State Farm seeks 22% emergency rate hike
ocregister.com
ocregister.com
In its “best” form, it’s requiring those who have bought homes in safer areas statewide to subsidize those in more dangerous areas, which is already absurd, considering those more dangerous areas are already predominately wealthy coastal and hillside areas that can and should pay their own full cost of insurance.
My annual payment with a different insurer nearly doubled after our insurer had to drop the entire zip code purely because half of my zip code is in a high fire hazard zone, even though my property and half of zip code is rated one of the lowest fire hazard zones in the state.
At its most extreme, because of the provisions limiting risk adjustment based on and within zip codes (originally, for redlining, which I understand, but for fire risk it makes no sense considering different locations are inherently riskier), it will and has caused insurance companies to exit the state entirely, and then we’re all screwed.
I do wonder if SCOTUS will revisit this and declare the original ballot measure limiting risk an unconstitutional “taking” from those in safer locations (or insurers themselves), given my understanding is Florida has the same issues too…
A $600k home that is sure to burn within 20 years will have a much lower premium than a $6m home in the same location, after all.
So, if it costs $6M to rebuild a $600K house due to construction labor shortages and permitting bullshit, you still need to insure for $6M.
It’s basically never a financially good idea to build a house in California, since market value will be below construction cost. (Otherwise, we’d have a housing boom instead of a housing shortage!)
So, decreasing the supply of buildable land (as your proposal would do) will only make housing prices go up.
Worse, all the major cities are prone to flooding and hurricane-force storms thanks to climate change, so we’d need to disallow building there too. That’s on top of earthquake risk.
If that were true, there would be no new construction in California. There is still plenty, although it might not be where you're looking. And much construction isn't happening where you're looking because 1/the land isn't suitable for construction, or 2/zoning rules forbid building housing in such a way that it would be profitable.
The market value of almost every single home in the Palisades, as someone with family from there, is due to the location, not the homes themselves.
If the land loses its intrinsic value because it is inherently unsafe, it will be cheaper to buy. Maybe only modest homes get rebuilt because decreased land value cannot support estates anymore, but that is the situation.
> It’s basically never a financially good idea to build a house in California, since market value will be below construction cost
No, I can assure you as someone who has both built and remodeled in Los Angeles, this is not the case. This region is so housing starved that even spending $200k to a convert a 500sqft garage into an ADU (which is extremely high cost per square foot, compared to national averages) immediately increased the property value by almost $400k. The reason Los Angeles has a housing shortage and not a housing boom is entirely self-inflicted: this city has a terrible zoning and NIMBY problem, and the city refuses to meaningfully fix it. Developers would _love_ to build here, if only they could: projects that take 60 days to get permitted in Dallas, TX take 3-5 years here.
On the other hand, affordability will also be adversely affected in the short and long term if nothing changes. Once the moratorium for insurance companies to leave the state is up in about 1 year, and no one can get a mortgage because no insurance providers are left. Banks will not take on the implicit roles of insurers in a no-recourse loan state.
Doing nothing is not an option. The writing is on the wall.
I agree that doing nothing is an increasingly unviable option
It's a ballot measure that's easily defeated as no one wants to pay more for insurance, and no one wants their property values to decrease. But no one wants to face the reality either.
It's likely that as insurance companies drop out, more Californians will find themselves on the state-sponsored FAIR insurance plan, which may already be insolvent. And the state will bankrupt itself and its citizens since no one can make any hard decisions.
That was a real case of voters voting against their individual interest (near-guaranteed higher property taxes) for their collective wellbeing (the solvency of the state)
We’re no stranger to ballot measures here, for better or worse. I think most Californians will agree with insurance reform when they realize they won’t be able to get insurance otherwise— also the fact that many people in safer areas probably would see rates decrease.
Every time I interact with them, they find a new way to break the law. The big one is that they refused to pay for covered damage to our house. After fighting it for about a year, they sent us a lowball check that was less than 25% what they owed.
Our premiums are 4-5x what neighbors with more expensive, higher risk houses pay.
Many properties have no willing insurer left, and have to participate in a state-funded plan (that many fear is not actually solvent). Many more properties only have one or two insurers left.
State Farm was the only insurer left in the Palisades, and my guess is after the moratorium to cancel policies is up in one year, if they can’t reflect the risk in their premiums to account for this fire, the Palisades will have no insurer left either. And then rebuilding will be impossible.
… the Palisades will have no insurer left either. And then rebuilding will be impossible.
People should rebuild where they want as much as they want, so long as they’re willing to accept the financial risk to do so (I.E. higher premiums that reflect the risk… which may be 10x higher, who knows! A lot of these Palisades home owners could, and would, pay for that risk, if only the law would let an insurer charge them for that)
State law does not let that happen, and all the risk is therefore subsidized by everyone else or not offered at all. Both worse outcomes!
If everybody else has very flammable houses then the fire is going to spread and cause a ton of damage to _not houses_. The state really does need to clamp down on people using private land to cause public problems (like lack of water pressure in fire hydrants).
I'm not sure that's the correct take-away. I think you had in correct in the second sentence.
> Do not rebuild in the exact same place, in the exact same way
If your area is a fire-prone, then yes I think you should be allowed to build there. However, your house better have taken into account fire. Whether it means you can't build houses within an acre of another or it has to be all stone, idk let qualified people figure out the requirements. But eventually everywhere in the US will have been hit by a natural disaster and the rule can't be you can't re-build, it just needs to be you need to account for what is likely to happen.
As to flooding, I don't know the specifics but if instead of rebuilding the same you put the house on stilts so just the staircase floods out every couple of years I think it's fine.
The 3 necessary components for fire are: oxygen, fuel, and ignition source. No stopping the presence of oxygen. Ignition sources are present with lightning strikes (among other things). That leaves fuel as the thing that can be controlled. If you can't reduce the fuel load around your dwelling, it doesn't make any sense to live there. I live in a forest that has experienced a tragic wildfire in the past, so I'm in a similar boat (but without the Santa Ana winds). Keeping fuel away from my home is something that I think about a lot -- and ACT ON a lot.
I have a neighbor who does practically nothing to reduce his fuel load. It's his legal right, but I think it's foolish. He's told me he likes to keep his property "undisturbed". It sounds like there's much of the same thinking that drives policy in California.
The combined practice of: (1) put out any fire immediately, and (2) do nothing to reduce fuel load, makes for a bad combination in the long run. It would seem to me that Californians should have figured these things out decades ago and be the experts on fire risk management. What am I missing?
Human nature, sad to say.
They were getting so rich so quickly it didn't matter that they had stupid and unsustainable government practices (not managing fire risk, meddling in insurance, etc).