If you own a home in North County, you know what this looks like. The letter comes and your premium is up by a third. Or it says they aren't renewing you at all, after fifteen years of on-time payments and never a claim. You start calling around and find out there is nothing else out there. So you land on the California FAIR Plan, paying more for less, and you tell yourself it's temporary. For a lot of families it isn't.

This is happening to people who did everything right. They cleared the brush, put on a fire-rated roof, and spent thousands of dollars hardening a house because the state told them to, and their rate went up anyway. And it is hitting hardest where there is no room to absorb it. Seniors are getting a 2.8 percent Social Security increase this year while the FAIR Plan raises rates 29.1 percent on October 15. That is not a budgeting problem. That is people deciding whether they can stay in a home they already paid off. Nearly 700,000 California homes are now on the FAIR Plan, up from about 124,000 in 2019, carrying $768 billion in exposure. It was built to be a narrow backstop. It is becoming the market, and the state has never published what happens when it can't pay.

Insurance is regulated in Sacramento, not by counties. San Diego County cannot set a rate or order a carrier to write a policy, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What we can do is put enough names in front of the Insurance Commissioner and the Legislature that they have to answer in writing.