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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

(charleshughsmith.substack.com)
478 points spking | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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Animats ◴[] No.42734092[source]
Not uninsurable, but buildings are going to have to become tougher.

It's happened before. Chicago's reaction to the Great Fire was simple - no more building wooden houses. Chicago went all brick. Still is, mostly.

The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement.

I live in a house built of cinder block filled with concrete reinforced with steel. A commercial builder built this as his personal residence in 1950. The walls look like a commercial building. The outside is just painted cinder block. Works fine, survived the 1989 earthquake without damage, low maintenance. It's not what most people want today in the US.

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Sabinus ◴[] No.42734105[source]
If the market is allowed to price insurance correctly then we can motivate building designs to be more disaster resist. If the McMansion can't get insurance but disaster resistant, modest homes do, then people will adapt.
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iandanforth ◴[] No.42734200[source]
"Correctly" is doing a lot of work here. Some readers might miss that this is double edged. Insurance is a mandated product. You don't have a choice if you want a mortgage, or want to run a business. So while it is true that the sustainable price for insurance in many areas is higher than what current regulations allow, let's not forget what happens in an unregulated insurance market; price gouging.
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CalRobert ◴[] No.42734498[source]
For what it’s worth, you can get a house with no insurance or mortgage. They tend to be cheap. I had an uninsured thatched cottage for a while, it was 68k
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hnburnsy ◴[] No.42734790[source]
What did you do for liability insurance?
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1. CalRobert ◴[] No.42735432[source]
For the first year I had a policy similar to what farmers use for ag land, then it got cancelled and I was uninsured, which wasn’t ideal.

I sold the house after a while, it was an interesting experiment in cheap living but ultimately it wasn’t great.

Annoyingly I couldn’t insure it because it was thatched, and I couldn’t change the roof because of heritage. The Irish government has screwed over thatch owners brutally.