![]() I panicked and called every insurance broker I knew. “Citizens fired us, and we had to take insurance with a private company - for 20% more,” Brown says.” That company then increased prices by 40% and then last September, in the middle of the hurricane season, went bankrupt and we lost all coverage. Since then, however, Citizens’ eligibility rules for property insurance have changed: homeowners are now only eligible for their policies if available premiums from private insurance companies are more than 20% higher than the premiums for comparable coverage from Citizens.Ĭitizens did not return requests for comment. “In 20 we were hit twice, at a time when we were fortunately covered by Citizens.” “Hurricane insurance is critical to being able to continue to live in Vero Beach,” Brown, in his 60s, says. Ian Brown, who is partly retired and lives in the small, Atlantic-facing city of Vero Beach, is pondering the very same dilemma. Photograph: Ricardo Arduengo/AFP/Getty Images “I don’t know anybody in these places, and any savings on home insurance could be cancelled out by higher property taxes elsewhere.”Ī man wades through a flooded neighborhood in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian in Fort Myers last September. I’ve been looking at South Carolina and Wisconsin. ![]() With my income level I’d have to move somewhere pretty inexpensive. When my premium goes to the $3,000-a-year mark, I have to sell and move out of Florida, probably in the next couple of years. ![]() “In a really bad hurricane year,” Andrea says, “Citizens can do a special assessment and charge me more. ![]() The state of Florida has done zero in that period to help homeowners.”įlorida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has been accused of dragging his feet on the insurance issue, as well as of a “catastrophic” approach to the climate crisis after saying he rejects the “politicization of the weather” and questioning whether hurricanes hitting Florida have been worsened by climate change. “But it has been getting a lot worse over the past two years. “This insurance trouble has been going on since Hurricane Andrew,” Andrea says, referencing the destructive category 5 hurricane that struck the Bahamas, Florida and Louisiana in August 1992. This brought my premium down to $2,200 annually, so I can stay for now.”Īndrea is among a number of Florida citizens who shared with the Guardian that rapidly exploding hurricane cover premiums had made their private property insurances unaffordable, and forced them to apply for cover with the Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, Florida’s not-for-profit insurer of last resort, created in 2002 to provide windstorm coverage and general property insurance for homeowners who could not obtain insurance elsewhere. Luckily I was able to get insurance through the state-funded program. “My insurance premium went from $750 in 1999 to a little over $3k last year, before jumping to $4,678 in 2023, despite the fact that the area I live in has not had a direct hit by a hurricane in over a hundred years and I have an itty-bitty house. Like many other Floridians, Andrea’s private insurance premium doubled in the past two years, and became her largest monthly bill, bigger than her mortgage payment. “But if my homeowner insurance premium goes up further,” she says, “I may have to sell up and move to another state.” Andrea, 68, a retired office manager in the automotive industry from Pinellas county, has lived in Florida for almost 30 years.
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