After a decade of wildfires, an overlooked election could shape California’s climate future
Grist · LC · trust 35/100
Insurance is a social contract. When you sign up with State Farm or Allstate for home insurance, you confirm your membership in a community — your money will go to fix someone else’s burned or flooded home, and their money will in turn support yours. We let insurance companies sell policies on a private market, and we elect or appoint government officials to oversee that market to protect the interests of homeowners.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, but that’s not how it panned out for Lynn McIntyre.
When McIntyre’s mother died in 2022, she willed McIntyre her longtime house in the “Alphabets,” a charming neighborhood not far from the coast in western Los Angeles. McIntyre and her daughter had only lived there for a year when her insurance company, Liberty Mutual, withdrew her fire coverage. She couldn’t find another private company to cover the home’s fire risk, so she enrolled in the California FAIR Plan, a state-backed “insurer of last resort,” paying another $5,000 a year in addition to her regular home insurance from Liberty.
After the Palisades Fire raged through the Alphabets in early 2025, McIntyre’s small bungalow was still standing. But it was full of smoke and ash that had crept in through vents and windows, and her belongings were stained beyond recognition by smoke. When she filed a claim with the FAIR Plan, the plan adjusters told her she was out of luck. They would pay for a temporary apartment, but nothing else.
McIntyre, who had worked for years as a real estate broker, spent months battling with 10 different adjusters and dozens of FAIR Plan representatives. It didn’t work. The employees batted her away at every turn, hiring third-party adjusters failed to get her anywhere, and her attorney professed himself confounded by FAIR’s obstinance. Even as most of her neighbors cleared their debris and started building new fire-resilient homes, many of them much larger than their old properties, her old bungalow sat stained with smoke.
It was only in late August, more than 18 months after the wildfire, that she was about to start repairing her home — not with insurance money, but with a nearly $200,000 loan from the federal government that she will someday have to pay back. To make matters worse, FAIR has been trying to cut off her apartment expenses, telling her that power and water have come back online in her area and that she needs to move back home — never mind that her house still has boarded-up windows and a scorched exterior. Meanwhile, Liberty Mutual informed her this summer that they would be canceling her non-fire coverage.
“The next time a fire comes through, I’m just going to light it on fire, because I’m not going to go through this again,” McIntyre said wryly as we stood in her doorway, construction machines rattling at the other houses around us.
Ensuring that Californians like McIntyre have access to affordable insurance falls to an elected official that many Californians have likely never heard of: the insurance commissioner. The commissioner, one of eight elected state officials in California, regulates the companies that provide fire, home, and auto coverage in the Golden State.
Over the last eight years, the incumbent insurance commissioner presided over what parties on all sides have called a “ disaster ,” a “ crisis ,” and a “ collapse ” in the state’s home insurance market. Now, as the current commissioner terms out, two Democratic candidates — Ben Allen and Jane Kim — have emerged claiming they can fix it. These candidates embody a debate in the Democratic Party about the best way to adapt to climate change. Allen, an established legislator representing Pacific Palisades, wants to rebuild the market, and Kim, a left-wing organizer from San Francisco, wants to ditch the idea of a private market altogether.
California State Senator Ben Allen, left, and insurance commissioner candidate Jane Kim each address the crowd during the California Democratic Party State Convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco in February 2026. Christina House / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Whoever wins in November will inherit an insurance system battered by a decade of devastating wildfires, insurers pulling out of the state, and other upheaval. Climate change and decades of poor forest management have turned California’s woodlands into tinderboxes, and the problem will only get worse as the planet continues to warm. The current crisis in the insurance market began with a series of unprecedented wildfires between 2015 and 2020. These fires scorched around 4 million acres and destroyed 35,000 homes, many in areas that had never been known to burn. Insurance companies like State Farm and Farmers had to pay out billions of dollars in claims, enough to negate the profits they had made from writing fire insurance policies over the previous two decades.
The companies believed they were charging Californians far too little, but the price of insurance isn’t elastic like the price of gasoline or paper towels. Insurers have to seek permission from the state insurance commissioner to raise their prices. California was strict about those price hikes, and it blocked insurers’ attempts to pass their post-fire bill onto the state’s homeowners. The insurance industry’s response was to ditch California. They dropped tens of thousands of customers across the state, and companies like State Farm announced they would withdraw from the state altogether and cease writing any new policies.
“There’s something broken that so many of us are facing the same issues,” McIntyre said, “and they just think they can just roughshod right on over all of us.”
The lack of available insurance is starting to hurt the state’s economy: Around 1 in 7 California realtors said they had a home sale fall through in 2024 due to insurance issues, the state’s FAIR plan ran out of claims money last year , and average premiums could rise by 16 percent this year . The trend is now spreading out of…
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