this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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Semi-unrelated but insurance as a whole is bonkers right now and I’m not sure how much the average person knows. I work on commercial real estate. The whole industry is having to review tons of insurance waiver requests because insurance in some properties is out of control. Business either can’t get it for can’t afford it. Especially, in flood zones. I’m actually kind of worried about the damage these hurricanes are doing in the US. Not just in the lives lost, which is devastating, but also the financial damage of all the uninsured losses.
Climate change is a big reason for the policy denials for property insurance. What wasn’t risky 20 years ago is much riskier today. Data doesn’t lie.
If an event chance is too high the cost of insurance increase to a point where it stops making sense.
If every house in an area is 100% guaranteed to get at least one flood event over a 5 years period, that means that every 5 years the insurer need to get in enough money to rebuild all houses, so the cost of insurance will be more than 1/5th of value of a house per year (plus operating cost, profit, and so on). There's no other way, it's just maths.
Ok, the actuarial math is more complex but it boils down to getting enough cash in to pay for claims and pay the operating cost.
At a that point people need to realize that if the risk is too high they need to accept it, plan to rebuild every 5 years on their dime, or move.
Unfortunately people suck at understanding risk.
Sounds kind of like exactly what insurance is for? If you can't get insurance for a flood zone, then maybe there's a fucking reason for that.
The problem is people have gone and built entire cities in unsafe areas. If we were being sensible basically the entirety of Florida should not be occupied, the place is a disaster waiting to happen, or more accurately is a disaster that has already happened, but somehow nobody's learnt from it.
Sounds like their problem? I know that sounds callous, and I'm not necessarily referring to the millions of Floridians who can't afford to relocate (ideally, we'd have a functioning government that could relocate them)... But how many times does your home need to be destroyed on a bi-yearly basis before you decide to move a couple hundred miles away?
I mean... yeah.
Generally speaking, every house in Florida didn't need to be replaced every five years.
I agree! And, I know government was bailing these people out for a long time, which just makes them double down. I’m not worried about those people. I’m worried about the ones that don’t want to be there and can’t afford to relocate, or for some and even worse, evacuate.
Climate change is clearly a hoax, the Republicans were right all along!
/s
That's not bonkers that's sanity. If you want to build your house in front of a dike don't expect to get insurance. The trick is to build in a place where there's a risk, not certainty, of damage.
It's absolutely bonkers. I don't get how Americans can build houses in leopard enclosures and then act all surprised when, inevitably, their faces get eaten. I know you're a settler country with little connection to the land but it's been long enough to know which parts get flooded and which don't, now hasn't it. Around here you don't even get building permits for lots of stuff in places even if you were willing to take on all financial risk yourself because it'd put unconscionable load on disaster relief, and thereby society at large.
So, there's two ways to go from where you are: a) Double-down on being Yanks and say "fuck you got mine sucks to be you", abolish disaster relief and let those rugged individuals fend for themselves, or b) fucking build where it fucking makes sense. It's not like you're Singapore or something, you've got more than enough land.
So I had to look online because I don't know where it is and North Carolina is nowhere near a coastline, so I'm not sure how much the people who live there are to blame.
I don't know where you got North Carolina from, I was speaking in general. Also the place has plenty of coastline. Also you don't need to live near the coast to live in a flood area, plenty of rivers that can and do flood. In mountainous regions it's not about building on the right side of the dike, but not at the bottom of the valley, and in the places in between it's about... well, it's usually not really about not building in one particular place, but making sure that there's areas that you can flood to protect areas you want to keep dry. Much cheaper to pay off a farmer for a lost harvest and cleanup than half a million people for losing their homes.
North Carolina has a coastline though. Granted the issue this time was that the storm came in from the southwest and hit communities that were completely unprepared for the heavy rain, high winds and flash floods
You’re telling me. I just started a small construction company on the side and have to do it uninsured because it cost at a minimum $4,000 a year just for liability. Seems ridiculous
Edit: I’m in Iowa too so clearly away from any possible large disasters. I know liability insurance is different from homeowners but I think it having a large effect on insurance as a whole. Also when the derecho went though Iowa, everyone and their brother apparently became a contractor and collected insurance money and that ruined it for a lot of other people.