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Florida’s Home Insurance Crisis Hits Poorest Inland Counties Hardest

by gongshang22

Florida’s home insurance crisis is hurting its poorest counties the most. Wealthy coastal counties get hit by storms. But poor people in inland counties face an even worse insurance market. They risk having no coverage at all.

Steve Cates lives in Okeechobee, Florida. One day, he walked back from his mailbox. He flipped through new letters. One envelope made him stop in his driveway. It was from his insurance company.

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His house felt strong. But he knew getting insurance here was hard. Okeechobee is a small, quiet community north of Lake Okeechobee. His fiancée and friends had their insurance canceled. His own policy was dropped a year earlier. A few weeks later, the company renewed it. But the cost went up by a few hundred dollars. In six years, his annual rate jumped 180 percent. It reached $4,742. He still paid it.

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Now, he stared at another non-renewal letter. His hand shook. He owed $30,000 on his mortgage. Some people he knew had stopped buying insurance. But he couldn’t. His mortgage company required it. He’d lived in this home for 20 years. He feared that life was about to end.

Insurance experts have warned again and again. Extreme weather is getting worse because of climate change. It causes more economic losses. This threatens to collapse the insurance industry. If that happens, housing markets and families’ finances could suffer, too.

Louisiana, California (hit hard by wildfires), and Florida are in the worst shape. Florida faces tropical cyclones that crash into its coasts. The crisis is hitting these states the hardest.

The risk is making insurance companies act. They raise prices. Some leave the market entirely. This is a crisis. It could hurt Americans’ most important asset: their homes.

Many people focus on South Florida’s coast. There, expensive homes mean high insurance costs. But an analysis by Inside Climate News tells a different story. It looked at data on home insurance non-renewals. It found that poor rural communities around Lake Okeechobee are at the center of Florida’s crisis. These places are often overlooked.

The data comes from December. The U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget released it. The committee asked big insurance companies to share numbers. It wanted to know how many policies they didn’t renew each year from 2018 to 2023. Staffers got data from 23 companies. Together, these companies cover about two-thirds of the nation’s home insurance market.

The committee said non-renewal rates matter. Industry experts say high rates are an early sign that the market is unstable. The committee’s report linked this to climate change. It noted that in 2022 and 2023, non-renewal rates spiked. They were highest in counties with the most climate-related disaster risk.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) was chairman of the committee when the report came out. He told Inside Climate News, “Scientists predicted climate change for decades. Now it’s happening. The insurance industry is showing us that first.”

He talked about Florida. “Sea levels are rising. Storms are worse. The oceans around Florida are getting warmer. Warmer air holds more moisture. So rainstorms are more dangerous. Insurance companies see this. They think, ‘This risk is too big. We can’t predict it.’”

Whitehouse added, “Florida is like a preview of what’s coming.”

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