Extreme weather that damages our buildings is no stranger to New England. This isn't just a threat across the country, as shown by this motel in Hardwick, Vermont hit by 2023's devastating flooding. Photo: Shutterstock.
As flames engulfed much of Los Angeles in January 2025, homeowners had one more thing to worry about besides their safety, the dangerous air quality, and the fires themselves: whether they had a home to return to or the money to rebuild.
Home insurance companies made these concerns even worse. Just before the Palisades fire, State Farm dropped the policies of around 1,600 homeowners (and another 2,000 in neighboring zip codes). And after the fires burned buildings to the ground, State Farm sought a 22% rate increase for renewed policies. Thousands of people found themselves struggling or unable to pay the rate hike, especially after the damage the fires caused.
What happens if you can’t afford home insurance? Well, that means no mortgage, no buying another home, and no financial support for rebuilding your current home.
This isn’t a story unique to California. Insurance companies across the country are fleeing or jacking up their rates as extreme weather becomes more frequent and severe, leaving homeowners high and dry. The trend is becoming so widespread that even federal lawmakers are investigating insurance companies running away from states at high risk of extreme weather.
But what does all of this have to do with New England?
Home Insurance Companies Are Getting Flighty Here, Too
Yes, New Englanders are also seeing insurance rates spike or having to cancel their policies entirely because it’s simply too expensive.
According to an interactive map of insurance data from the New York Times, Massachusetts had the fifth highest nonrenewal rates in the country in 2023, with insurances companies opting not to renew one in nine policies in flood-prone areas (like Cape Cod). Connecticut nonrenewal rates have nearly doubled since 2018 as the state faces more wildfires. Rhode Island’s rates also spiked in 2023.
And even for people who still have home insurance, it’s a fight. In Vermont, devastating floods submerged homes and businesses two years in a row, in 2023 and 2024. Families still report fighting with adjusters or finding that flood coverage only paid for a meager portion of the repairs needed for damaged homes. One Vermonter describes being unscathed by Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, only to be hit in 2023 – and her flood insurance paid for barely half of the repairs necessary to rebuild.
What Does This Mean? Climate Change Costs Us Too Much
As Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said in the New York Times, “The climate crisis that is coming our way is not just about polar bears, and it’s not just about green jobs…It actually is coming through your mail slot in the form of insurance cancellations, insurance nonrenewals, and dramatic increases in insurance costs.”
This isn’t just about the environment. Losing your home is one of the biggest setbacks a family could experience. It means losing what is likely the majority of someone’s life savings. It also means losing a lifetime’s worth of memories, from family photos to family heirlooms and more.
And what about entire neighborhoods hit with rising premiums – where insurance cancellation rates are spiking because families can’t pay the new, high cost? These neighborhoods tend to be those most at risk for extreme weather. So, when a storm barrels through and destroys an entire community, families may be forced to sell what’s left of their land to developers. And developers will likely build expensive new properties these families might not be able to afford to buy back. This pattern can displace entire neighborhoods.
It goes further than that – local and state governments are struggling to pay for damaged public infrastructure, like roads and bridges. Families are stretching to pay spiking energy bills during frigid winters and hot summers. And now, we have to shovel out hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild our homes from increasingly severe and frequent storms – despite also paying for a premium that’s supposed to help.
So long as we continue burning fossil fuels that overheat our planet, we can count on these unnatural disasters rapidly worsening. Our ties to gas, oil, and coal, which the fossil fuel industry calls “cheap,” cost us much more than the utility bills we get every month. They cost us paychecks, entire savings, and even our homes.
How long are we willing to wait? How much are we willing to pay?
Most states have some level of data that shows the severe connection between insurance rates, nonrenewal, and climate change. But frankly, that data isn’t always guaranteed, and it’s not mandatory for all states to collect the same data or release it. Texas, for example, didn’t provide any data on nonrenewals or cancellations. And now, the Trump administration is touting potential cuts to the Federal Insurance Office.
What does this mean? The threat to our housing security could be much worse than we understand it to be right now.
That’s why New England and the rest of the country can’t sit idly by while extreme weather gets worse and insurance companies either flee or jack up their rates. These shocking patterns mean our state decision-makers must plan ways to hold insurance companies accountable and stay the course on climate. Our leaders need to think about where people build, how they build, and how they can seek relief in an age of storms, wildfires, and floods. Our leaders also need to step in to make sure people are protected as we expect even less coverage with federal rollbacks. We also need the culprits who knowingly overheat our planet and fuel extreme weather, Big Oil and Gas, to pay for the damage their dirty products cause – not be forced to shell it out ourselves.
After all the fires, floods, hurricanes, and tropical storms we’ve seen, it should be clear that extreme weather doesn’t care where we live or how much we make. None of us can truly be “at home” until we stop burning the fossil fuels causing our planet to overheat.
This is part of a series diving into our most commonly asked questions, current events, and topics of curiosity.
