The skyrocketing cost of insurance premiums in Florida is leading residents to drop their insurance, consider selling their home, and even move out of the state, according to recent reports.

For years now, the sunny, vibrant state has been a magnetic destination for many Americans—a phenomenon which has been driving up demand for housing, especially during the pandemic, as well as home prices.

But while Florida was the number one state in the country that people moved to in 2022, it was also the one with the highest number of residents wanting to relocate, according to a SelfStorage.

  • BigMacHole@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    It’s a good thing their Republican Leaders are working hard to help them with this issue.

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Sell their homes to who? Is this like a NFT, always a bigger fool, kind of thing?

    • quindraco@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      To landlords, who will charge arbitrarily high rent, secure in the knowledge that they aren’t in a free market due to inelasticity of demand (people can’t do without shelter) and supply (there are finite places to live). That will let them pay the insurance premiums homeowners can’t afford.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I keep trying to convince s few buddies we should pool our money together and get into RVs. Have a lot with RVs for rent. Move them from lot to lot based on needs. Park them outside business that don’t pay well but have a lot of workers.

        • quindraco@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          I’ve heard worse business proposals, for sure. But be careful about identifying as a landlord (even a prospective one) in a place like this!

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Not actually going to own land and I am certainly not a lord. I am thinking more like I own RVs, rent them, and work with my renters to find provide parking and utilities.

            • quindraco@lemm.ee
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              11 months ago

              Landlords aren’t defined by literally owning land or literally being lords. If you own living space you rent out, you’re a landlord, even if your apartments are mobile (including both RVs and houseboats).

              But listen, I support you and your choices. This is not me being critical. We’re just having this conversation in a space where it’s much more in vogue to hate anyone who owns living space they rent out.

    • eestileib@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      Republicans who want to jerk off to DeSantis and let some racial slurs fly without social opprobrium.

      That’s who has been moving there since 2020 or so.

      • Vanon@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Some people see Florida as America’s floppy, deformed penis. Others see it more as a nauseating dookie emerging from the south. Scientists are still studying the area to find the causes of the mass psychosis, but urge all healthy adults to avoid the region and its inhabitants.

    • rchive@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Everything has a buyer at some price. These people will just have to sell at a loss, probably.

  • Furbag@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    They were laughing at Californians when it was happening to us (very very recently) thinking that it was the result of “liberal policymaking”.

    Well, how does it feel, Florida? Are you ready to put aside our differences and go after our real common enemy, the for-profit insurance industry and climate deniers? Because I promise you, this is only going to get worse unless we force them to change things.

      • rchive@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        He probably does think that. He could spin rising premiums as speculation based on climate change belief.

        • limelight79@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          Watch: More legislation on insurance prices in the state.

          Or, they could pull a North Carolina and outlaw any discussion of sea level rise.

          • lad@programming.dev
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            11 months ago

            Seriously, there are places where climate change (discussion) is banned? This is mind blowing

            We should just ban it everywhere, and that’s it, problem solved 🤦‍♂️

          • ____@infosec.pub
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            11 months ago

            Lord, don’t even get me started on NC property insurance. Their solution to increasing rates for many years was to mandate that rates couldn’t exceed x, based on what they believed was appropriate.

            Protip: It wasn’t appropriate. I’ve been out of that game for long enough now that I don’t know if they ever fixed it, but it was bad - basically if you couldn’t write a policy within x% of the expected rate, the risk had to be ceded to the state’s reinsurance facility, which drastically limited the available coverage.

          • flerp@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            He can’t beat big business. If he tries it will ruin him even more than he is already ruined. Give him all the ideas.

      • Joker@discuss.tchncs.de
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        11 months ago

        He will pass a new law allowing him to fire insurance companies’ boards and install his own people. Make America Florida! Yeehaw!

    • willis936@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Honestly I’m on team insurance in these cases. The US is filthy rich and we have tons of highly habitable land. Why are we wasting resources subsidizing some people choosing to live in comfortable, risky locations?

      For those stuck in poverty: that does suck but I consider that an independent issue.

    • ours@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Free hand of the market is giving them an invisible bitchslap.

      Soon they’ll be “free” from insurance.

      • rchive@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        Good. Subsidizing risky behavior, as we do with some kinds of disaster insurance, encourages risky behavior. Rising insurance costs are the market telling people to stop living in certain places. We’d do well to listen and stop living in places like Florida so much.

    • superguy@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Are you ready to put aside our differences and go after our real common enemy, the for-profit insurance industry and climate deniers?

      Nah. Republicans never admit when they are wrong.

  • OhmsLawn@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    It’s interesting to me that insurance companies are becoming the chief drivers of the preparation for climate change: “Wanna build a house in the woods? On a sandbar? GTFO. Use your own money.”

    • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
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      Since humans invented math and fossil fuels, this moment was inevitable. The writing has been on the wall in Florida for ten years.

      I forgot the actual statistics, but it’s something crazy. Like Florida constitutes 8% of the country’s homeowners insurance policies, but 80% of all homeowners insurance litigation. Florida real estate is a ponzi scheme now.

      They’ve got miles and miles and miles of roads in Florida lined with 10-million dollar, beachfront houses, all of which will sooner than later be buried under 25 ft of seaweed for the next thousand years. The question is who will be left holding the bag on all that risk?

      I’m certain the Republicans in the Florida legislature will let the insurance companies off of the hook before too long here, and will leave working people holding a bunch of worthless real estate, just waiting for climate catastrophe to wipe everything away.

    • zaphod@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Well yeah. The cost of damage resulting from rising sea levels are one of the negative externalities that result from burning fossil fuels. Insurance premiums are effectively passing that cost on to future flood victims.

      That means the right market-based solution, which both parties claim to love, is to apply an appropriately sized carbon tax, thereby internalizing those costs in the price of fuel, and using the funds to pay for flood mitigation and future damage, but that looks too much like socialism…

      • rchive@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        The criticisms I hear from the American left about carbon taxes is that they don’t work, not that they look like socialism. I think they probably would work, but what do I know.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Because they are grounded in the real world. If your goal is to make money finding out how to lower your costs is a good way to do it. If your goal is to win elections telling people what they want to hear is a good way to do it. They know that this is happening and it is going to get worse.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Whatever it takes to finally get people to realize that living in a disaster zone is a terrible idea.

    • GentlemanLoser@ttrpg.network
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      11 months ago

      The current crisis isn’t so much about climate change as it is an insurance market so rampant with fraudulent roof damage claims that the market can’t bear it. FL legislature tried to correct this but before the law took effect a flood of claims were filed.

      Climate change will only make this worse, ofc.

      • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        My understanding is that the substantial majority of roof damage claims were legitimate and attributable to predatory roofing companies that would finance and install new roofs after a storm at a huge discount, they’d install a shitty fucked up roof, then would sell the debt to a third party servicer, and then the roofing company would close up shop, rebrand under a new name, and do it again. By the time the roof fails, the original company is long gone leaving the homeowner and the insurers holding the bag.

        The legislature and the insurers realized they had a impending consumer crisis and loosened the laws about paying these claims, and essentially opened the door to the fraud.

        I wonder if the real issue at this point is that Florida just attracts fraudsters. It was their laws that allowed contractors to have a revolving door of LLC’s.

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            11 months ago

            Of course it is. Nobody will do business with the shitty roof company that no longer exists ever again. See, the invisible hand works just fine, and might even give you a handjob if you pay it enough.

      • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        Not being able to sell them (except for 10 cents on the dollar of what they paid) when they cannot be insured will be the next shock.

        • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
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          11 months ago

          Yeah we saw that happen in places like Detroit during the recession, but I doubt it’ll get quite that bad ($100 homes) since Florida at least has good weather going for it.

      • RBWells@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Oh come on. We live in a house built in the 1940s, and I moved to this house from one built in the 1920s that is still in good shape. It’s not like all the houses are knocked down and rebuilt every 15 years, but that is how the insurance is priced.

        Insurance is partly like gambling, the house always wins, right? They want to make money. Whatever the highest amount allowed by law is, that is what they charge.

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
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          11 months ago

          You’re missing out on the most important point.

          The house always wins - but the house doesn’t pick up and leave when they’re already losing money, they do it when the cost of relocating their pile of money is less than the margins they could make if they move

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    It won’t be long, and in Florida the cost for the mortgage will be neglectable in comparison to the costs of insurance.

    The big downside will be that Floridians will move out of Florida and spread elsewhere. Maybe it is time for Georgia and Alabama to invest in a massive fence?

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Insurance typically works off historical data to evaluate risk from my understanding, and having something as disastrous as the Miami beach condo collapse bodes a bad sign for insurance companies, especially given the terrible and absolutely incompetent rescue effort during the aftermath.

    By the way, I’m shocked at how quickly the Miami condo collapse left the news cycle.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Iirc Florida passed some kind of law requiring coverage no matter where a structure is. And the only way the companies could make it work was massive premium increases because the places they’re being forced to cover literally have to be rebuilt every year. This was after the federal government said it wouldn’t offer disaster insurance on those zones anymore.

    • Uncle_Bagel@midwest.social
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      11 months ago

      To be fair to Florida, that condo was built pre-Andrew and they revised their entire building code after Andrew. There aren’t too many large building built pre-Andrew anymore because they were all built as cheap as possible to laundrr drug money.

      That being said, there are a million reasons why i would never move to Florida, and the only building codes that can prevent your house getting inundated by flood surge is by putting it on stilts, so no shocker that the premiums are skyrocketing. Same with fire insurance in California right now.

      • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The building collapse was due to bad building code for sure; however, the apathy that followed the tragedy, both from rescue workers and the public at large, was really disheartening.

      • Pasta4u@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I’d build a 3d printed house that is on a raised slab in Florida and in Cali. Anything out of wood would be a waste

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          In California you’d largely be fine as long as you take care to have land around your house and keep it defensible. A lot of the fires that get into towns are because those recommendations and regulations get ignored in favor of trying to live in a forest as much as possible.

          • Pasta4u@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            You can do everything roght but your neighbors might not. I have family that lost thier home a few years ago in a fire and have moved to San Fran now

        • Fosheze@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Alternatively just build it dirt cheap and expect to rebuild every year. Disposable housing, the real american way.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    lol @ all the people who fled the northeast because “Florida is cheap…”

    Even the second place finisher of the Carolinas has gotten too expensive.

  • LEDZeppelin@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    So much for DeathSantis utopia. Go back to Florida and don’t bring your Nazi politics to my state.

    • DigitalTraveler42@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      40% of voting Floridians voted against DeSantis, Florida is also the state with the third highest Jewish population, I’m fairly certain that nowhere near all of Florida has “Nazi” politics.

      Maybe try not sounding like an ignorant by generalizing the third most populated state, which is also just as mixed as the other three most populated states. You’re just sounding like those idiots that bitch about how California is all “liberal” while ignoring the conservative North Cali and all of the Neo-Con enclaves and Nazis in between.

      Sure the Florida GOP are pretty much Nazi-lite, but there’s a shitload of Florida citizens who are not them and completely disagree with them and are doing what they can to push back against them.

    • Superb@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 months ago

      It’s a storage unit company, so presumably they have their own moving service or often connect people with other moving services. They’d be able to see the trend

      • Wrench@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Yeah… that still seems like some extremely flimsy evidence to base an article on.

        Edit - didn’t notice this was from Newsweek. “Journalism”

        Maybe I should connect them with my local bartender. He’s full of information. Qualification? He talks to people.

        • rchive@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          The article also mentions how storms are becoming increasingly deadly, which they’re not, necessarily. It’s so up and down year to year it’s hard to pick out an actual trend.

    • Rockyrikoko@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      They didn’t finish the sentence

      …according to a SelfStorage service clerk working in Tampa /S

  • Clown_Tempura@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Would be sick if we could pull a Looney Tunes and saw the fucking thing off from the rest of us. Let it float away and sink into the Atlantic.