With home insurance rates skyrocketing, some homeowners in Florida are choosing to "go bare"—go without home insurance, particularly expensive hurricane insurance, despite the risk of losing everything. Those with mortgages are required to have insurance, but many people in communities like West Palm Beach who have paid off their mortgages have chosen to drop insurance when facing premiums that have gone up around 40% this year, NPR reports. Others have chosen to leave the state, where insurance costs are the highest in the nation at more than triple the national average.
An example: Pete and Susan Sinclair decided to drop insurance on their home in West Palm Beach's historic Flamingo Park neighborhood when their renewal jumped to $10,000 this year. "If the house does blow over, we can sell the land and move on," Susan Sinclair tells the Wall Street Journal. Another neighborhood resident, Palm Beach County Mayor Gregg Weiss, says he paid off his mortgage and dropped insurance when the windstorm portion doubled to $20,000. Soaring property prices have contributed to the surge in insurance rates, which has left many homeowners with premiums that cost more than their mortgages.
The increase in natural disasters caused by climate change has caused a rise in insurance costs in Florida and other states most at risk. The soaring cost of construction and repairs has also played a role, as has a rise in litigation. Florida lawmakers passed a bill to deal with the latter issue last year, though it hasn't led to a drop in premiums yet. Benjamin Keys, a professor of real estate at the University of Pennsylvania, tells NPR that climate change models are causing private insurers to back away from some high-risk markets, a move that could lead to the federal government stepping in. "Will we see a national wind insurance program? Will we see a national wildfire insurance program?" he says. "I think that those are possibilities." (More home insurance stories.)
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