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Comment by speff | Hacker News Reader

> Regulators asked for that [better metrics] in 2023 but lawmakers rejected it, claiming it would “upset the apple cart” of Florida’s insurance industry.

I don't disagree with the lawmaker's stance on this one. FL's in a bad spot where home insurance in particular is unsustainable given the increasing threat from climate change. Why would I want to run an insurance operation in FL without an actual incentive (read: more money)? There ARE going to be multiple city-leveling hurricanes in the future - how do people expect to be able to pay for this?

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You raise the rates on everyone to cover actual expected losses, and make sure that the insurance companies don't commit fraud.

Then people will say that they can't afford Florida. And they will be correct.

Agreed, but it seems like the people of FL want a populist who will prevent the companies from raising rates[0][1]. What happens then?

It's rhetorical, since we see in this post's article what happens. But my point is that something like this was more-or-less inevitable.

[1]: https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desan...

[2]: https://www.floridapeninsula.com/blog/florida-legislation-he...

They want the socialism benefits wrapped in populist authoritarianism to appease their tribal and in group belief system. “The only moral benefits are my benefits.”

With Florida climate risk accelerating, the new admin telling states FEMA is unnecessary, and ~15-20% of Florida homeowners going without property insurance due to cost, this will manifest in an unfortunate but entirely expected outcome: catastrophic economic loss at some point in the future with no recourse for the majority impacted (citizen homeowners and GSE investors alike).

Followed by a federal bailout, presumably

>> What happens then?

Same thing that's happening in CA. Insurers pull out of the state and non-renew policies.

I'm sure it was satisfying to see the regulator stick it to the insurance companies, but you can't force them to write policies if they don't think it's worth it.

This is literally the opposite of what is happening. They are reforming laws to decrease costs, and have had new insurers enter the market.

https://www.wptv.com/money/real-estate-news/9-new-insurers-f...

> Agreed, but it seems like the people of FL want a populist who will prevent the companies from raising rates[0][1]. What happens then?

Eventually, property values would be drastically reduced and home insurance would be more per year than the mortgage. If it’s 80% mortgage 20% insurance premiums now, maybe it will flip to something like 35%/65% mortgage/insurance with property values halved (or more). I’m ignoring the fact that the replacement cost of a home has little to do with the property value since most of that value is in the land, but the land would also be worth less. Regardless, a shitload of mortgages would be underwater, impacting both lenders and borrowers on a massive scale. Vast amounts of wealth would be destroyed.

Or, property values remain the same and the poor have to leave Florida. This assumes there are enough people that can move to Florida and pay the same for a property with doubled or tripled insurance premiums, which is probably less likely than the first scenario I laid out.

It's a little odd to say "vast amounts of wealth would be destroyed" without noting that this is the result of spending, borrowing and lending irrationally.

It's not so much that the mortgages are underwater. It's that the houses are.

Wouldn't the insurance being twice the mortgage mean that in the time you pay your mortgage the house is expected to be destroyed and rebuilt twice?

This is accurate at the macro level, but on the micro level the insurance companies are doing nasty insurance company stuff like doubling rates in ~5 years, requiring people to replace their roofs every 10 years instead of every 30 years (at their own expense) and low balling claims expecting most people to not hire a lawyer to fight for them when their house is in shambles. They've really gotten shady over the last few years. These aren't fly-by-night insurance companies, these are companies you've all heard of that make hundreds of billions of dollars a year, companies with blue logos and red logos; how American.

The other problem is, as most of you may know, to get a home loan to buy a house, you are required by the banks to carry insurance. This makes it a near monopoly that these companies are taking full advantage of. I'm sure the legislature is happy to take campaign contributions from these companies to ensure the status quo. No one will get arrested. You know the drill.

I agree insurance will be more expensive in a hurricane prone area, but all the shady stuff is what people are complaining about.

As a state, they consistently vote for politicians who are anti-regulation and pro-capitalism. What do they expect to happen here?

I think the last Democrat who ran against DeSantis got caught smoking crack in a hotel room with a male hooker. Florida doesn't seem to have a lot of great choices. Pick the corrupt person, red or blue.

To be fair, a lot of Democratic politicians destroyed their economies with extended lockdowns, and also being extremely generous with prosecuting theft, among other things, so Florida isn't the only one with bad choices.

I'm not defending DeSantis, but it seems the job of US politician attracts a certain type of person, regardless of what color their flag is. The longer they stay in, the more comfortable they get with being, lets say, morally flexible.

Wasn’t his last opponent Charlie Crist in 2022? He didn’t seem to be a bad choice.

Yes, you're right. Crist was a Republican governor before but he switched to Democrat last cycle. He was decent as far as I remember, but I was too young when he was governor and wasn't paying much attention. I wanted Crist to win last cycle; DeStantis really went off the handle starting with his second term. His first term was ok.

> I think the last Democrat who ran against DeSantis got caught smoking crack in a hotel room with a male hooker. Florida doesn't seem to have a lot of great choices. Pick the corrupt person, red or blue.

The was from DeSantis's first election for governor. The Democrat was Andrew Gillum, mayor of Tallahasee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Gillum

And it was meth, not crack, with a male hooker. But that was after he had already lost the election.

What's crazier is how close that election was. The spread was 0.4%. That's ~30K votes out of 8+M.

The 2022 reelection spread with DeSantis arguably at the peak of his popularity was 19.4% which is a landslide by all measures.

Well, then it sounds like they got what they wanted. If the numbers are to be believed, they got what they really wanted.

Which is why the rest of the nation is happy for them! They have the government they want and deserve. And I'm sure that government will sort out their problems in a fashion consistent with that government's beliefs, and therefore, also consistent with the desires of the people of Florida.

So everyone is getting what they wanted here. Really there is no problem.

You've heard of Elon talk of 'the woke mind virus'? Whether or not it's a thing, there is a concept of memetic viruses like computer viruses. There's also 'psy-ops', but psy-ops are usually intentional and pushed by some group, whereas mind viruses arise unintentionally. A few others:

Anti-Vaccine, Flat Earth, Doomscrolling, Productivity etc.

Well there's another. It captures people in their late 20s and 30s. It's getting political. It's getting far to ensconced in politics. You should treat politics like you are work at HF and your job is to find base reality truth. If not you become well, one of those guys, and unless you work in Government - no one wants to hear it.

California (largest state) burning is not good. Florida (3rd largest state) having rising house costs is not good. Don't get captured by tribalism.

There are no mind-viruses.

There are ideas. Some you like. Some you don't like. The fact that people feel a need to call ideas mind viruses is an indication of how far rational civic discourse has fallen. People have nothing of substance to offer in support or refutation, so they speak of mind viruses instead.

But here's the thing, a person not liking an idea doesn't make the idea a mind-virus. It's an idea. Ideas are good. Ideas are how we advance as a species.

Please try to appreciate that other people have ideas on how things should work. In fact, very traditional ideas on how democracy should work. You vote, you get what you voted for, good for you. Simple. Elegant. Fair.

My idea is that there is no need to be unhappy for people who get what they want through democratic means. That's not a mind virus any more than being woke, pro-vaccine, or pro-flat earth, or anti-flat earth, or anti-woke, or whatever is a mind virus. These are just ideas.

Mine just happens to be a very pro-democratic idea. You voted. You supported the guy or gal with the idea that you wanted. Good for you Florida. Not the idea I would have supported, but, hey, I respect your democratic right to self determination. Hope it works out for you.

One of these tribes repeatedly puts too much faith in their politicians to represent their interests, and then goes to work making excuses for why their legislation always seems to end up with loopholes, resulting in an ever-accreting ball of regulatory capture embraced by big business.

The other tribe just voted to outright destroy our government, on a spectrum somewhere between straight spite and handing control over to the very consumer surveillance industry that they themselves had been complaining about. When the other tribe tried to engage about the multiple bold lines being crossed and where the path would inevitably lead, they jeered and caricatured the frustration as "tears".

I'd say that some schadenfreude about a smaller situation with quicker feedback is an understandable coping mechanism.

Let's move past candidates. If we were to take a random polling of people in a median area of FL and ask them questions like "should we remove regulations on private businesses?". I would be flabbergasted if the polls showed anything other than overwhelming support for this. Likewise, I would imagine the same for a question like "Should the federal government provide home owners insurance".

And yet, if you were to ask the same people: "if you lost everything you owned in a disaster and were left penniless, should the government help you out?" I guarantee you the answer would be different.

And herein lies the real problem.

> the last Democrat who ran against DeSantis got caught smoking crack in a hotel room with a male hooker.

And yet Matt Gaetz got elected there. It seems having a flawed personal life isn’t a dealbreaker in Florida.

Gaetz was in the house. He only needed to convince his district to vote for him (1/28).

No one shoots themselves in the foot more often than GOP voters.

It’s wild to watch folks like my SIL (a teacher) and my BIL (a combat veteran with no other marketable skills) vote against their own self interests every time they select a GOP candidate.

These folks have spent decades doing everything they can to make life more difficult for teachers and veterans. Yet teachers and veterans will still line up to elect these people.

See, the problem with two political parties is you get a lot of baggage for a couple of things you like. So you're basically voting for two piles of shit that may say one or two things you like. Did I like lockdowns? No, Do I like corrupt insurance, also no.

The way I see it is the Democrats are for the really poor people and the really rich people, of which I'm neither. The GOP is for the really rich people, of which I am not. Neither party has any interesting restoring any type of freedoms, they both want to ban stuff they don't like.

The middle class really has no real representation, and that's why we're dying.

they both want to ban stuff they don't like.

genuinely curious which stuff do democrats want to ban?

I’m curious to hear the answer as well.

Maybe they’ll say something about guns. But we all know Republicans basically invented modern gun control.

Democrats want to ban things like unvaxxed children. Which sounds like a great idea. Especially looking at the current measles outbreak in Texas.

In the last 4 years the Democrats expanded overtime eligibility, ramped up antitrust enforcement, got inflation under control, cracked down on junk fees, forgave billions in student loan debt, invested in domestic manufacturing, invested in infrastructure spending (unlike Trump's "infrastructure week" that was talked about for his entire term and never happened), prosecuted companies for union busting, added penalties for airlines who abuse customers, and so many other things.

Anyone who claims "both are the same" and "neither does not anything for the middle class" is being willfully ignorant.

Yea, you're right. Biden did some pretty good things for the middle class. I'm glad he got us out of Afghanistan finally, though it was pretty messy.

I'm more remembering Clinton's NAFTA and basically telling everyone to "learn to code," and Obama bailing out the banks but allowing middle class homes to be sold for pennies on the dollar to companies like Berkshire. It wasn't his mess, but the bailouts seemed one sided.

Biden also did some bad things, like the lockdowns, and threatening people's jobs if they didn't get the jab. Misrepresenting the efficacy of the vaccine, etc. I believe Pfizer made record profits off those policies, which was, for lack of a better word, "icky." The Twitter Files were pretty bad as well. I didn't like that he defended his 93 crime bill, one of our countries biggest mistakes. He also punted on legalizing pot, ensuring more of the drug war. That's kinda my point, with either party, we get a few good things and a lot of bad things. It always feels like a bad deal.

Lockdowns were under Trump. How quickly we forget ...

"Why wasn't Obama in the White House on 9/11?"

"That's what I want to know!"

Not to mention that survey back in the day of Republican voters, "What if, instead of Obamacare, the government was to introduce an Affordable Care Act?"

80% of Republican voters were in favor of it...

Yes they were. They were also extended for multiple years under Biden. The no fly list for no jab under Biden, discharging military who refused the shot, Biden.

No they weren't. It was done, if at all in 2021, at the State level.

Vaccination requirements for travel were cross border, and there was never a "No fly list". The closest restrictions to what you may be thinking of was Hawaii's 5 day quarantine requirements for certain unvaccinated travelers, which continued until March 2022. Military have always had vaccination requirements.

You are an unreliable narrator, sorry.

Yes, you're right. It was for international flights. He also required anyone in-office to get the vaccine if they worked for a company with 100 or more people. That was shot down by the courts. People were scratching their heads why the corporate requirement existed and the airline requirement didn't.

https://nypost.com/2021/11/28/biden-allows-airlines-to-escap...

Pretending that all the covid restrictions were only from Trump is just plain wrong.

>It was done, if at all in 2021, at the State level.

And greatly extended, sometimes for years by Democratic governors held in high regard by the party. This crushed small (middle class) businesses, but the large conglomerates (Walmart, etc) survived just fine. In fact they thrived because all their small business competition died off. Restaurants too. The ridiculous outdoor dining, what a mess, they were just winging it the whole time.

Once again you're wrong. Only non-citizens had to show proof of vaccination to enter the US.

The OSHA rule never went into effect. The NY Post is not a good representation of "people". OSHA has certain powers to regulate work safety. The Supreme Court said vaccination requirements for workplaces should be handled at the State and Local level. Limiting travel is much more fraught, plus it's limited and intermittent exposure.

You were talking about Biden, not State level decisions about how to weigh risks and handle an unprecedented health emergency.

> These folks have spent decades doing everything they can to make life more difficult for teachers and veterans. Yet teachers and veterans will still line up to elect these people.

I don't know your SIL or BIL, but in general they line up to vote because the party promises to make life even more difficult for people unlike them. "I may be losing my job and health benefits, but on the bright side, some immigrant might be sent back to their country, or some blue haired lesbian might be driven to suicide!" That's the mentality we're dealing with.

Agreed. They vote like that because they wish to make life more difficult for those they dislike.

> FL's in a bad spot where home insurance in particular is unsustainable given the increasing threat from climate change.

I was a South FL resident for half of my life. Either the insurance pool is spread across the entire country, subsidizing FL, or just stop.

FL will soon be uninsurable in the free market.

Isn't this what happened in areas of California?

If I understand the situation correctly, yes.

The core of insurance is Lloyd's of London. They do the math, aka the re-insurance numbers.

If a retail insurance company can't get re-insurance for a local market, then they exit that local market.

That is what happened prior to the LA fires. The math saw it coming, re-insurance was pulled.

Both CA and FL are high-risk, and each have state-backed insurance systems of last resort. The more that these get tapped, the more unsustainable it all becomes.

Climate change, anthropogenic "or otherwise," sucks for insurance.

You're missing one key piece of the puzzle: consumer insurance rates in California are regulated by the California Department of Insurance led by an elected Insurance Commissioner. It's the agency responsible for regulating rates and how fast insurers can raise them. In the last decade, it's been very slow to allow insurers to raise those rates to account for the risk they've recalculated.

Insurers didn't pull out because the state is uninsurable, but because they were being hamstrung. Properly priced in fire insurance can be expensive here depending on location but it's not like Florida where there's predictable water damage to most houses in the path of a hurricane every 5-10 years. These past fires were the most destructive in history and burned under twenty thousand structures in the fifth largest economy in the world - it was traumatic but relatively minor in the grand scheme of things and well within the state's capacity to bail out without federal assistance (unlike Florida and the National Flood Insurance program which has sucked up tens of billions of federal funds since Katrina).

Only parts are uninsurable. If a house was built after 2005, it was done with updated hurricane codes. Most are built up higher, have hip roofs, and have their roofs strapped down to cinderblock walls with cement filled in the corners. All new roofs have a "sealed deck". The uninsurable are going to be on the coast (although you can mitigate this in a lot of cases) and low areas.

Side note: all insurance claims are subsidization.

> Only parts are uninsurable.

But the X zones keep shrinking, don't they?

I worry that FEMA's FIRMs will stop reflecting reality in the current political environment. Then many homes will be below flood levels. Then what happens?

> There ARE going to be multiple city-leveling hurricanes in the future - how do people expect to be able to pay for this?

Are there?

As far as I can tell, hurricanes:

- Destroy buildings that are not properly designed and built to withstand enough wind. The industry and modern codes know how to deal with this for new and sufficiently retrofitted construction. I don’t even think the measures needed are particularly expensive.

- Damage to structures due to wind-blown rain. The more informed architects and engineers know how to deal with this. A very brief search suggests that even the Miami-Dade code hasn’t caught up: for example, you can still build a vented roof assembly in Florida. This is a poor idea in a humid climate even without hurricane, and those vents are problematic in a hurricane. Getting rid of them in new or remodeled construction is easy and not very expensive, but architects and builders need to learn how.

- Damage to structures due to flying things near them. In a city setting, this can be mitigated by building structures that don’t turn into flying junk and enforcing requirements for people to keep their yards clean.

- Flooding: this will cause massive damage to whole cities.

An interesting property of the issues other than flooding is that the most vulnerable structures may get destroyed by hurricanes, leaving behind the less vulnerable structures.

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