Originally published at: More insurance companies leave Florida | Boing Boing
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Conservative Floridians: “Bad times are coming, real bad.”
Conservative Floridians: “So-called ‘climate change’ is a librul hoax to force us into the NWO.”
Conservative Floridians: “Our only hope for freedom is the free market.”
[Severe weather hits, homes insurers have refused to cover due to shareholder requirements are destroyed.]
Conservative Floridians: “Biden is to blame! He should give us money!”
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Holy fudge! It is amazing how “You can’t get insurance” suddenly makes the situation concrete.
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I thought Florida was all about “small government” and “personal responsibility”
/S
If they get the federal aid, there should be string attached: no money for beach front property. They know what they signed up for.
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No, it’s about “privatizing the gains while socializing the loses.”
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The only outcome will be Americans paying to rebuild uninsurable homes.
Which won’t be built to standards designed to survive such storms and in any event will be destroyed again in a year or three. Rinse and repeat.
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At that point, they should “pull their own bootstrap.”
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It’s not an ‘If” it’s most decidedly when these days.
I’ve lived in FL for most of the last 36 years - i have seen it change a great deal in the last 7 years and not for the better. Some of the laws that were passed this last session were thrown out as being stupidly extreme and cruel just 8 years ago (the trans bathroom ban for one), the last 5 years have been a rush to increased cruelty and DeSantis has moved to prevent local government from having any power.
The weather is definitely different from when we moved down in 87, and even through the early 2000s - it used to be we could count on cold weather in the Orlando area in October for hallowe’en horror nights at Universal - now it’s still t-shirt, shorts and hot as hell at that time.
I usually go camping over Thanksgiving and the last few years it’s been questionable whether it will be cool enough for that. In the summer we used to have a daily monsoon like downpour around 2-3pm every day, that’s not happened in at least 20 years. We’re instead getting way more intense storms that are not nearly as predictable.
In the last 20 years we’ve gone from hurricanes being a rare thing to an almost guarantee that one will hit somewhere in the state - the Panhandle has been hit extremely hard recently and when the building codes were strengthened back in the 90s from Andrew, the Panhandle was excepted because of how rare they were up there - Ivan in 2005 and MIchael in 2017 did immense damage. The storms are more frequent and stronger. Add a huge amount of fraud, especially among roofers and auto insurance claims, and yeah, the insurance companies are getting out. The legislature spent more time passing laws to make DeSantis a public figure for the MAGAssholes nationally for his presidential bid than with anything that would help Floridians with real problems - nothing for folks getting squeezed out of housing because of rental prices (except to block local govs from trying to do anything and allowing leasing companies to be able to charge more bullshit fees), nothing for insurance (except to protect insurance companies from the insured), etc. All culture war bullshit to get him on the news.
It’s a shit state. Didn’t used to be.
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And that’s not to mention how fucking insane Irma was - usually the hurricanes lose strength quickly when the hit land - Irma hit directly in the middle on the southern tip and went directly north and was a hurricane all the way up. That is the craziest storm I’ve ever seen hit - even beating Jeanne in 2004 doing a loop to come back and hit us after veering to the NE.
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If they get hit, DeSantis’s administration will go from anti-woke crusading to begging the federal government for money. The federal government will bail it out. Then Florida will go right back to anti-woke crusading.
I think the reality will differ only slightly from this description. DeSantis won’t let up, even WHILE taking the bailout, simply because he knows the Biden admin isn’t petty enough to punish the people of Florida for the misdeeds of the governor. I predict he will have no compunction about accepting the check with one hand and vigorously stabbing with the other.
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Oh yes, definitely this - he showed this when Ian hit in 2022
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It’s just, Biden needs to make a huge show about this fact. You know those giant novelty checks seen in commercials and tv? He need to hand deliver one of those to DeSantis every single time he get’s one and on camera to drive that point home to the rest of the country.
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EVERY effing Gov contract with a Southern state should be like that.
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That’s the type of petty I can get behind. It doesn’t hurt anybody that’s a victim of circumstance.
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It’s amazing what competent governance can do. I mean, conservatives can complain all they want, but they also happily take the changes.
Up here in Illinois, we had a Repub governor who did the whole campaign on change (after the disasterous Blago who followed our record trend of having governors go to jail) and cost us our state’s credit rating and failed to pass a budget while in office, leading to an exodus of giant companies and the closure of colleges. The next governor, a billionaire heir that no one expected much from has nailed every one of his campaign promises and was on the national stage making deals in McDonald’s parking lots for PPE to get around Trump barricades. The state reported recently paying off all of its loans and having like $50 billion in rainy day money…and the conservatives are loving all the changes and critique him with the brilliant counter of “but he’s fat, right?”.
I really hope Florida does turn the blue everyone says it can be. Disney is far from blameless but I hope they somehow make DeSantis have to dress up as Mickey and beg for forgiveness. He’s doing absolutely nothing for the state to improve it.
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Jaded prediction: Someone with local FL clout will start a group insurance company that provides literally no services in their legalese policy, but will collect millions from FL residents until the next disaster. Rinse, repeat.
Onnnnnnn the issue at hand, I live very near the coast of GA and I have a Farmer’s Home Insurance/Hazard policy. This may well be my immediate future concern, and yet I’m not ready to leave my awesome city or home. 
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If they receive Federal aid it should be with the proviso that Florida’s government admits the problem is down to climate change.
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Let’s call it Trumpsurance.
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Huh, so the insurance companies there have been losing money (and quite a lot of it - almost a billion dollars a year, now) since… 2016. So this has been a long time coming. I’ve been amazed that “prime” (and highly vulnerable) Florida real estate (e.g. everything in and around Miami) has continued to inflate in value, but within this context it’s absolutely boggling. Clearly everyone’s counting on eventually being bailed out (with no losses) by the federal government, so they have no trepidation about the increasingly ridiculous property prices. It doesn’t matter that the property has an expiration date, and that date is “oh, right about now.”
The issues aren’t confining themselves to beach front properties, so there’s really no need to distinguish along those lines. One way or another, at some point the US government is either going to have to spend trillions of dollars to bail out Florida property owners, or trillions of dollars worth of value is going to disappear from the US economy, which also won’t be great (and a lot of non-wealthy people will see their savings get wiped out). I’m sympathetic to people who bought property a long time ago and the poor and middle class homeowners who are clueless about the risk, but it chaps my hide to think about those who blithely spent many millions on “hot” luxury properties recently that are going to be literally underwater in a few decades. The buyers and sellers in the overinflated luxury real estate market just don’t care about the risk because they know they’ll never have to pay the price themselves.
Although even if they were, they won’t necessarily be built to survive the next set of storms that come along that will be unprecedented in power, nor the fact that (quite soon) Florida will simply be underwater.
I suspect they’re too heavily regulated for that to be viable. (For a red state, there’s a surprising level of control over insurance. The state even regulates how much they can charge - so reinsurance costs have been greater than their revenue for years.) Far easier to set up a legit insurance company, extract some profit in between disasters and then go bankrupt when the claims come in. Except the disasters are too regular now for even that to work anymore.
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When the hurricane comes along that wipes out a chunk of the Overseas Highway connecting the Florida Keys to mainland Florida, will that be enough of a warning sign, or will the Florida government say, “Eh, Key West was full of teh gays, so no biggie.”
See also: “Storm of the Century”, by Willie Drye.
eta: this would be one of the very few situations where eminent domain would be useful. When someone’s house gets destroyed for the second time by a storm, either the state or federal government should buy it out, no discussion, and no rebuilding a third time. God is telling you this is a bad idea.
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