Local, State and National Leaders Must Address Impact of Supersized Natural Disasters
COMMENTARY
The catastrophic fires raging across southern California are heartbreaking, and they highlight the dramatic increase in the frequency and severity of natural disasters we’ve seen over the last decade, driven in no small part by climate change.
What’s going on in California follows a massive snowstorm across the east which followed hurricanes that ravaged the southeast last year.
In addition to the immediate toll that these disasters inflict on communities, homeowners across the United States face a long-term crisis: the skyrocketing cost of homeowners’ insurance.
The reality is that we need to fix our home insurance system before it collapses. In states with high risk of catastrophic natural disasters, insurers are exiting the marketplace and leaving property owners to pay exorbitant premiums. We need to identify the challenges and build support for a range of policy changes to support homeowners and make sure the cost of insurance doesn’t price them out of their homes.
The three of us have had to deal with natural disaster-related issues in our home states of California, Florida and Louisiana, and we’ve piloted a raft of solutions to begin to address the issue.
This includes building resiliency hubs in California that transform schools and government spaces into resources for shelter, food, emergency services and power, as well as legislation to strengthen disclosure laws in Florida to ensure potential homeowners are fully aware of a property’s flood risk before purchasing.
In Louisiana, addressing this challenge has meant legislative proposals to incentivize efforts to make homes less vulnerable to hurricane damage and strengthen flood plain disclosure laws. Those are designed to lower insurance costs for homeowners who take steps to increase protections for their properties and provide homeowners financial incentives to fortify their roofs against the state’s primary extreme weather events.
Ideas like these make sense, and other states (and localities) with similar risk profiles should consider adopting them. Yet, the reality is that they are not nearly enough.
The natural disasters made worse by climate change are not limited to one state. They are only going to get worse, and the impacts will be felt by more Americans, in more regions of the country.
We are calling on the president to convene a bipartisan working group — made up of federal, state and local officials, as well as industry leaders — to develop solutions to address this issue, which can then be implemented and adopted in the most relevant jurisdictions. The mission of this group should be to identify national solutions to the natural disaster crisis — including what to do about affordable insurance — and to highlight workable solutions that have been piloted at the state and local levels that should be expanded nationwide.
This is about much more than high premiums. With increasing frequency, insurers are pulling out of markets they deem too risky. As a result, homeowners have limited options, usually at significantly higher costs.
We understand the impact these decisions have on our friends, families and neighbors.
As costs rise, the Congressional Budget Office data shows that low- and middle-income households “are more likely to be uninsured or underinsured than high-income households.” We can’t sit by while ever-increasing disasters upend the insurance marketplace and make housing more unaffordable.
As we hope for the best at the federal level, our work at the state and local levels is more important than ever.
State and local leaders must work collectively and with purpose. What works in Florida could be adapted to help residents in Louisiana, California and other states.
The stakes are high, but with strong and consistent leadership, and, ideally, with partners in Washington, we can ensure that Americans are not left out in the cold when disaster strikes.
Royce Duplessis represents the 5th District in the Louisiana State Senate.
Christine Hunschofsky represents the 95th District in the Florida House of Representatives.
Laura Capps is a supervisor on the Santa Barbara County, California, Board of Supervisors representing the 2nd District.
They are also NewDEAL Leaders, part of a national network of rising state and local Democratic elected officials who share and spread effective policy ideas across the country. They can be found on X.
