Insurance

A home insurance crisis faces Mountain West states as wildfires blaze the region.

Homeowners insurance is getting more expensive and harder to keep. Lawmakers in our region introduced more than a dozen policy proposals in response this year.

In recent months, the U.S. Senate Budget Committee and the Federal Insurance Office have each released detailed data on insurance premiums, non-renewals and other key metrics. The advocacy groups Public Citizen and The Revolving Door Project brought that data to life with interactive maps.

An obscure federal agency recently released what it calls the “most comprehensive data on homeowners insurance in history.” And the picture it paints for the Mountain West is a concerning one.

While California has a uniquely unstable insurance market, many of the issues there are increasingly being seen across the West. The state’s previous insurance commissioner says there are things other states can do to stave off more serious problems.

Fire season in the West is getting longer, more severe and costlier, impacting both the availability and affordability of home insurance in Idaho.

There’s little doubt that insurance markets in the West and elsewhere are being severely impacted by climate change-fueled disasters. However, robust, granular data on the phenomenon is hard to come by. That is until a pair of researchers developed a clever methodology to extract detailed, zip code-level data on tens of millions of properties across the country. What they find is steep increases in premiums in disaster-threatened areas, and the promise of even steeper jumps in years to come.

In the context of climate change’s spiraling impacts on insurance markets, an effort is underway to collect voluminous data from insurers to analyze risks, availability and affordability. Insurance market volatility has been an increasing issue in the West, spurred by wildfires and other climate-related disasters.

Home insurance is becoming a more uncertain market, in large part due to climate-fueled disasters like wildfires. Some states in the West are taking steps to address the situation, like Oregon where a 2023 law requires insurers to account for home-hardening measures in their underwriting models. In California, they’re trying to take it a step further.

Catastrophic wildfires and other disasters fueled by climate change are raising serious doubts about the future of insurance. But a former California insurance commissioner has some ideas about what could be done.