Perhaps the most interesting part of the article:
Insurance, both property and health, is completing it’s morph into a parasitic value extraction tool with zero actual use. They are committing straight fraud at this point, daring people to sue them for contract breach, knowing many won’t
I agree with the first sentence, but I don’t think there’s a lawsuit here as the contracts that you sign with them have a limited term and they are simply not renewing
Always has been.
Did the CEO’s house burns down in the wild fire as well?
Absolutely sucks, but these are also some of the wealthiest homeowners in the US. Cut your losses and move to less vulnerable areas. Nobody should be building homes in flood plains, lake beds or fire prone areas, particularly the ultra-wealthy. Save FAIR for normal folks and low income families.
Good news! Everywhere is becoming a vulnerable area, so there won’t be anywhere that fits your criteria :D
Entire west coast is fire and earthquake prone.
Entire east coast is flood/hurricane prone (as shown by hurricane Helene absolutely destroying asheville, which is in the mountians
Central US keeps getting extreme weather / tornadoes.
Shit’s on fire, yo.
I think the curious aspect of this is that business is absolutely aware, and acknowledges existence of the climate change.
lol dude climate change has been in companies’ drawers since the 1970s, for example shell and such. they just acted as if they didn’t know to continue selling at record speeds.
They should be putting in effort to reduce climate change impacts. It’s in their financial interest, even if they have no capability to have a moral motivation
I’m pretty sure these gamblers will profit all the way down.
wow, its almost as if we should cut off the heads of insurance CEOs and nationalize them all into one low cost government plan thats paid for with pennies on the dollar in taxes.
lol, who am I kidding. Idiot Americans will always prefer paying 3000 dollars for bad coverage, rather than pay 100 in taxes for great coverage.
That is what confuses me. Nationalized Healthcare, even an extensively covered one (with dental, optical, and prescription meds included) will be much cheaper overall than the private bullshit happening now.
I never understood how privatization advocates so routinely get away with bullshit. How can anyone not see how public program failures are almost always the result of deliberate sabotage.
deliberate sabotage bought and paid for by the private industry, to increase public pressure to move more healthcare to the private sector, so CEOs can make more billions.
and i have no idea. americans are fucking stupid. “Do you want to pay an extra 100 dollars in taxes for great health coverage and no declining what you need?” "NO! I WANT TO PAY 5000 FOR COVERAGE THAT DENIES EVERYTHING, BECAUSE A POOR CEO NEEDS A NEW GOLDEN TOILET ON HIS 8TH YACHT "
BUT MUH TAXESS
You had me at cutting off the heads of CEOs.
Guillotines go brrrrrrrrr
Woodchippers. Guillotines are too 18th century. Put em’ in head first.
In that case my vote would be feet first. But I think they’ve caused enough pain to deserve a little on their way out ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Or, you know, tackle climate change. But both are equally unlikely.
You’d think that insurance companies would be on the forefront of pushing climate change mitigation and prevention specifically because the impacts of worsening climate change will have a massive impact on their bottom line.
Maybe they can counter some of the petro company propaganda with their own marketing.
Their time preferences have been shortened to “this quarter” just like the rest of the economy. We would need to buy insurance plans that last decades and not renegotiate every year.
So long as we live in an economy designed to maximize GDP, this can’t work.
TBH, if insurance companies started pushing for climate change policies it would probably make those policies less popular. If there’s an industry less trusted than Big Oil, it’s Insurance.
I’m thinking a death match between big oil and big insurance.
Why would they do that rather than just not offering plans in areas where they project they will lose money?
They’ll run out of places to sell insurance pretty fast if climate change isn’t effectively countered.
And that’s when you’ll start seeing the property insurance industry suddenly really give a shit about climate change.
They’re in the business of making money, not fixing problems. It’s easier to just pull out of an unprofitable area than fix the Republican party’s head-in-their-ass ideas about climate change.
With climate change, there is no option for “low cost” plan, government or no.
You can’t constantly have massive losses like these fires in a single area all paying out claims and expect to pay them off with low premiums.
Yeah the point flew way over that guys head
Did you pull a muscle? You know, stretching that hard to intentionally misconstrue what I said.
Seems to me that’s exactly what you said.
no, i said having a universal insurance would lower premiums significantly since there would be no corporate greed driving prices up for personal gain and everyone paying into a single pot.
But please, keep stretching. You are apparently treating this topic like a yoga class and gotta stretch stretch stretch.
Greed is bad, but its large losses in certain areas due to climate change-induced disasters that is pushing up prices far more than greed. You are the one that is stretching credulity more than a contortionist getting ready for their act.
And are you saying we should not have risk-based premiums? Sounds like you want the rest of us to subsidize living in a disaster prone area. I will gladly choose insurers that chops to drop clients in disaster prone areas so I can afford my insurance.
I haven’t seen it in the comments yet but this is just the death spiral of climate change. Everything will just get worse from here on out as long as society operates the way it does. To everyone’s “surprise” I’m sure.
Yeah, I really do wonder when the government and rest of the people start to seriously consider if it is worth it dropping $50 billion on places like SoCal and South Florida every few years or so. At some point you need to do the math and ask hard questions about whether it is worth it, and the answer damn well may be no.
The insurance companies gotta keep their shareholders happy. That is the number 1 priority and fuck the customer.
I completely get the eat the rich mentality. At the same time, it really doesn’t make sense to rebuild some of these places. We’re all paying for it one way or another.
/a rub living in a flyover state that’s very boring from a climate change perspective, at least so far.
Absolutely, every single homeowner will pay for the insurance company losses. There are plenty of places that should have been left to nature. The entire Florida Oblast should be a National Park.
Ahahahahahahaha! Hahahahahahahaha!
Oh my god, get fucked rich people!
This makes me so happy.
What the fuck is wrong with you
Either grow up or become less of shitstain
You think everyone in LA is rich?
People with multi-million dollar houses in the Palisades, yes.
Alta Dena is most definitely not.
Still mostly million dollar plus homes. 8-12 times what my Midwestern home is worth. Hell, a freaking empty lot in Altadena is worth more than my house.
That doesn’t necessarily make them rich. The combined salaries of my partner and I would make us “rich” in some parts of the country but we rent an apartment and almost live paycheck to paycheck.
If they are not rich owning a million dollar asset, then I’m poor as fuck.
Living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t make you not rich. It just means you spend what you make. Plenty of rich people do that.
If you spend what you make, you’re not rich. You’re pretending to be rich.
Someone should adjust the silhouette to look like Mario bros Luigi
The exposure isn’t quite right and there are artifacts, but I am not a graphic designer so 🤷It’s beautiful lol, your skills are apt. I meant the Batman on the building silhouette but this is equally cool
I meant the Batman on the building silhouette
Aww dammit 😅
The issue isn’t just local. “This is predicted to cascade into plunging property values in communities where insurance becomes impossible to find or prohibitively expensive - a collapse in property values with the potential to trigger a full-scale financial crisis similar to what occurred in 2008,” the report stressed.
I know this isn’t the main point of this threadpost, but I think this is another way in which allowing housing to be a store of value and an investment instead of a basic right (i.e. decommodifying it) sets us up for failure as a society. Not only does it incentivize hoarding and gentrification while the number of homeless continues to grow, it completely tanks our ability to relocate - which is a crucial component to our ability to adapt to the changing physical world around us.
Think of all the expensive L.A. houses that just burned. All that value wasted, “up in smoke”. How much of those homes’ value is because of demand/supply, and how much is from their owners deciding to invest in their resale value? How much money, how much human time and effort could have been invested elsewhere over the years? Notably into the parts of a community that can more reliably survive displacement, like tools and skills. I don’t want to argue that “surviving displacement” should become an everyday focus, rather the opposite: decommodifying housing could relax the existing investment incentives towards house market value. When your ability to live in a home goes from “mostly only guaranteed by how much you can sell your current home” to “basically guaranteed (according to society’s current capabilities)”, people will more often decide to invest their money, time, and effort into literally anything else than increasing their houses’ resale value. In my opinion, this would mechanically lead to a society that loses less to forest fires and many other climate “disasters”.
I have heard that Japan almost has a culture of disposable-yet-non-fungible homes: a house is built to last its’ builders’/owners’ lifetime at most, and when the plot of land is sold the new owner will tear down the existing house to build their own. I don’t know enough to say how - or if - this ties into the archipelago’s relative overabundance of tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, but from the outside it seems like many parts of the USA could benefit from moving closer to this Japanese relationship with homes.
As far as the value of the home, you need to consider rebuilding costs. New construction costs in the LA area are on average $440 and higher for custom work.
At those prices, a new house, without the land, will cost at least $500000 to build (also note that a 1130 sq ft house isn’t really what most people want to buy, as the average new house size is around 2000 sq ft, putting the cost of a basic house at $880000, again without the land).
Really cool idea, and comment. I think it would reduce money tied up, but still, would require significant investment to build and maintain
While I mostly agree with your line of thinking, I do feel the urge to point out that most of the value of property is tied to the land underneath the structure, rather than the building itself.
This is largely why one of those Sears catalogue 2-3 bedroom post-war homes is worth significantly more than a similar footprint modern apartment/townhouse a few doors down.
The houses themselves are often seen as a depreciating asset; and for the more unscrupulous land-bankers, these fires just became free demolition.
I guess what I’m saying is, shit’s even more fucked than you thought… and until we get rid of milquetoast liberal politicians and replace them with actual populist progressives globally, it will only continue to get worse.
I see this sentiment frequently. What I don’t see, though, is how this can cmbe achieved short of government owned uniform housing. Maybe I’m missing something, though. Can you helpe understand?
With regard to Japan, you’re right, single family homes aren’t intended to last all that long. This is largely because building standards there change so rapidly thst building something that lasts means that you wasted money. Even if it is built to last, it will fall out of code in a way that it will devalue over time.
That doesn’t happen in the US because we don’t have the same frequency of disasters and the same rate of change in building codes. Maybe that will change moving forward, though, given the increased frequency of disasters in the US due to climate change.
We could take notes from Finland: https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/look-finlands-housing-first-initiative
Throw a few of these up in every city. Would go a long ways quickly to solving problems.
Oh good megablock housing. I’m sure that won’t be abused in any way whatsoever
As opposed to the suburban sprawl we have now? Every lawn fertilized, every driveway 2.5 cars? Or the shanty towns?
It turns out building housing is as easy as building housing. I would absolutely live in one of these if they were correctly managed. A half a billion Chinese people can’t be all that wrong.
Can’t be wrong? I’m gonna have to point you to Kowloon. Kowloon was pretty wrong. They didn’t call it the city of darkness for nothing.
Using kwaloon walked city is disingenuous AF. Kowloon was a shanty town left to its own devices, governed neither by the British or the Chinese due to a quirk of geography and diplomacy. Kowloon (the walled city area now a park, not to be confused with the neighborhood) was never built to any sort of plan.
At it height kwaloon had 40,000 people living in it. In hong Kong alone there’s now close to 10million, most of whom live in apartment buildings. It can work. It does work. Every day.
I swear to God it’s like my countrymen saw a rap video shot in the projects and now think the crack epidemic was the fault of public housing.
Actually I saw dredd cause Karl urban is rad af. We don’t need more Peachtrees. We need to eradicate Airbnb and make the housing we already have accessible to the people that need it and barred from the people that hold property for profit.
People need space in the same way that some people need religion. It’s not actually necessary until you consider comfort along with efficiency.
So, projects? I would love to see a solution to home prices and the inequality they create but I think projects have been shown to work out poorly in the US.
They only work out poorly in some plsces due to neglect. You have to give social services to the residents.
Meanwhile the insurance companies are throwing parties right now for pulling out ahead of the disaster. Probably tweaking their models to make sure they’re not at risk anywhere else.
Don’t worry though, the incoming administration will be working with local governments to prepare for future challenges… Or ignoring them and dismantling any and all efforts to mitigate climate disasters. One or the other.
I’m sorry, are we just skipping over the regulations that caused these companies to pull out? Most of these homes would still be covered. They’d be paying a higher price, but they’d be covered.
When you put a legal cap on costs, the company will pull out.
Turns out when you say you cannot charge more than x for a service that costs y to provide, and y>x, no one can sell the service.
Insurance companies fucking suck, but too many think their profits are the ONLY reason there is a problem.
Yea that’s just basic economics.
Maybe we should have rules in place that provide more protection for actual human beings instead of prioritizing profit margins or pretending that “Basic Economics” is a universal law rather than a guideline of how people interact with each other. Sorry, I’m not mad at you, just the system we live in
We, did, they were pushed to the side. Those rules and protections were building more reservoirs, keeping those and the current ones full of water, continuous upkeep on fire hydrants, rehiring firefighters who were fired for not taking the vax, regular controlled burns, clearing out the undergrowth, not dumping water into the ocean after rainfall… So, so many that were completely abandoned.
You seem to think the prices for fire protection came out of nowhere, but they don’t. As these precautions were abandoned one by one, fire insurance went up, because the likelihood of a fire grew exponentially. When government put a cap on price, that effectively made it clear that the company would go bankrupt, completely, because they knew a fire was going to happen eventually.
We should be mad that those very protections put in place to help people were taken away by the government, not the companies.
Por que no los dos? The government is NOT faultless in this, but how often are those regulations removed because a company lobbyist
bribed themhinted very strongly that they would like that?
Funny how the rich argue with climate change when it benefits them. For decades they denied it fiercely and now it’s time to pay… even if we take all from them (which we should) it’s not enough repair the damages their behavior caused.
There are many blue voters who live in areas affected by the Palisades fire
Blue voters that happily generate more carbon that most of us.
If you have the type of money required to live there you no longer get to be a voter, you gotta be a doer
The map below shows rates of home insurance nonrenewals in recent years. You can explore your state and areas with the highest rates in the country, including California and Western states facing wildfires and Eastern Seaboard states like Florida and the Carolinas with elevated hurricane risk.
Louisiana be like, let’s add a few more refineries, and a ethane cracker plant for good measure
When your insurance drops your coverage, that’s your cue to GET THE FUCK OUT BEFORE YOU HAVE YET LOST EVERYTHING.
Those actuarial tables are designed from the ground up and refined over literally decades (up to around a century in some cases) to predict risk and while they’re not always perfectly accurate they are clearly ENOUGH so that they have made it possible for insurers to remain profitable.
IF THEY KNOW ANYTHING THAT YOU DON’T, THEY ARE DEFINITELY ACTING ON IT.
I know you can’t literally just drop everything, or fit absolutely everything that matters to you in your car in a pinch, but you WILL be better off if you’ve packed up and prepped for transport as many as possible of the things that would hurt you and/or inconvenience you the most to leave behind.
So for those of you who haven’t already experienced total loss, learn from this. Prepare yourselves. The people displaced by this will strain many other extant failure points in our society. Shit is about to get MUCH, MUCH WORSE.
The problem is that people cannot simply get out at scale. The homes themselves are not portable and represent a significant investment that most homeowners cannot afford to lose. An individual can sell, but that requires there being a buyer, so doesn’t actually solve the problem.
What is needed here is a government funded relocation program. The government buys houses in eligible areas at market rate (locked in at the time the program starts, as market rate should collapse to 0). Then, the government does nothing, and saves money from not needing to subsidize the insurance market, and need needing to spend as much on disaster response and relief. Given that the disaster relief savings is largely born by the federal government, this program should receive federal funding as well.
In the US, voters have shown over and over that they don’t care if a lot of people become homeless. Why would you expect them to care about people who become homeless because of fires than they do about people who become homeless because of economic conditions?
So someone has say 2 million in real estate and 1.5 million in other Investements. They are at risk of losing some of that 3.5M while still counting themselves wealthy and the government who can’t afford to provide a whole laundry list of shit for normal people just hands them a few million to ensure their bad decisions don’t cost them anything.
How about we don’t subsidize your insurance and if you suck up you just lose your money.
This is a terrible idea.
We bought our present home 6 years ago. One house we looked at was in a low lying area, probably less than a metre above the high tide line. We didn’t buy that home because I’m not an idiot.
Since the dawn of time people have been building homes in silly places and losing their money as a result. It’s a shame.
In the next century there’s going to be a great many people displaced due to climate change. Let’s not start out by indemnifying those who pretended climate change wasn’t a thing.
When was that house built? What should the current owners do with it? If they sell, someone else needs to buy. Someone is going to be left holding the bag for a decision made decades ago.
And our current approach already indemnifies them, because their flood insurance is provided by the federal government as no private insurer will offer it. Then, when a flood hits, we all pay for it, along with the emergency response during and after the event.
The government shouldn’t offer insurance the market won’t. The person holding the bag is the most recent idiot.
What if they bought before the 70s? Before climate change was taught in schools?
We all know who’s responsible for it.
Petroleum companies, oil and plastics added so much pollution in such a short amount of time the planet couldn’t deal with it and it’s likely led to significant, global-level environmental impact.
Sure, but even they didn’t know they were destroying the climate until the 70s
I’m somewhat astonished that you think owners of this type of property ought to be indemnified in any way.
If I inherited such a property, I would absolutely try to find a “greater fool” to buy it.
I would point out though, properties like that aren’t going to be unsaleable over night. They’re just going to be less desirable than other properties.
Why should my tax dollars be used to bail out someone who bought a multimillion dollar home in a high risk area? Why should home owners get all the profits from owning but get to skirt the risks?
That’s an easy one. Because the government let this happen by not reigning in the corporate pollution it knew was happenig. All so the economy would grow and grow which is what gave you the money to pay those taxes. So the tax dollars you are giving the gov are the reason these people need to move.
I think relocation (and getting people comfortable with their tax dollars going towards it) would work better if the US states weren’t so ideologically divided.
There is no way I want the average republican relocating to my state, let alone wanting to pay for such punishment.
A lot of things would work better if the states weren’t so ideologically divided. Lol But yeah, relocation is rough. Moving people away from family and friends means removing them from the people they probably depend on. And that just leads to more people taking thier kids with them to vegas, lol.
Likewise there’s a reason all the billionaires are building bunkers in Hawaii and New Zealand and investing in yachts, that Greenland and northern Canada have new geopolitical and economic importance, and that the Panama Canal is at risk of not being able to get enough traffic across. I’m tired of getting gaslit by climate naysayers.
“Everything is fine!” they say as they stockpile supplies and build secret locations to hide.
The warning bell rang decades ago and we’re still ignoring it. There is no escaping or planning around what is to come. It doesn’t matter if you move somewhere less impacted by climate change. Those places can’t support anywhere close to the amount of people that will need to live there. We’ll ruin those places fighting over what scraps remain until there’s nowhere left to go.
I’m already in a place that is less susceptible to climatological ruin. I’ve resigned myself to the inevitability that billions will die. Regardless, my preparatory steps shall continue to be “make room”. I’m going to personally see to it that IF by some miracle I actually manage to survive, I bring as many people with me as possible; failing that, I hope to find a way to enable more people to survive EVEN IF it kills me.
The entire world basically just tried to ignore COVID and kept burying the bodies hoping everyone would stop caring. (BTW, excess death statistics are still horrifically higher than pre-2019 levels across the world)
Long COVID is a literal debilitating lifelong mental and physical disability but everyone has it now so we just don’t care.
It’s simple. The bourgeois must be eliminated or humanity dies.
I had to get out of Public Health because of the damage pretending covid was over was doing in almost every sense.
