the job of other people, to pay you for your mistake.

Why should others subsidize your investment lost?

He says he’d like that, but that it wouldn’t be fair

they should not. the fact that you did not understand this is what I was saying, suggests a lack of practice in social interaction. now this is not meant as a personal attack. think of it like this: you are teaching an arithmetic class - something for which fully functional members of society need to have the skill. you explain that 5+2*2=9. someone corrects you that it is in fact 14. what would you suggest this person do?

this also applies to basic language skills. i suggest that whatever advice you have for the previous hypothetical person, you apply to basic social interaction in your own life.

but maybe I'm wrong, and you did not read the comment to which I was replying. in that case, I suggest that when you read a comment, you should see the comment it's rebutting, prior to posting yours. this also, is a basic social skill.

I'll start you off: I do not own a house at all as I travel internationally and move around too much to stay in one place over a few years. I would also never purchase one in a risk zone, since there are thousands of others available w/o the risk, and they don't cost more.

Usually the answer is "they should just sell" though less clear is to whom.

The government could buy out the homes.

There'd have to be restrictions to prevent abuse and the government buying 1M+ vacation homes (or whatever), but it'd make the problem go away.

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