Lloyd and his wife later bought another home in Hidden Valley Lake, a town that has taken ambitious steps to reduce flammable vegetation, but their insurance premium is still more than $4,500 a year, more than triple what it was on their last home in Kansas. Lloyd is worried that his insurance company will hike his price further under the new rules.
Other states across the West such as Colorado and Oregon are also seeing insurance coverage gaps emerge after big wildfires, though their problems are less acute than those in the Golden State. In Colorado, for instance, officials just recently established a state fire insurance backstop like California’s FAIR Plan, since it’s only in the past few years that customers there have been dropped en masse. California’s grand bargain with the insurance industry provides a blueprint for those other states: If you want to address coverage…
