Thousands of Los Angeles homeowners were dropped by their insurers before the Palisades Fire
Pacific Palisades, the Los Angeles neighborhood that's been devastated by the Palisades Fire, is emblematic of the insurance nightmare increasingly facing homeowners residing in regions prone to climate disasters.
About 1,600 policies in Pacific Palisades were dropped by State Farm in July, California Department of Insurance spokesman Michael Soller said in an Thursday email to CBS MoneyWatch. An analysis of insurance data by CBS San Francisco last year found that State Farm also dropped more than 2,000 policies in two other Los Angeles ZIP codes, which include the Brentwood, Calabasas, Hidden Hills and Monte Nido neighborhoods.
In an email to CBS MoneyWatch, State Farm said, "Our No. 1 priority right now is the safety of our customers, agents and employees impacted by the fires and assisting our customers in the midst of this tragedy."
State Farm's decision reflects a trend of private insurers, including Allstate and Farmers Insurance, of dropping California policies or halting underwriting, leaving homeowners with the choice of getting coverage through the insurer of last resort, the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, or FAIR Plan, or forgo insurance altogether. The FAIR Plan provides basic fire insurance coverage for properties in high-risk areas when traditional insurance companies will not.
As a result, homeowners in Pacific Palisades had increasingly shifted to the FAIR Plan, with roughly 1,400 of the town's 9,000 homes covered by the plan in 2024, more than quadruple the number in 2020, according to data from the insurer. In other words, prior to the disaster, about 1 in 7 homeowners were reliant on the FAIR Plan.
The Palisades Fire could become the costliest wildfire in history because of the number of buildings that have been destroyed and as the structures rank among the nation's most expensive homes, said Daniel Swain, a University of California Los Angeles climatologist, on a Wednesday webcast about the disaster. The neighborhood's 9,000 residential units have a median home value of $3.1 million, according to real estate data firm ATTOM Data.
While personally and financially devastating to homeowners, the Los Angeles fires — which include the Eaton Fire and several other wildfires — are likely to place added stress on the state's already fragile insurance market, experts and lawmakers say. It's an issue that extends beyond California, with similar issues facing homeowners in Florida, Louisiana and other states.
"We will be watching to see whether the collapse of a trembling home insurance market accelerates after this added shock," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, wrote on X Thursday. Whitehouse serves on the Senate Budget Committee, which last month issued a report about climate change's impact on the insurance market.
Rep. Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California whose district includes parts of Los Angeles, told CBS MoneyWatch she will soon re-introduce a bill called the Wildfire Insurance Coverage Study Act, which would require the Government Accountability Office to analyze the dangers posed by wildfires to communities, and how insurance companies are responding.
"It will help us determine what the best federal response is to these issues," Waters said. "We have to know more about climate change," such as determining which areas or types of vegetation are more susceptible to wildfires, and the risk of building in those areas.
She added that the higher risks are "leaving homeowners and business owners and families without insurance coverage because some of the insurance companies are canceling; they are aren't writing any new insurance. People continue to pay higher prices for even less coverage."
With the fires continuing to rage across the Los Angeles area, the estimated cost of the disaster is surging. The potential property damage and economic losses could amount to as much as $150 billion, according to a Thursday estimate from AccuWeather. That would make these wildfires by far the most destructive in U.S. history.
In California, State Farm last year said it was discontinuing coverage for 72,000 houses and apartments in the state. Since 2019, more than 100,000 Californians have lost their insurance, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis of insurance data.
"A full-scale financial crisis"
With climate disasters increasing in frequency, the insurance industry is grappling with a new calculus amid rising costs and risks. That's prompting some insurers to decide not to renew insurance policies in counties that are most at risk from climate risks — and it's not only within California and the other usual suspects, the Senate report found.
"The data confirm that it is climate change that is driving increasing non-renewal rates," it noted. "Second, the data reveal that Florida, Louisiana, California, and Texas are not the only places experiencing spiking non-renewal rates and increasing premiums."
Other regions facing rising non-renewal rates are Southern New England, the Carolinas, New Mexico and counties in the Northern Rockies, Oklahoma, and Hawaii, the report found.
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.
"Here's how it works: Climate change makes risk unpredictable; risk makes insurance unaffordable or unavailable; no insurance makes mortgages unavailable; without mortgages property values crash; cascading like 2008 into general economy," Whitehouse wrote Thursday on X.
FAIR Plan
Still, there's some potential for near-term relief. Homeowners in California could get help from a new state regulation, announced Monday, that will require insurers to offer coverage in wildfire-prone areas.
The ultimate goal of the new rules is to get homeowners out of the FAIR Plan, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara's office said. The average cost of insurance on the FAIR Plan is about $3,200, or more than double the typical homeowner's cost in California, according to Bankrate.
The rule will require home insurers to offer coverage in high-risk areas, something the state has never done, Lara's office said in a statement. Insurers will have to start increasing their coverage by 5% every two years until they hit the equivalent of 85% of their market share. That means if an insurer writes 20 out of every 100 state policies, they'd need to write 17 in a high-risk area, Lara's office said.
In exchange for increasing coverage, the state will let insurance companies pass on the costs of reinsurance to California consumers. Insurance companies typically buy reinsurance to avoid huge payouts in case of natural disasters or catastrophic loss. California is the only state that doesn't already allow the cost of reinsurance to be borne by policyholders, according to Lara's office.
Opponents of the rule say that could hike premiums by 40% and doesn't require new policies to be written at a fast enough pace. The state did not provide a cost analysis for potential impact on consumers.
"Californians deserve a reliable insurance market that doesn't retreat from communities most vulnerable to wildfires and climate change," Lara said in a statement.
