It's probably not news to anyone who owns a home or other type of building that insurance rates are going up, but it may be more startling that outright insurance denials are as well.
A few days ago, the New York Times covered this and created a nationwide map showing how the denials are concentrated, based on data from a U.S. Senate hearing:
As I assumed, the areas with the most denials were in obvious hurricane- and wildfire-prone areas, like the Southeast and California, but overall the denials were more widespread than I had realized.
What I also noticed was that two of the areas that had the least denials were the two places I have called home for the vast majority of my life: upstate New York and Minnesota. Pennsylvania has about the same level, it looks like, but other than that, nothing is close. (I'm not sure what the little overlaid dots in the coding mean, so am unclear what's going on in Alaska; I suspect it means no data are available.)
Upstate New York and Minnesota have been bandied about as "climate havens" for a while, so this doesn't totally surprise me, but their contrast with nearby states was startling, nonetheless. And I know that rates have been rising here, too, so maybe denials have only been lagging.
Climate change = climate crisis. It comes in forms we won't be ready for.
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