When thousands of Los Angeles homes went up in flames earlier this year, Santa Barbarans watched in awe, scrambling to help by opening up their homes and schools, and donating money and time. But through it all, two questions continued to nag. Could the same thing happen in Santa Barbara? And how can homeowners protect themselves from wildfires and the skyrocketing insurance costs associated with them?
To the first question, Santa Barbara County Fire Chief Mark Hartwig put it bluntly. “It won’t,” he said at a home insurance town hall in Goleta on February 27. If Santa Barbara residents and first responders uphold their “response culture and preparedness culture,” potential urban wildfires simply won’t have the same effect as they did in Los Angeles.
The second question, however, proved to be a bit more complicated. “We know how much insecurity exists in our community because of this,” said State Senator Monique Limón, who arranged the town hall with State Assemblymember Gregg Hart. The “decrease in availability and affordability” of homeowner’s insurance has hit Santa Barbara hard, Limón added, and the speed of climate change only poses to exacerbate the problem.
“We’ll never get to affordability if we never get to availability,” said California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara. After discussions with Governor Gavin Newsom and the 12 largest national insurance providers, Lara assured more than 100 attendees that “all of them have recommitted to California.”
Despite this bit of good news, Santa Barbara residents continue to find themselves dropped from or priced out of their home insurance policies. In the past year, the amount of countywide homeowners enrolled in the FAIR Plan — California’s “insurer of last resort” — has increased nearly 50 percent. As of September 2024, over 4,800 properties in Santa Barbara County are insured through the FAIR Plan, up from around 3,200 the year before.
Now, the FAIR Plan is the third largest property insurer in California. They’ve seen 400 percent growth over the past four years.
David Lorenc, chief of staff to the president of California’s FAIR Plan, made it clear that growth is not their goal. Rather, their model is rooted in providing basic wildfire insurance when private companies will not, then getting those individuals off the FAIR Plan and into the private market as soon as reasonably possible.
Lara is pushing forward legislation that would require insurance companies to write at least 85 percent of their California market share in wildfire-distressed, underserved areas. Currently, he said, they only write 50 percent of their policies in these areas, where the FAIR Plan is often the only option.
“The big challenge for this issue is, frankly, climate change,” said Assemblymember Gregg Hart, which makes for a “really complex, difficult” insurance market when it comes to wildfires.
To tackle wildfire risk, Chief Hartwig encourages Santa Barbara residents to create at least five feet of “defensible space” around their homes by removing flammable objects to create a buffer. Embers from nearby fires can travel miles, he said, and if they find a receptive space next to a home, the structure will be in jeopardy.
Many of those who lost their homes in Los Angeles are still awaiting insurance payouts. To that, Lara made a promise. “If they don’t pay, I’m going to come after them.”
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