California insurance crisis: Which Bay Area communities have lost the most coverage

With its rows of tidy homes and neatly trimmed shrubs, Carolina Villaseca’s Brentwood neighborhood hardly looks like a tinderbox one spark away from erupting in flames.

Yet in October, Villaseca’s insurer, Safeco Insurance, sent a notice that the annual premium to renew her policy, which already had climbed steeply, would more than double, from $2,700 to $5,770.

“No claims, and the insurance company didn’t have an explanation whatsoever,” said Villaseca, who has since found coverage at a higher rate with another insurer. “The price has gone up every year, and I would say in the last three years, the price has gone up exponentially. They make it so people can’t afford to renew their insurance.”

California’s property insurance market has been reeling after a series of devastating and costly wildfires over the last decade, with estimated losses of more than $35.8 billion. Insurers have argued that outdated voter-approved regulations enacted in the late 1980s aimed at ensuring fairer rates have left them unable to charge enough to reflect rising costs and risk, forcing them to limit their liability exposure or leave the California market altogether.

Villaseca’s Contra Costa County ZIP code, 94513, with 19,366 non-renewals, had the largest number of home insurance policy non-renewals in the nine-county Bay Area from 2015 to 2024, with about one in every 10 policies, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis of California Department of Insurance data.

Statewide, California has had nearly 7.6 million non-renewals. The state’s hardest hit ZIP code was 92592 in the Riverside County city of Temecula, with 26,918 non-renewals.

Marin County as a whole had 49,782 non-renewals from 2015 to 2024, according to the data. A random sampling of Marin ZIP codes includes 94941 in Mill Valley, which had 6,714 non-renewals out of 87,127 policies; 94924 in the Bolinas area, 399 out of 5,315; 94960 in San Anselmo, 3,631 out of 46,863; 94945 in Novato, 3,583 out of 47,071; 94956 in Point Reyes Station, 302 out of 3,858; and 94901 in San Rafael, 6,190 out of 79,096.

Elsewhere in the Bay Area, ZIP codes with the most non-renewals elsewhere in the region include Dublin (94568) and Fremont (94536) in Alameda County; Gilroy (95020) and San Jose (95123) in Santa Clara County; South San Francisco (94536) in San Mateo County; and Santa Cruz (95060) in Santa Cruz County, the analysis found.

But Contra Costa County was home to several other ZIP codes with the most Bay Area non-renewals, including Bay Point (94565) and Antioch (94509).

That didn’t surprise Igor Dubrovsky, a co-owner of ESI Insurance Brokers in San Francisco, which has served about 5,000 customers in the Bay Area for about 15 years.

“Our agency had an increase of maybe 300% in the phone calls every single day and almost every story is the same,” Dubrovsky said. “The people come to see me to say, ‘I’m being dropped by my carrier, and I’m looking for insurance.’”

In Marin, Scott Johnson, the founding insurance broker of Marindependent Insurance Services, said his phone has been ringing off the hook with people who have been dropped by their insurer.

“People are getting non-renewed left and right,” Johnson said. “It’s a problem.”

While non-renewing home insurance policies has been an issue for a while, Johnson said some insurers have upped the ante — like taking drone or satellite pictures of homes — and even canceling line items in the insurance.

“They’ll issue a non-renewal for the silliest reason — you have moss on the roof,” Johnson said. “It really requires action on the part of the consumer to keep the policy.”

Spurred by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the state’s elected insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, presented a plan last fall to adopt new regulations by the end of this year addressing insurers’ chief demands: faster rate hike approvals; rates based on risk modeling rather than historic losses; and the ability to pass along to consumers their own costs for reinsurance against catastrophic losses. In return, Lara pledged that insurers would have to offer more coverage in the state’s fire-risk areas.

Those efforts are nearing completion, and relief is on the way with insurers such as Allstate and Farmers announcing plans to expand coverage in the state as reforms are implemented, said Michael Soller, a spokesman for the insurance department.

“All of the changes Commissioner Lara announced late last year are going to be in effect and finalized by the end of this month,” Soller said. “The risk of wildfires has increased, but under our 30-year-old rules, insurance companies are increasing the costs but not writing more policies. We’re updating rules so that insurance companies actually have to write more policies. And for the very first time in California’s history, that will happen.”

But insurers have cautioned that it could take years for changes to be reflected in coverage, and consumer advocates have questioned whether the new rules will deliver more than just higher premiums.

“All homeowners are going to pay a lot more for their insurance under Lara’s regulations,” said Consumer Watchdog president Jamie Court.

Homeowners in areas that insurers consider high risk have found themselves with few options. Many have turned to the state-mandated, last-resort California FAIR Plan, a privately run high-risk pool that offers limited coverage and can leave homeowners paying two to three times as much as a standard policy. Over the last five years, the number of FAIR Plan policies in the state has more than doubled, from 204,800 to 449,800.

Johnson said the FAIR plan is still not ideal, but it has improved a lot over the past few years. He said it used to take months just to get an insurance quote. Still, it can take time to get a FAIR policy changed or canceled.

“But it’s a godsend for many, like West Marin. No insurer wants Nicasio right now, nobody wants Woodacre, Point Reyes Station,” Johnson said. “There’s too much lumber out there, so it’s really the best option for many of these people.”

Others are turning to what are called non-admitted or surplus line insurers licensed in other states but not California and not subject to the state’s rate regulation. They also can be expensive.

Johnson said in Marin, this tends to be the case. He said he sees about roughly 50% of homeowners going to non-admitted insurers, with maybe around 40% to the California FAIR plan. He will refer some clients — those with lower-risk homes, in terms of both location and risk reduction work – to insurers like AAA that are still taking some customers.

“It seems like the non-admitted insurers are riding to the rescue right now,” Johnson said. “There’s very few places in the admitted market right now.”

Either way, premiums tend to be higher, and even those who receive offers for standard policies are seeing massive cost increases.

“Most of the clients’ rates are going up significantly more,” Dubrovsky said.

So why has home insurance suddenly become so expensive and hard to get in so many parts of California? Areas with many trees or wood susceptible to fire, including suburban areas on the outskirts of the Bay Area’s major cities, are seen as high risk, Dubrovsky said.

Chris Bachman, assistant chief and fire marshal at the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District, said things might get worse when Cal Fire releases new fire hazard maps for local urban areas next year. Those will add additional “high” and “moderate” ratings to maps that currently only show “very high” risk.

“This means that more communities will likely be impacted,” Bachman said.

Rich Shortall, a consultant for Fire Safe Marin, said the insurers are looking at risk zones as a whole and not individual homes, which makes it harder to work with insurance companies. Shortall was formerly the executive director of the nonprofit.

“I do think that the ultimate answer is that there is going to have to be a balance between residents being more proactive in protecting their homes if they want to get insurance and what the insurance agency will insure,” Shortall said. “Most people really aren’t there with that.”

Mark Brown, executive officer of the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, agreed that insurance agencies are not looking at individual efforts to reduce risk at their homes.

“Unfortunately, I do not think the insurance industry is looking at how much risk mitigation people have done, yet,” Brown said. “They are just looking at what the overall risk is for an area without taking into account the risk mitigations that have occurred.”

Home wildfire risk reduction includes removing and reducing vegetation in the first 5 feet around the home, replacing the vents with ember-resistant models, replacing gutters and installing double-pane windows. Shortall and Brown said most homes in Marin already have “class A” roofs. Brown added there is still a lot of wood and combustible siding on homes in Marin, which will take decades to replace.

Wildfire risk reduction work only goes so far when it comes to insurance. Both Shortall and Brown, fire risk reduction experts, have had their policies canceled by insurers.

Shortall’s insurance for his home in Truckee was non-renewed around five years ago — he is now on the FAIR plan — and his insurance for his house in Sleepy Hollow was canceled about a year ago by Travelers Insurance. He ended up going to a non-admitted insurer.

“I kind of experienced what everyone’s going through,” Shortall said. “Both properties were in really good shape. It’s just about not insuring anymore, period.”

Brown’s insurance for his home in Santa Rosa was canceled by State Farm in June, but he was able to get Farmers Insurance to cover him. He said he had done a lot of work to reduce risk on his home, but he was not sure if it was considered in Farmers’ decision.

“I’ve talked to lots of residents who have said I’ve outlined all the work they’ve done on their properties to insurers and it didn’t do any good,” Brown said.

Johnson said one of the first things he does with a new client is get information on the home, such as the kind of siding on the house, when all the systems were last updated, if there is a circuit breaker and its make and model, and past claim information. He said part of the job has become talking to people about what a realistic premium is now, which is often somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000.

“Most people don’t know the answers to them, so you have to do homework,” Johnson said. “You want to start that conversation early.”

Brown said insurance agencies need to recognize the community-level risk mitigation that agencies such as Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority and individuals have done.

For homeowners like Villaseca, it hasn’t felt like the state has had their back, leaving her and her neighbors to use social media to share information about insurance rates and insurers who are offering policies in their neighborhoods.

“I really don’t know what they’re doing,” Villaseca said. “That’s why we use Nextdoor.”

IJ reporter Krissy Waite contributed to this report.