> if the state of California believes it knows better than the insurers how to fairly price risks to its citizens’ homes, it should offer that insurance itself.

Behold, the California Fair Plan:

https://www.cfpnet.com/

Technically not a State agency. They force registered insurers to participate in a pool and insure homes. It should be called "California Forced Plan" or something worse.

In practice, it's a horrific thing. I know people paying $6,000 per year for home insurance when, in other parts of the State you can insure a home for $800 per year.

Fires, you say?

Yeah, no, not a single bush burned in their neighborhood in 30 years.

What happens is that some incomprehensible grouping of State, City, County...whatever agencies get together and declare entire regions as high fire hazard zones. That's pretty much a license to rape and pillage.

Check out the map:

https://osfm.fire.ca.gov/media/6636/fhszs_map.pdf

The whole thing is, from my perspective, a horrific authoritarian overreach.

Why do I say this?

Look at those areas and research how many homes exist in them compared to the rest of State. Then get data on how many homes per year burn down due to brush or forest fires. That part is important. You cannot count homes that burned down because a 3D printer caught fire in the garage or someone started an oil fire while cooking and could not put it out.

If you are going to classify an entire region as an extreme fire danger region, you'd better have lots of fires caused by events well outside anyone's home. You know, brush fires.

The truth of the matter is that the numbers don't justify any of this. They are taking advantage of people.

There are approximately 12 million housing units in California [1]. Out of those, between 2005 and 2022, some 65,000 structures were lost o wildfires.

That averages out to about 0.03% properties lost per year to wildfires.

And that number is deeply skewed by abnormal way-out-of-the-norm activity during three out of 18 years. If we take out these three data points we go from 65K properties lost down to 20K. Which means somewhere in the order of 0.01% of properties lost to wildfires under normal circumstances.

So, somewhere between 0.01% and 0.03% lies a sensible estimate. And for this ridiculous number they castigate a massive portion of the CA population with this high fire risk rating that causes their premiums to explode.

There's a lot more to this [3]. If you look at home fires at a national level (over 300K per year), the leading causes are cooking and heating equipment. And yet, once again, with 140 million housing units in the US, that number represents 0.2% of the housing units per year.

In other words, if we are going to talk about averages (not always a good idea), the national average for homes burning down due to fires not related to wildfires, is TEN TIMES greater than the percentage of housing units burned down in CA due to wildfires.

Conclusion: People are getting robbed. Insurance companies are just fine.

[1] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/housing-stat...

[2] https://headwaterseconomics.org/natural-hazards/structures-d...

[3] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/house-fire-stati...