Perhaps the most interesting part of the article:
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.
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.
You had me at cutting off the heads of CEOs.
Guillotines go brrrrrrrrr
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 😅
I think the curious aspect of this is that business is absolutely aware, and acknowledges existence of the climate change.
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
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.
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).
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.
Really cool idea, and comment. I think it would reduce money tied up, but still, would require significant investment to build and maintain
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.
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.
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?
Speaking of the Palisades fire, I’m not sure if anyone has looked into this yet, but they probably should:
It’s true. I read it on the internet.
Everyone is saying it.
Fact-check that, Sugar-Mountain!
Oh please please, keep em coming
Wow, really compelling stuff. Zuckerberg really is a monster
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
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
It was always a terrible idea for the government to offer insurance when private insurers wouldn’t. It just forces everyone to subsidize the lifestyles of people who choose to live in disaster-prone areas. Perhaps it was necessary for a time to avoid major economic upheaval, but constantly rebuilding in areas where disasters keep happening should never have been allowed to become a long-term policy.
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.
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?
Then they have PLENTY of equity to move to a place better suited to their risk tolerance.
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
Insurance companies are scummy but the headline phrasing makes it seem like they JUST canceled the policies…but no, it was 6 months ago.
As much as I want to hate them for it, can you really blame them? Insurance operates under the measured assumption that most people won’t have to use it for some major. When wildfires become probable, it’s almost guaranteed to cost them exponentially more than homeowners paid in premiums.
Even if insurance cost $50,000/year, it would take several years of payments to cover the payout. And California has wildfires yearly.
As much as I want to hate them for it, can you really blame them?
Yes; go sue big oil who fucking knew since the 60’s climate change was inevitable if nothing changed. Make those fuckers pay dearly.
Especially for the palisades $3,500,000 homes.
At $50,000 a year it would take 70 years of payments.
Well, it should be proportional to the value they’re covering * the risk of loss, so they’re probably paying much more than $50000/year.
This is why insurance shouldn’t be for profit.
Insurances need to cover their expected cost with the rates, otherwise they won’t be able to cover in case of an incident. Nobody will run an insurance expecting a loss, and you can’t force anyone to.
The alternative is like when we had flood that the state bails out the boomers who bought houses when they were cheap in areas where insurance won’t insure because of risk, paid with taxes by people like me who have a hard time acquiring property because taxes and other cost are so high due to decisions their generation and earlier ones made.
Of course, this is somewhat exaggerated; they also pay taxes. But it’s also not completely wrong.
In the particular case of a previous colleague’s house getting flooded, I always had to think of the fact that she chose to fly a certain route for work to save about 2 hours because it’s just so much more convenient than the train.
I mean it would have happened with it without her flying, but still thought about it.
They could cover a lot more if they didn’t need to make billions in profit. But your general concern is valid. What stops people from building in extremely high risk places. The answer should be federal building standards. If a house is built in a high risk area, it must have mitigating features that protect it from the high risk, or it can’t be built. Local building codes already do this sort of thing. So this is just an extension of something already done. Most people don’t know which areas are high risk for what. So don’t penalize them for getting duped. And in many cases the house wasn’t in a high risk area when built. So there needs to be funding to upgrade those houses to reduce the risk. That should come from the industries that profitted on ignoring the effects of thier industry in exchange for great profits.
I think you might have missed the point.
I mean it would be great to have some kind of socialised home insurance that wasn’t “for profit”, but such a scheme should still refuse to insure homes which are likely to burn down.
That probably sounds good in your head. But you are only thinking of fires. What if they just pick the highest risk factor for every house and refuse to cover that. Then what would be the point of the insurance. And if you consider all the houses that are a high risk for something… fire, hurricane, flooding, high winds, tornadoes, earthquakes… you aren’t left with many houses.
What a silly thing to say.
Obviously, if one insurer refused to cover what ever thing, they would lose all their customers to other insurers who covered sensible risks.
The point is, you can’t insure against risks that are too likely to occur.
For some reason you made me think of banks being covered by government insurance. In a way you’d think the government would also insure land, seeing as that’s one of the main things they protect.
The logistics would probably be horrible for that type of thing though.
Government can print money when appropriate and not abused. Payments directly to the general public are the best type of stimulus. Take a bad situation and make it a stimulus.
Part two though has to be that they are not allowed to receive a payout more than once or make it illegal to build new construction in wildfire zones until they have figured out the forest management issues.
There aren’t really forestry issues at all.
Practically everywhere is a wildfire zone though. Yes we need much more forest management, infrastructure hardening, fire resources, etc, but giving folks a one time payout and then they move to another area that gets destroyed and now they don’t get support doesn’t seem helpful since we can’t really predict what will burn. It’s simply harder than e.g. flood mapping.
You don’t have to drop the entire area though, you just have to drop forest fires as a claimable item.
Then people can make a decision on if that’s okay for them, or try to find someone else.
Would this not most likely still cause the same kind of financial collapse in the housing market that was mentioned as a possibility in the article linked by OP? If it is not possible to get insurance for an event (i.e. wildfire) that is likely(/definitely going) to occur, then I imagine buyers/real-estate developers would be less inclined to pay high prices in those regions.
I think we’re likely to see a collapse of housing markets in places like CA and FL no matter what.
You just can’t live any place and in such a fashion as shall certainly result in a loss
I’d think so, but just to a lesser extent?
I know some areas have laws mandating certain minimal coverages. I wonder if the insurers would even be allowed to issue policies that didn’t cover wildfires.
If that’s the case, we might see some laws changing in the near future.
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.
This is starting to feel more and more like a planned property grab.
I think it’s much simpler honestly: fires like these have been happening every year in California for the past hmm… at least 5 years, maybe more. Insurances are simply catching on and doing what any for-profit company would do in this situation, avoid losing money.
Wildfires are part of the ecology for basically the whole state. Most of the native plants here have evolved to actually depend on and co-exist with routine fire. It’s completely normal and natural for this state to burn. The problem is that for 100 years we decided that it should never ever burn at all, so there were many areas of the state that should have burned at least once every ten years that sat there and accumulated unnatural amounts of growth and fuel for ten times that long. So, when we got hit with a megadrought and a fire finally did happen in those places, it was a crazy slate-wiped fire that nothing survived instead of a manageable brush fire that plenty of things would grow back from next year.
Now, is it all bad land management? No, a bunch of shit came together at once to make this message:
-
California was caught in a mega drought for the better part of a decade and we’re still years from our groundwater returning to where it was before the drought.
-
The Japanese pine beetle killed a lot of pine trees, and that’s most of what there is in the Sierra range (yes, there are some oaks and other things, but, well, we’re getting there, hold on). So many trees died where they stood that dealing with them all was a nearly impossible task, and beetle-killed wood can’t really be used for anything (don’t ask me why, but when I was wondering why nobody had come to get all this basically free wood just laying around, that was the answer I got). So, you had huge, huge stands of beetle-kill just standing there, getting drier and drier, waiting for a spark.
-
The drought also severely dried out lots of other vegetation. There’s people I know in the Sierra who said they didn’t even have to season their fresh-cut wood. Just chuck it right in the fire, no problem.
-
Fucking PG&E decided they didn’t need to follow best practices because that costs money and spending the money your consumers pay you on stuff that isn’t bullshit makes PG&E a sad panda. So, they stopped cutting around their power lines. As someone who partly grew up in the southeast US, this fucking melted my brain. Georgia’s a pretty wet, green state, and Georgia Power clear cuts everything down to shin height for probably 50 meters to either side of their transmission lines. Humid-ass Georgia decided they needed it, but we’re totally fine to skip it in the Phoenix state, yeah, that makes sense.
So, is climate change to blame? Mostly, yes, climate change is a big, big part of why we’re here. Hotter, drier weather with shorter, more intense rain delivery means that the vegetation gets dry faster and stays dry. It means there’s less water to fight fires with. That said, it’s not the whole picture. There’s other ways we could be doing stuff better.
PG&E absolutely should have faced criminal charges for pulling that… I remember hearing it was also equipment maintenance, which the state even gave them the money to do, and they just gave it to their shareholders as dividends instead
-
Definitely more than 5 years. I still remember some fires back in 2009 that we’re jumping the freeways and I had to wait over a day and travel almost triple the amount of time to make it back home while being worried the whole time that my family’s house would burn down.
Yeah I said at least 5 years, cause I haven’t been here forever, and also it seems they’re getting worse in the last few years, though maybe that’s just my biased perception.
There was a wildfire in the area last month. A couple years ago, a wildfire burned down a bunch of Malibu, a few miles away. I would be very surprised if wildfires in the area stop happening.
I think that maybe the most-reasonable solution is for insurers to just ramp rates way up unless a home is built to be extremely fire-resistant – just assume that there are going to be wildfires that dump embers in the area sooner or later, and that if your home isn’t constrained such that it is able to withstand being showered with embers without going up in flames, that it’s going to be insanely costly to insure, because it’s likely to burn sooner or later.
Insurance companies wanted to raise rates… The insurance commissioner said no. So a lot are leaving.
Same for cars, getting a lot harder to find car insurance in Cali was well.
Even if one specific house is a concrete bunker, if it’s in the middle of normal homes, the bunker still faces potentially 1000 degree temperatures from surrounding homes, and shit’s going to burn.
You could pave everything; put in some 100-yard paved firebreaks; who know what else. Or you could just accept that there’s going to be a lot of climate refugees fleeing high risk US states. All the heads-in-sand people thinking it was just Tuvalu and Kiribati at risk going to wake up and find out it’s LA and Miami, too.
and shit’s going to burn.
Having a house next door burn doesn’t entail that your house burns. You can see video from this fire of people walking around next to houses on fire – they aren’t spontaneously combusting. Heck, I had a relative who had exactly the not-burn thing happen to them in this fire – the house next door burned down, but theirs didn’t. And it’s not hard to see that that has to be the case, or once one house in a city burns, the whole rest of the city would too. That didn’t happen even in this fire, or there wouldn’t be a Los Angeles left.
You can constrain how your house is built. You can have one of those counter-wildfire systems that has large tanks of water kept on-site and a generator-driven system that sprays it out over the property in a fire. I’m sure that there are others. They aren’t necessarily cheap and some aren’t pretty, but you can do buildings that can pull though fires.
Yeah, one house on fire next to you is probably fine, although I’ve seen that melt the siding off neighbors. All the houses on your block, especially when those houses are only separated by 6 feet, is a completely different situation.
The problem is that it just makes more financial sense to just not insure the area. The property itself is wildly expensive and then the owners are sure to lawyer up if they don’t get exactly what they want. Makes more sense to just not issue policies.
The problem is that it just makes more financial sense to just not insure the area.
There is always going to be some price at which it makes sense for an insurer to insure a property, as long as they are not restricted in what price they can charge.
They are restricted. California has an insurance commissioner who has to approve any rate increases. It’s probably easier to stop insuring then to get the rates up to the profitability margin their risk models are suggesting are appropriate.
Malibu hills fires happened almost every year 20 years ago. Maybe not in areas with homes but it’s hardly surprising from the outside looking in. Still pity the folks.
Unfortunately whether intentional or not I think it’ll play out that way specifically for those who could not afford, with time and money, to re-build their homes and buy a new place to live.
For example, parts of Altadena, CA were exempt from redlining, so there is a majority black and brown homeowners in certain neighborhoods who have owned their homes for many years. They couldn’t afford their $1M+ house in today’s market. Insurance will pay them out, but there’s nowhere to live in Altadena now. Maybe some will lease while their home is being rebuilt, but I think many will cash out and buy a new home somewhere else, leaving a lot of opportunity for investors to buy up land and build for-profit housing.
Of course, we now know that insurance companies will not cover some of these properties so may not be a valuable investment, but the community will be forever changed, and I would be surprised if that didn’t include further gentrification.
What? How is it a property grab if no one can live there? Only the stupidest and/or richest people would buy an uninsurable home. You can’t get a mortgage without insurance, because the banks want to make sure they still have an asset to repossess if you default. Even if you were that rich, why would you throw your money away on something that will almost certainly be destroyed, sooner rather than later, without a way to recoup any of the cost? If a company like Zillow comes in and snaps up all the uninsurable homes in these regions, they’ll be declaring bankruptcy within 5 years.
Maybe? They’re not sure if this guy is linked.
Warning: MSN link ahead:
Alleged Arsonist Arrested In Los Angeles Amid Deadly California Wildfires: What We Know
ETA: Also, 3 fires started all at once looks a little wonky in January.
Edit 2:
…though law enforcement officials have said they cannot confirm a connection between the arson suspect and any of the deadly fires currently burning through California.
One of the women involved in the citizen’s arrest, Renata Grinshpun, told local news he had a “propane tank or… like a flame thrower” and that someone saw him “behind a van, trying to light something on fire.”
Any spark that wasn’t dealt with immediately during Santa Ana’s that severe (60-100 mph gusts, constant wind around 40 mph), and during a severe drought, AND with humidity below 20% was going to blow up.
It is wonky that it happened in January, because historically that’s when we’re getting rain, but that hasn’t happened this water year. For all practical purposes we’re still in the dry season.
Yeah, but they caught a guy with a torch blower trying to start fires. I don’t know if it’s arson or not. I hope not, this is horrific.
Yeah, it sounds like he is responsible probably for the Kenneth fire, which started after the winds had died down a bit. Still enough wind to kick it off (regular 20 mph gusts), but it wasn’t hurricane force winds like Tuesday when the Palisades and Eaton fires started. I’m skeptical that any arsonist is fire happy enough to also get clonked in the head by flying debris.
I can see why you’re pretty confident, but I don’t think you can be 100% confident that these weren’t all started. We’ll have to wait and see. They’re usually pretty great about figuring out what happened.
That’s honestly really impressive. The majority of the evidence has been incinerated by thousand-degree fires and covered in sea water and firefighting foam by the time investigators get to it.
Not if their cameras were sent to the cloud before they were engulfed in flames.
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.
