Uninsurable

No insurance, no mortgage. No mortgage, no buyer. Uninsurable follows the short, one-directional chain that turns a house into unsellable property the moment an insurer decides a region is too risky to cover, and shows, zip code by zip code, how much of the country is already there.

Drawing on Federal Insurance Office data, state insurer-of-last-resort records, and reporting from the hardest-hit markets, this book documents non-renewal rates running 80 percent higher in high climate-risk areas, the assessments homeowners never get to vote on, the mortgages that quietly require coverage nobody can find, and the hail-country and coastal markets where the private insurance market has already, functionally, left. It is a clear-eyed account of a mechanism reshaping American real estate well ahead of the climate changes usually blamed for it, and a warning about what depopulation looks like when it starts with an insurance letter instead of an evacuation order.

For readers of climate economics, housing policy, and anyone whose renewal notice just went up.