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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

(charleshughsmith.substack.com)
478 points spking | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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teeray ◴[] No.42738381[source]
The problem is that in American home-buying, insurance is often compulsory for a purchase with a mortgage. This makes sense from the bank's perspective--they want to insure their collateral. However, the system doesn't really have an answer for "what happens when their collateral becomes uninsurable?" Even though lenders have force-placed insurance, even those insurers can deny coverage in certain circumstances (e.g. flood plain). This puts insurers in a position to de-facto foreclose on not just one person's house, but swaths of houses in regions they (as an industry) deem risky.

I'm not sure what the answer is here other than forcing insurers to insure (which would raise premiums for everyone), or creating meta-insurance of some kind (insurance against becoming uninsured).

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1. _fat_santa ◴[] No.42738543[source]
What I see happening in the future is builders will stop building homes in highly disaster prone areas because those places cant secure insurance and thus potential owners won't be able to secure a mortgage, and the only folks living there will be the very wealthy that can afford to self-insure.

There are some areas like CA where natural disaster risk can be mitigated through forest management and I think those places will continue to grow, but for places where we can't do anything to impact a natural disaster (ie hurricane's in florida), those places will start to have "off limit" zones for any type of insurable construction. These places will still be accessable, we will just build parks, beaches and other things there for the public, just not homes or commercial structures.

I think a big part of why natural disasters have gotten so bad is one climate change but also the fact that we're building places we shouldn't and in the future most will learn the lesson to no build in a certain area unless they are made of money and are aware of the risks of building their.