NPR is focusing on climate change solutions in housing due to alarming trends in insurance markets. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell highlighted a sharp rise in premiums, up 24% on average, influenced by climate-induced disasters like wildfires and floods. His testimony to Congress underscored that marginalized areas may soon become uninsurable, threatening property value and local government funding. Homeowners in risk-prone areas could face limited insurance options, forcing many onto costly state-run plans, exacerbating recovery challenges post-disasters and making housing unaffordable for many residents, particularly low-income families.
"If you fast-forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage."
"Everything has a price. And so, it's not that areas become uninhabitable. It's that it's so wildly unaffordable to find insurance that only the very wealthiest people could afford to live there to bear those kinds of risks themselves."
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