The skyrocketing cost of insurance premiums in Florida is leading residents to drop their insurance, consider selling their home, and even move out of the state, according to recent reports.
For years now, the sunny, vibrant state has been a magnetic destination for many Americans—a phenomenon which has been driving up demand for housing, especially during the pandemic, as well as home prices.
But while Florida was the number one state in the country that people moved to in 2022, it was also the one with the highest number of residents wanting to relocate, according to a SelfStorage.
It’s a good thing their Republican Leaders are working hard to help them with this issue.
Obviously woke insurance companies are to blame!
💀
The weather doesn’t listen to legislators.
Won’t stop them from trying! The general assembly in NC literally outlawed taking ocean rise into account for determining insurance rates 🤣
Capitalists being evil but not stupid, I’d expect insurance companies to start refusing to do business in the state.
I know I read some story about an Emperor who tried to prove he could order the tides and drowned.
Can we build a wall to prevent them crossing the border to America?
Doesn’t matter to me, they think I live in a third world communist hell hole so they won’t move where I live anyway. Never thought I would say this but… thank you Fox News!
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Bugs did nothing wrong
Bugs bunny or the arachnids of klendathu?
They got Buenos Aires, not Florida. Unless I missed that bit in Starship Troopers. Maybe in the book? Haven’t read it in years.
Yeah it was BA in the book too.
It’s just a joke on “bugs”.
Don’t be ridiculous. A bunch of little saws will do just fine
Maybe we can cut the whole peninsula off and refer to it as the Great Castration.
Just be brownish, and you’ll get a free flight to New England!
A seawall.
You can’t build a seawall on deteriorating limestone, that’s why Miami is doomed.
…and Cuba’s gonna pay for it.
Sell their homes to who? Is this like a NFT, always a bigger fool, kind of thing?
Fucking Aquaman?
To landlords, who will charge arbitrarily high rent, secure in the knowledge that they aren’t in a free market due to inelasticity of demand (people can’t do without shelter) and supply (there are finite places to live). That will let them pay the insurance premiums homeowners can’t afford.
Premiums they will then offload onto renters keeping their margins.
Landlords are not immune from the market. It’s not truly inelastic in that people have a choice of where to live. Climate change will eventually suppress demand and thus prices for many parts of Florida.
Smart Florida money is buying land in northern Maine to move the orange groves to.
I keep trying to convince s few buddies we should pool our money together and get into RVs. Have a lot with RVs for rent. Move them from lot to lot based on needs. Park them outside business that don’t pay well but have a lot of workers.
I’ve heard worse business proposals, for sure. But be careful about identifying as a landlord (even a prospective one) in a place like this!
Not actually going to own land and I am certainly not a lord. I am thinking more like I own RVs, rent them, and work with my renters to find provide parking and utilities.
Landlords aren’t defined by literally owning land or literally being lords. If you own living space you rent out, you’re a landlord, even if your apartments are mobile (including both RVs and houseboats).
But listen, I support you and your choices. This is not me being critical. We’re just having this conversation in a space where it’s much more in vogue to hate anyone who owns living space they rent out.
Republicans who want to jerk off to DeSantis and let some racial slurs fly without social opprobrium.
That’s who has been moving there since 2020 or so.
Some people see Florida as America’s floppy, deformed penis. Others see it more as a nauseating dookie emerging from the south. Scientists are still studying the area to find the causes of the mass psychosis, but urge all healthy adults to avoid the region and its inhabitants.
Nah just spin it up into a bunch of naked credit default obligations and mix it in with the A and AA tranches, what could go wrong?
Everything has a buyer at some price. These people will just have to sell at a loss, probably.
They were laughing at Californians when it was happening to us (very very recently) thinking that it was the result of “liberal policymaking”.
Well, how does it feel, Florida? Are you ready to put aside our differences and go after our real common enemy, the for-profit insurance industry and climate deniers? Because I promise you, this is only going to get worse unless we force them to change things.
I’m sure DeSantis can fix this by just “fighting woke” more, right? /s
He probably does think that. He could spin rising premiums as speculation based on climate change belief.
Watch: More legislation on insurance prices in the state.
Or, they could pull a North Carolina and outlaw any discussion of sea level rise.
Seriously, there are places where climate change (discussion) is banned? This is mind blowing
We should just ban it everywhere, and that’s it, problem solved 🤦♂️
Lord, don’t even get me started on NC property insurance. Their solution to increasing rates for many years was to mandate that rates couldn’t exceed x, based on what they believed was appropriate.
Protip: It wasn’t appropriate. I’ve been out of that game for long enough now that I don’t know if they ever fixed it, but it was bad - basically if you couldn’t write a policy within x% of the expected rate, the risk had to be ceded to the state’s reinsurance facility, which drastically limited the available coverage.
DON’T GIVE THE MAN IDEAS
He can’t beat big business. If he tries it will ruin him even more than he is already ruined. Give him all the ideas.
He will pass a new law allowing him to fire insurance companies’ boards and install his own people. Make America Florida! Yeehaw!
Insurers aren’t really to blame here. Florida is a fundamentally high-risk place to build and live now, and will continue to get worse for the foreseeable future due to climate change. Even a non-profit insurer would need to price Florida insurance at a premium, lest its funds be exhausted when the inevitable category-6 hurricane hits the state.
Arguably the ones most to blame (after the fossil fuel industry, for putting us in this position in the first place of course) is corrupt politicians and developers who allow such shoddy construction in the state in the first place.
We don’t just allow construction in risky places, we subsidize it. If you’re an owner or developer and you wanna put your own money at risk by building in risky places, you should be allowed to do that. Just don’t expect me to pay for it through taxes and FEMA flood insurance.
The category of hurricane isn’t the problem, it’s the frequency. 5 category 2s are way worse than 1 cat 4 or 5, in terms of economic cost, typically.
I was using cat6 as a stand-in for “all the bad stuff”. There’s never been a category 6 hurricane before.
Maybe it’s not quite comparable to the situation in California, now that I think about it. Florida has always been in the path of devastating hurricanes for as long as I can remember. There is a degree of assumed risk living there. In California, these massive wildfires almost never happened and now suddenly it happens every year without fail no matter how hard we try to contain them. I live in an area that has never been hit by a wildfire, but because California as a whole has been hit so hard so many times recently, rates get raised to untenable levels and State Farm won’t even write you a policy. It’s completely mad.
Like, I get it, it’s not the insurance company’s fault that we live in the path of predictable destruction, but there has to be a better solution than “move somewhere else if you don’t like it”. I wonder if we can learn something from studying the insurance models of other countries that are prone to disaster (Island nations in Asia that are frequently hit by typhoons, for example) and adapting that to how policies are tailored here?
Honestly I’m on team insurance in these cases. The US is filthy rich and we have tons of highly habitable land. Why are we wasting resources subsidizing some people choosing to live in comfortable, risky locations?
For those stuck in poverty: that does suck but I consider that an independent issue.
Free hand of the market is giving them an invisible bitchslap.
Soon they’ll be “free” from insurance.
Good. Subsidizing risky behavior, as we do with some kinds of disaster insurance, encourages risky behavior. Rising insurance costs are the market telling people to stop living in certain places. We’d do well to listen and stop living in places like Florida so much.
Are you ready to put aside our differences and go after our real common enemy, the for-profit insurance industry and climate deniers?
Nah. Republicans never admit when they are wrong.
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It’s interesting to me that insurance companies are becoming the chief drivers of the preparation for climate change: “Wanna build a house in the woods? On a sandbar? GTFO. Use your own money.”
Since humans invented math and fossil fuels, this moment was inevitable. The writing has been on the wall in Florida for ten years.
I forgot the actual statistics, but it’s something crazy. Like Florida constitutes 8% of the country’s homeowners insurance policies, but 80% of all homeowners insurance litigation. Florida real estate is a ponzi scheme now.
They’ve got miles and miles and miles of roads in Florida lined with 10-million dollar, beachfront houses, all of which will sooner than later be buried under 25 ft of seaweed for the next thousand years. The question is who will be left holding the bag on all that risk?
I’m certain the Republicans in the Florida legislature will let the insurance companies off of the hook before too long here, and will leave working people holding a bunch of worthless real estate, just waiting for climate catastrophe to wipe everything away.
Well yeah. The cost of damage resulting from rising sea levels are one of the negative externalities that result from burning fossil fuels. Insurance premiums are effectively passing that cost on to future flood victims.
That means the right market-based solution, which both parties claim to love, is to apply an appropriately sized carbon tax, thereby internalizing those costs in the price of fuel, and using the funds to pay for flood mitigation and future damage, but that looks too much like socialism…
The criticisms I hear from the American left about carbon taxes is that they don’t work, not that they look like socialism. I think they probably would work, but what do I know.
Because they are grounded in the real world. If your goal is to make money finding out how to lower your costs is a good way to do it. If your goal is to win elections telling people what they want to hear is a good way to do it. They know that this is happening and it is going to get worse.
Whatever it takes to finally get people to realize that living in a disaster zone is a terrible idea.
How many more years before all of Earth is a disaster zone?
20
How very optimistic of you.
The old folks home is gonna be lit. Can’t wait.
The home or the Ättestupa?
All of Earth has always been a disaster zone. Do you realize how incredible it is that we don’t all get eaten by lions every day like our ancestors did? Lol
Depends on how far out the astroid is
Don’t look up.
The current crisis isn’t so much about climate change as it is an insurance market so rampant with fraudulent roof damage claims that the market can’t bear it. FL legislature tried to correct this but before the law took effect a flood of claims were filed.
Climate change will only make this worse, ofc.
My understanding is that the substantial majority of roof damage claims were legitimate and attributable to predatory roofing companies that would finance and install new roofs after a storm at a huge discount, they’d install a shitty fucked up roof, then would sell the debt to a third party servicer, and then the roofing company would close up shop, rebrand under a new name, and do it again. By the time the roof fails, the original company is long gone leaving the homeowner and the insurers holding the bag.
The legislature and the insurers realized they had a impending consumer crisis and loosened the laws about paying these claims, and essentially opened the door to the fraud.
I wonder if the real issue at this point is that Florida just attracts fraudsters. It was their laws that allowed contractors to have a revolving door of LLC’s.
I’m sure more deregulation is the answer.
Of course it is. Nobody will do business with the shitty roof company that no longer exists ever again. See, the invisible hand works just fine, and might even give you a handjob if you pay it enough.
Free market win?
I mean rebuilding houses in regions every 5-20 years was never gonna come out on top.
Not being able to sell them (except for 10 cents on the dollar of what they paid) when they cannot be insured will be the next shock.
Yeah we saw that happen in places like Detroit during the recession, but I doubt it’ll get quite that bad ($100 homes) since Florida at least has good weather going for it.
The weather is literally the issue here.
Oh come on. We live in a house built in the 1940s, and I moved to this house from one built in the 1920s that is still in good shape. It’s not like all the houses are knocked down and rebuilt every 15 years, but that is how the insurance is priced.
Insurance is partly like gambling, the house always wins, right? They want to make money. Whatever the highest amount allowed by law is, that is what they charge.
You’re missing out on the most important point.
The house always wins - but the house doesn’t pick up and leave when they’re already losing money, they do it when the cost of relocating their pile of money is less than the margins they could make if they move
It won’t be long, and in Florida the cost for the mortgage will be neglectable in comparison to the costs of insurance.
The big downside will be that Floridians will move out of Florida and spread elsewhere. Maybe it is time for Georgia and Alabama to invest in a massive fence?
Negligible.
A wall. A sea wall.
Insurance typically works off historical data to evaluate risk from my understanding, and having something as disastrous as the Miami beach condo collapse bodes a bad sign for insurance companies, especially given the terrible and absolutely incompetent rescue effort during the aftermath.
By the way, I’m shocked at how quickly the Miami condo collapse left the news cycle.
Iirc Florida passed some kind of law requiring coverage no matter where a structure is. And the only way the companies could make it work was massive premium increases because the places they’re being forced to cover literally have to be rebuilt every year. This was after the federal government said it wouldn’t offer disaster insurance on those zones anymore.
To be fair to Florida, that condo was built pre-Andrew and they revised their entire building code after Andrew. There aren’t too many large building built pre-Andrew anymore because they were all built as cheap as possible to laundrr drug money.
That being said, there are a million reasons why i would never move to Florida, and the only building codes that can prevent your house getting inundated by flood surge is by putting it on stilts, so no shocker that the premiums are skyrocketing. Same with fire insurance in California right now.
The building collapse was due to bad building code for sure; however, the apathy that followed the tragedy, both from rescue workers and the public at large, was really disheartening.
I’d build a 3d printed house that is on a raised slab in Florida and in Cali. Anything out of wood would be a waste
In California you’d largely be fine as long as you take care to have land around your house and keep it defensible. A lot of the fires that get into towns are because those recommendations and regulations get ignored in favor of trying to live in a forest as much as possible.
You can do everything roght but your neighbors might not. I have family that lost thier home a few years ago in a fire and have moved to San Fran now
Absolutely. I meant to convey that. I’m sorry if I was unclear.
Alternatively just build it dirt cheap and expect to rebuild every year. Disposable housing, the real american way.
Why not a boat? Hear of the storm then you just float away
3d printed would likely be cheaper
This is the first I’ve heard about it. When did it happen?
Fuck me. They even knew something was wrong…
Thank you for the article.
lol @ all the people who fled the northeast because “Florida is cheap…”
Even the second place finisher of the Carolinas has gotten too expensive.
Everywhere is expensive now. Sad reality.
Greedflation is real
My rent went up 24% this month. Now I’m paying half of my income to one corporation
More than my parents mortgage on their house
I bought a house I didn’t really want recently because my rent had gone up 50% in the previous two years, and was going to go up another 10% if I renewed again. Prices are out of control.
Same here. I was looking at renting and the cheapest apartment I could find was the same cost as a mortgage on a house. So I just bought a shitty house that I still can’t afford but I guess I’m at least building equity so that’s nice.
Doesn’t that require you to have tens of thousands of dollars for a down payment?
For a first time home owner mortgage you can put 0% down. You just also have to pay for “private mortgage insurance” until you have 20% equity in the house and that insurance is not cheap so the more you can put down the better.
In my case I think the PMI costs me almost $200 per month but I think it’s based off the value of the home and mine was dirt cheap. I’m also lucky in that my dad is a carpenter and taught me how to do most of that stuff so I had the option of buying an absolute shitheap and making it livable on my own. I had also been working constant overtime for a year straight while living in my dads basement so I did have a bit of cash saved up, but most of that money went into repairs on the house I bought rather than the down payment. I also live in a very low COL area so my house was way cheaper than it is in most of the country.
So I’m definitely not saying “why doesn’t everyone just buy a house?” Because I was just very lucky in a lot of respects. But buying a house is more feasable than most people think it is. You definitely don’t need to put 20% down; doing that is only really expected if you’re selling your current house to buy another or if you’re buying a second house.
A tiny condo where I live costs half a million dollars. You cannot buy a house for under a million
Most jurisdictions have tenant protection laws that prevent such rent raises unless you did something wrong. If not the latter, I’d try and talk to some tenant protection organization in your area. They tend to be free consultation. If not, there’s always a lawyer as well. You could even be entitled to getting money back if they did illegal rent raises.
There are zero protections where I live They could raise the rent 1,000% if they like.
Every complex in the area raise the rent at the same time from 1700 to 2000 for a one-bedroom apartment.
When I got the renewal offer I checked everywhere and I would have to move an hour away in an area where you wake up to gunfire to pay $1,700 a month again.
I spoke to the manager of the complex to negotiate the rent increase and they just told me it’s the “market rate”. I’ve spoke to other neighbors and they have the same rate that I do so it’s not a ‘punitive rate’
I had like a week to decide so I’m going to ride out this year and leave the area next fall.
Don’t worry, housing prices will crash next year and then you can buy cheap. Lol
No they won’t. The government will bail it out and the economists who work for the banks and the government will say how wonderful of an idea it all is.
That would not surprise me, but prices could still crash if that happened. Bail outs happen after that.
Could being the operative word here. Look at how fast that California bank was bailed out. After 2007 disaster it would surprise me if there is already a plan that can be executive ordered ready to go, give the banks a trillion dollar line of credit. You know so they have time to evict people.
One bank foreclosured on a family over five dollars. Thanks government!
Why would they crash? Build 2 Rent is a massive industry that’s just getting started.
I was kind of joking, but I did see this recently which made me wonder if the institutional buyers/investors thing is a bit overhyped and coming to an end not that far into the future:
That’s the free market meeting climate change. It will get worse.
You voted for it… You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.
Actually I very specifically voted against it, but my vote wasn’t enough. I’m really hopeful that the GOP will finally just implode now that the MAGAts and the more traditional trickle-down conservatives are at each others throats, but I’m also not naive enough to think that’s guaranteed or even likely. With the luck we’ve been having lately most likely some even worse more virulently stupid and corrupt version of the GOP will rise from the ashes.
People move to Florida for the same reason why people use to move to California. So you wonder when housing prices will absolutely soar. Also, lack of natural disaster preparedness is something that can’t be ignored in Florida. Deregulation won’t solve that problem.
But when you have banned all wokeness (whatever that is), surely all problems will be solved?
So much for DeathSantis utopia. Go back to Florida and don’t bring your Nazi politics to my state.
40% of voting Floridians voted against DeSantis, Florida is also the state with the third highest Jewish population, I’m fairly certain that nowhere near all of Florida has “Nazi” politics.
Maybe try not sounding like an ignorant by generalizing the third most populated state, which is also just as mixed as the other three most populated states. You’re just sounding like those idiots that bitch about how California is all “liberal” while ignoring the conservative North Cali and all of the Neo-Con enclaves and Nazis in between.
Sure the Florida GOP are pretty much Nazi-lite, but there’s a shitload of Florida citizens who are not them and completely disagree with them and are doing what they can to push back against them.
according to a SelfStorage
Lol, what?
It’s a storage unit company, so presumably they have their own moving service or often connect people with other moving services. They’d be able to see the trend
Yeah… that still seems like some extremely flimsy evidence to base an article on.
Edit - didn’t notice this was from Newsweek. “Journalism”
Maybe I should connect them with my local bartender. He’s full of information. Qualification? He talks to people.
The article also mentions how storms are becoming increasingly deadly, which they’re not, necessarily. It’s so up and down year to year it’s hard to pick out an actual trend.
They didn’t finish the sentence
…according to a SelfStorage service clerk working in Tampa /S
Build the wall
counterpoint: Don’t build the sea wall.
