Things are changing fast in the home insurance market
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2024
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
In the weeks after Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit the Southeast, the price to rebuild has become a topic of contention in the home insurance market. For years, home insurers have identified climate change as a threat, cut coverage and increased premiums for properties in disaster-prone areas. But now, home insurers are also using new technologies such as drone footage and artificial intelligence to identify other high-risk areas in urban and suburban neighborhoods.
Then, we’ll get into what headline inflation measures leave out of the cost of housing. And, how do we prepare for the upcoming Election Day in the shadow of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol? Later, we’ll hear from listeners on voting from overseas and the origins of trick-or-treating.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “Home Insurance is a Really Big Problem” from Kyla Scanlon on Substack
- “How Higher Property Insurance Premiums Mirror Climate Risk” from Knowledge at Wharton
- “How the Home Insurance Market Became So Distorted” from The New York Times
- “The Home Insurance Crunch: See What’s Happening in Your State” from The New York Times
- “America’s Most Famous Inflation Gauge Is Easing — But Some of Your Biggest Expenses Are Left Out” from Bloomberg
Do you have an Election Day tradition? Maybe you like to mail your ballot or treat yourself to coffee after hitting the polls. Let us know what your voting routine looks like at makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:12.0 | And I'm Amy Scott in for Kyrie. none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:15.0 | And I'm Amy Scott in for Kyi Risdahl. It's Tuesday, October 22nd. |
| 0:18.0 | Today we're talking about something that's on many Americans' minds |
| 0:21.0 | after the two recent hurricanes Helene and Milton and |
| 0:25.6 | and actually something I've covered quite a bit here at Marketplace which is what |
| 0:29.4 | many call a crisis in the homeowners insurance market. |
| 0:34.0 | Right, and we've talked about it a bunch on this show, but we really wanted to get into it today |
| 0:38.5 | because as many of you will know if you're lucky enough to be a homeowner, insurance premiums are rising across the country and a lot |
| 0:46.3 | of insurers are willing to cover less and less, particularly as the risk of of course these climate |
| 0:52.4 | related disasters has gone up and |
| 0:55.1 | this is leaving many Americans uninsured or underinsured and so we wanted to |
| 1:01.1 | learn more about how this is affecting the housing market as well as the broader economy, what solutions are out there. |
| 1:08.0 | So here to make us smart about this is Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, which is an advocacy group for insurance |
| 1:15.9 | customers. |
| 1:16.9 | Welcome to the show, Amy. |
| 1:18.9 | Thanks for having me on. |
| 1:21.5 | It's been like two weeks now since we've had these back-to-back hurricanes in the southeast and obviously |
| 1:27.0 | super tragic loss of life, so much damage that I know a lot of folks are still recovering |
| 1:32.0 | from. |
| 1:33.0 | But what do we know so far about how the insurance industry is responding to people's claims |
| 1:39.5 | from these batch of storms? |
... |
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