Semafor: "Lawmakers' Approach to the Insurance Crisis is Counterproductive"
A long-form newsletter about natural disaster insurance quotes RFF Senior Fellow Margaret Walls and cites two recent RFF papers.
The problem with allowing rates to rise precipitously or with cutting off public insurance is that such changes are likely to fall most heavily on low-income households. There’s a misperception that homes in fire-prone forests or along beaches are mostly vacation properties for the wealthy, said Margaret Walls, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a research nonprofit. In fact, homes in high-risk areas, precisely because they are high risk, have historically been less expensive, and therefore drawn lower-income buyers. Now, low-income zip codes may be more likely to have their policies canceled because of wildfire risk, Walls found. A separate RFF study in February also found that accurate pricing of flood risk would lower the value of homes owned by low-income families nationwide by up to 10 percent.
