The home insurance market is crumbling in New Orleans, leaving Alfredo Herrera with few options for coverage — and skyrocketing insurance premiums.
Herrera, 35, works in finance for a local bank. He bought his 900-square-foot home in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood in 2020 for $270,000, and lives there with his partner.
In 2022, he paid $1,600 a year for home insurance. But last July, his insurer canceled his coverage, saying it was leaving Louisiana.
In the past, acquiring or keeping homeowners’ insurance didn’t present much of a problem.
But as climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather, insurers — especially those in areas most impacted by floods and fires — are raising their premiums, or pulling out altogether, impacting the affordability and availability of home and fire insurance.
You can’t live in an area where your house is destroyed every other year and expect someone to pay for it.
Oh come on. No place is like that. I live in Florida, in the gulf coast, in a house from the 1940s. The house I moved from is 100 years old this year and still fine. Home insurance has been running a scam here for years, taking money and running. Of course the risk is higher but flood insurance is like 800 a year, house insurance exclusive of flood wants like 10x that, and they are cherry picking houses and leaving those they think are risky to be insured by the state insurance collective.
If I had all the money I’d sent to insurers over the years only to have them drop all the policies and disappear I could self insure at a higher amount that might actually pay to rebuild the house.
With any insurance, it’s like gambling, the house always wins.
Yet.
Right, but a 1/100 year event is not “every other year”.
You must not live in a hurricane area.