21 hours Ago
SAN FRANCISCO — When you buy home insurance, it's to make sure that when disaster strikes you can make repairs or, if necessary, rebuild. But as more and more wildfires have burned across California and the country, many people are finding that insurance won't cover the cost of the destruction. A San Francisco Chronicle investigation and documentary calls underinsurance the new housing crisis.
The reporting found that most people are sitting in a home that is underinsured. When Chronicle photographer Brontèˆ Wittpenn flew down to Los Angeles to cover the wildfires in January, she was shocked at what she saw. "What I saw was destruction that I'd never seen before.
Everything was gone," Wittpenn said. But because of a previous assignment in 2021, she also saw what the future looked like for so many of those homeowners. "All I could think was, here's Grizzly Flats four years later, and a lot of families are still left in limbo.
They're unable to rebuild, they don't know where to go, some are in trailers, and some might be in trailers for the rest of their lives," Wittpenn shared. "And it really made me think, what's going to happen to LA?" Grizzly Flats is where the Chronicle's investigation began. The logging community was destroyed by the Caldor fire in 2021.
"Over the last two decades, California's largest home insurance companies have overwhelmingly used several different algorithms to determine how much to insure homeowners for. And what we've found over the last six months is that those algorithms are not working," said Chronicle investigative reporter Susie Neilson. According to the investigation, the algorithms are used by insurers representing two-thirds of the U.
S. market. "This isn't just a California problem.
These algorithms are being used across the country," said Chronicle home insurance reporter Megan Munce. Homeowners in Colorado, Washington and New Mexico have also been impacted. Underinsurance doesn't just impact homeowners in areas with wildfires, homeowners could also be impacted by other natural disasters like hurricanes.
You can read the full investigation and watch the documentary from our partners at the San Francisco Chronicle on their website. See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel.
