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The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.

And i'd love it every lottery ticket, and horse i ever bet on was a winner

Feels like insurance companies just don't want to do their job.

They're getting paid to take someone's risk and then refusing to accept it.

It's happened before. Chicago's reaction to the Great Fire was simple - no more building wooden houses. Chicago went all brick. Still is, mostly.

The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement.

I live in a house built of cinder block filled with concrete reinforced with steel. A commercial builder built this as his personal residence in 1950. The walls look like a commercial building. The outside is just painted cinder block. Works fine, survived the 1989 earthquake without damage, low maintenance. It's not what most people want today in the US.

That was 10 years ago.

It's true that most predictions about climate are wrong - most of the time, they're optimistic. (Not always, fortunately [2])

[1] https://www.leparisien.fr/economie/business/special-cop21-un...

[2] https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/emissions-are-no-longer-fo...

Here is a list of all new solutions we need: 1) not insure places at higher risk 2) mass desalinification 3) fix US hot climate grids sparkles and/or place them underground 4) Street corridors to isolate fires in neighborhood 5) Build with more fire-resistant materials 6) Install automated hydrant towers with cameras able to spray water on fire remotely (it's done in Spain on the edge of forests and urban areas) 7) Pass on the costs of maintaining of living in expensive risky areas to the people living there and/or give them benefits to move to unpopulated areas with no risk

1) Not all the world will suffer equally from climate change. The parts that are at higher risk should not be insurable so that new housing will not be built there but somewhere else.

2) The idea there won't be water because it doesn't rain it's ridiculous. We live on a planet literally made of water. We'll develop mass production de-salinification plants and have enough water. We need to keep investing and improving that technology. I think having water artifically priced at a low price won't help the development of the desalinification industry. So water should cost more NOW that we can afford it to reflect the R&D cost of it that we must make to have water later.

5) Hot countries don't tend to have plenty of wood to build with. Forests grow with more rain. Building with wood in Spain and Italy is very rare. LA got his wood shipped from somewhere further out. Let's build with other materials in arid fire-prone zones. Yes it's perfectly possible to have houses that are both more-fire-resistant and more-earthquake resistant.

Car insurance became quite expensive. My premium is about $2,200 / 6mo (no accidents, no speeding, no claims in about 10 years) for two cars and two drivers. For some reason, 80% of people choose to park outside while they have a 2-car garage available. Usually packed with crap. They find it easier to have their cars totaled every 4-6 years.

For home insurance, my policy is almost $4,800/yr now! While making some coverage adjustments, I noticed that my insurance company no longer offers a choice of lower deductibles for hail/wind. It’s a fixed percentage relative to my property value, currently showing as nearly $15k as the cheapest option. That’s more than 50% of the replacement cost! (I know that because I had my roof replaced twice in the last 10 years.)

The issue in California is not the price of insurance, it's availability because of extremely myopic ballot initiatives that are entirely political in nature. Should insurance be fairly priced, then the market can force people out of uninsurable areas and into areas with far less chance to burn.

And because being accurate at assessing risk is directly connected to company performance, they’re likely one of the best places to go to get your finger on the pulse of what’s actually happening.

The one time this falls apart is when the government puts their finger on the scale and creates insurance that runs at a loss so that people can keep rebuilding in practically uninsurable locales.

I guess another nice thing about this is that the insurance company and you both have aligned incentives. Neither of you want to see claims being made. So they really care that you’re doing whatever you can to reduce risk.

I bet some of this is wrong, based on an incomplete read of the system, so please educate me. :)

A friend owns a Land Rover with such a notoriously bad engine that insurers refuse to insure it. Land Rover had to make their own car insurance [1].

Another friend owns an electric car that is becoming increasingly uninsurable. I'm told that due to the battery, any significant collision defaults to a complete destruction of the vehicle and not a repair. The second-hand market for electric cars is also terrible, almost no car dealer will touch them in the UK.

Another friend had a car that was insured for £5k, but it was actually worth more. An accident occurred that completely destroyed the car in a fire, and they offered £1.5k. They approached the insurer and said if £1.5k is adequate to replace the vehicle, then they could simply drop a vehicle off instead. Eventually they increased the amount to £2.5k, half of their own estimate, and far less than the vehicles actual worth.

Another friend got into an accident and was permanently injured. They got an initial offer from the other insurance company, which their insurance said to decline as they believed they should expect more. Several years of slow progress, with the original insurer shutting down and passing their work to several other insurers, they were told too much time had elapsed and they should have gone for the original amount. They offered a £50 "good will gesture" and then closed the case. In the UK we have the Financial Ombudsman for insurance disputes [2], which after review decided that £50 was perfectly adequate.

Another friend had their vehicle temporarily ceased by the police (the police were wrong to do so in this case, but you have zero right to appeal). They lost one of the sets of keys for the vehicle and scratched the car. The police told the person there was nothing they could do, and to claim on the insurance. They instead paid for the damage themselves, because the insurance premiums on such a claim would not be worth it. Just tonight I saw something similar where somebody's mirror was damaged in a hit & run, choosing to fix it themselves to avoid insurance premiums increase.

I used to send out parcels and insure them, but several parcels arrived damaged (admitted by the couriers) and they said they needed proof of packaging the items correctly. From therein I would video the packaging of all items and something occurred again, but they made it impossible to actually use their insurance.

My point is this: Getting insurance is becoming increasingly difficult, but also getting the insurer to honour their agreement is becoming increasingly difficult. In the UK you are legally required to have car insurance, but they are clearly robbing people with no recourse to justice. The system is already broken and not fit for purpose.

[1] https://insurance.landrover.co.uk/

[2] https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/consumers/complaints-...

It's not clear how extraordinary the losses are - by how much home insurance losses actually outpace home-price inflation (not CPI).

For the moment let's set aside legitimate concerns of climate change or land-use policy inducing unanticipated risk.

Insurance is systemic in the sense of pervasive, but the question is whether the crisis is a controllable excursion from stability, or itself amplifies the problem.

The key factor in the 2008 crisis was how foreclosures reduced prices causing more foreclosures and higher borrowing costs - a vicious cycle.

With insurance, homes are already affected. What other specific markets? Does insurance company diversification spread the impact from real estate costs to other industries?

The destabilizing mechanism is insurer exit after over-exposure. Over-exposure comes not from extra assets, but from mis-pricing.

US Insurance is a private market facility, so pricing is competitive. If a competitor prices insurance below your risk-assessed value, your incentive is to meet their price and try to make it up in other markets or through better investments. This tendency would get worse in times of strong investment growth.

Thus the investment-dependent insurance industry loses when investments fail, and also tends to lose after investments have been winning. Insurance profitability in the last two decades may reflect a sweet spot of stock market performance more than improvements in risk-assessment.

Assuming over-exposure, then what? Both low prices and availability depend on diverse and competitive suppliers. After an insurer has suffered major losses in a market, particularly to the point of viability, they lose the confidence of both investors and customers -- and insurance depends entirely on that belief of reliability. So their best response is to simply leave that market, to maintain their reputation in other markets. Then as more insurers leave a market, prices go up, consuming all available price elasticity - which is very, very significant for homes as fixed assets that are key to other value streams like jobs, schools, etc.

Still, that seems limited to housing unless it takes down cross-subsidizing insurance companies.

But it does end housing in these markets. Individuals won't be able to buy homes because of the cost of mortgages and insurance. But if insurance is unavailable large companies could own apartments (or even subdivisions where they lease homes) and self-insure or enjoy more tailored insurance.

With entire neighborhoods destroyed by fire, developers could rebuild newer, denser housing. And insurers could stay in business by settling with policy holders using money combined with a stake in the new neighborhood corporation.

That's the ideal solution, but it won't happen at neighborhood scale because it would involve too many coordination costs. The state (California) would have to effectively take all the property to avoid hold-outs, and then arrange with various insurance companies and developers.

So the economic solution is for developers to buy up plots of burned-down neighborhoods. A single small developer could use California's SB-9 to build 4 units where there was one. And larger developers could buy a 4 adjacent plots and build a 30-unit apartment. Both could self-insure, or be well-served by insurance company that focuses on protectable, high-density housing.

Doing that at middling scale - lots of complex transactions - would make a good business, albeit not the typical YC. You'd combine a small tech firm with a boutique law firm, add a government relations team. You'd have to be up and running quickly to use the crisis to get the policies you need and start coordinating developers who are sure to be in demand.

- It's all part of planned land grabs and clearances - They don't want to pay to protect us

And so on. Nobody once mentioned the real driving factor of increasing incidences of natural disaster: climate change.

I wouldn't insure that attitude either.

Punks feelin lucky are advised to Google (or ask any GPT about) "insurance paradox".

Haha

I'm not sure what the answer is here other than forcing insurers to insure (which would raise premiums for everyone), or creating meta-insurance of some kind (insurance against becoming uninsured).

Like requiring buildings be built to a standard where they can survive normal weather events, not building in disaster prone areas, not building in sprawling huge developments that eat up a ton of natural space and create a huge urban woodland interface, and trying to slow the pace of climate change by not dumping so much co2 into the atmosphere.

If things aren't priced correctly, mayhem ensues. Frustratingly the political solutions to high prices often just put off the problem. Government mandated price fixing, of insurance, rentals, etc never fixes the core problem, only allows it to fester.

Sometimes it's taxpayers losing money, sometimes it's the few unlucky ones being forced by the government - and arguably the latter is worse for everyone as private investment and services dry up because of regulatory risks.

I don't want to detract away from those points, but it's definitely worth saying that, at present, we're polluting CO2 into the atmosphere at a very large and to some extent avoidable rate. Climate change is already happening, but the extent to which it happens is still down to us - we can and need to do lots to improve flood resistance in, say, Florida, but we can also stop parts of Florida ending up below sea level too.

Fuel is not guaranteed, but renewables, batteries, heat pumps, EVs and possible nuclear does increasingly give us a technological option for ensuring power.

It's fair to ask if economics will drive us to adopt these technologies on a wide enough scale before we run out.

A similar argument works if insurance is just based on reconstruction cost, but construction costs inflate faster than incomes.

If properties become unaffordable, then to restore equilibrium, property prices must fall, incomes must rise, or lower-income residents will sell to higher-income purchasers. If there are few higher-income purchasers, property prices will fall.

Property taxes could be cut, or decoupled from property values (e.g. poll tax), but that never happens.

If the risk really is high, there is no practical insurance available, and all purchasers are rational, then the price may go to zero.

An example of an irrational purchaser would be one who assigned high status to a beach house, even in the face of threats from coastal erosion, hurricane floods or tsunamis.

The thing is that with the additional cost of climate change, a lot of these houses do not have the capacity to go through a once-in-100-years event, as they start to occur more frequently.

We just had a water backflow from the city main pipeline last August. Pretty much everyone was impacted, and insurance cost went up for those that were not impacted anyway.

So to make the house insurable, it requires: 1) massive city infrastructure rebuilding, and 2) everyone pays a lot more to install additional "modules" in their houses. For example I already have a backflow valve but if things get worse and water starts to accumulate close to the bottom of the house I'll need a very expensive French drain, something like 60k CAD. It's not going to break me, but it's 3-4 years of saving.

I can't imagine what happens if we get another once-in-100-years storm this summer. I'll probably leave the basement bare without floor and won't bother to claim it.

it’s ok if insurance is expensive - let it result in the insured goods or services having a serious price adjustment.

rather than price controls a slightly better solution would be just to nationalize insurance and force everyone to use it, but even that is not really a solution since highly correlated events are the antithesis of insurance.

Add to that the general rich mans disease of building anything in America being slow & expensive, so each rebuild is more expensive than the last, well beyond just inflation.

One obvious reason is rent hikes.

But as one of my favorite local bars was closing, one of the staff mentioned that insurance was really starting to kill them.

We don't live in a flood-prone part of NYC, so I'm curious: is insurance for retail space really going up dramatically across the board in NYC, or was this a single, subjective understanding of a situation?

But that doesn't mean that the concept may still be valid for the end user in a way or another, just that in the other end you may have a different kind of actor or mitigation of risk. That those events become far more common is not random or an act of some god, i.e. taxes for fossil carbon usage or other economic action towards those actors meant to have a fund for those cases. Or having a personal saving plan instead of giving that money to someone else, that in average may work better for most. Or force insurance companies to keep playing even when the odds are not so extremely favourable for them.

California is not very hospitable on its own but with human intervention it was made liveable. But that is now running out, because e.g. the water supply is no longer adequate for what is used.

But this is the difficult situation we find ourselves in; due to climate change, hospitable areas are no longer hospitable, and while you can throw money at the problem, it becomes exponentially more expensive to continue to live there. If this continues, it will trigger a (mass) migration. This can be applied everywhere, and the phrase "climate change will trigger mass migrations" has been uttered many times already. It however feels like people only considered this to be a problem in e.g. the global south, affecting poor people because they don't have the financial means to shape the earth and their living conditions by throwing money at the problem.

I live in the Netherlands that for hundreds of years has thrown money and resources at the problem that it's below sea level and prone to flooding. We're still managing, but still get flooding in some places due to e.g. heavy rains deeper in Europe. But if the sea level goes up enough, either we'll have to spend billions in building higher sea walls... or abandon regions entirely. The worst case predictions mention a 2.5 meter sea level rise by 2100, that'll definitely test our infrastructure to put it mildly.

(this comment was a reply first but moved it to a top level one because I added my main article comment as well).

Key insight here. Insurer of last resort == bag-holder for negative EV proposition.

The government needs to just stay out of it.

When you put a minimum on the price of wages the true minimum is zero. When you put a maximum on the price of insurance the true maximum is 1/0.

At least for risks like wildfires, we can reduce future risk by rebuilding homes using wildfire resistant techniques and materials.

The problem in LA (exacerbated by the climate-change driven conditions) was that most of the burned neighborhoods were built adjacent to fire prone wildlands during an era when homes were built like matchboxes, almost designed to burn. Add the hurricane strength wind, and each building became a blowtorch.

Fiber cement siding, minimal eaves, and metal roofs are straightforward ways to reduce wildfire contagion risk of buildings. There have been numerous experiments done to demonstrate how effective this approach is at significantly reducing combustibility of buildings.

Cutting back trees near houses to create defensible space is also pretty straightforward.

The business insurances are in is a business of statistics. As long as you can model things giving you an expected value and a standard deviation, you can offer an insurance policy which gives you X amount of profit with Y amount of risk, and the insurance premiums are adjusted such that the insurance's risk for negative profit is negligible, according to the model.

What does it mean for climate change? Current insurance models apparently don't work well, so they don't dare to offer policies in certain areas. But just like city planners need to adjust (build further away from shore, higher up, build in flooding protections) and home owners do (AC, think twice if you want a basement) and farmers (choice of crops, irrigation systems), so do insurances by finding better models that allow them to have better statistics.

My expectation in the long run is that insurances will be offered again, but with so high premiums for certain areas (of high risk) that it will just be too expensive to live there. Which is fine. Nobody lives on the moon either. And the public shouldn't be paying for somebody's privilege to have a nice waterfront property in a hurricane area.

TL;DR: The current public discourse about this topic conflates predictability with cost when talking about "insurability". They are very different things.

There's two options:

1: Pay people to leave, perhaps 80% of the fair market value as of a certain date.

2: Pay people for their loss, but do not allow them to rebuild. (Unless the house is built to stricter standards, and meeting those standards might not be covered by the loss.)

1) Maybe there needs to be some adjustments to how risk pooling is done. I live in Florida, so my homeowner's insurance is ridiculously expensive, but my property isn't really at risk from hurricanes etc, being very far inland. Realistically my property isn't any more at risk of anything than any property anywhere else in the country.

2) There doesn't seem to be enough flexibility in the offers. Most people seem to think insurance should cover any losses, but really people only need insurance to cover losses that they cannot recover from. I'd take a $100K deductible on my homeowner's insurance if it was offered and lowered my premiums significantly, but it's my understanding the law won't allow that.

People keep wanting to live in huge space that they barely use, then buy a fuckton of appliances they use once or twice a month at the maximum and hoard stuff like there is no tomorrow. Then they cry when they lose everything or that nobody want to insure their pile of crap. Just insure the minimum to live comfortably. It is much lower than what you can think of.

Since I have been moving every 4 to 5 years I have been focusing on never hoarding too much stuff. My appartment can burn, I will be fine and as long as I can find a small roof[1] for me and my family (1 partner 2 teenagers) and we could buy back what we need to live comfortably with less than 10k€ and then rebuild gradually to live in a normally sized[2] appartment/house.

[1] by my standards, which I rate at 20 to 25sq/m per person living in the household.

[2] a bungalow, yurt, caravan or large camper would be enough for a disaster recovery.

So my question is: is it even possible to insure against these events — e.g. hurricanes, forest fires, earthquakes — given that all insurance takers may need to collect compensation at once (in which case the price of a house insurance would need to be at least the same as the price of a new house).

Are there going to be massive changes in building codes? Yes. Will that make owning a building more expensive? Yes. Will the pundits tell you it is the fault of the what ever political party is in power? of course they will.

What is true is that 'pre-global warming' designed infrastructure is going to become uninsurable because it will be regularly destroyed. Once a track record is established for 'global warming aware' infrastructure, the cost to insure it will become more clear.

If you were wondering "How will global climate change effect me personally?", this is it. Your city's costs are going up as it has to rebuild itself to a new standard, if you own a home your insurance costs are going up until you tear it down (or it gets destroyed) and rebuild it to the new standard.

Does/Why would the insurance assume the subsidy is for people rebuilding in the same place? Money is fungible and so it doesn't need to be in the same place, at all. What I'd expect is that insurance for those hard-to-insure places would skyrocket and thus a new balance would be achieved.

In health insurance they don’t cover the elderly, and until Obama they did not cover people with prior conditions.

For home insurance they don’t cover flood get your are mandated to carry one if you have a mortgage.

In life insurance they do not cover you if you have a disease.

It’s more like a lottery rather than insurance.

THIS. I have started thinking a lot about this recently, and this isn't a lot less obvious that it sounds at first. We tend to think that, if we find _some_ consensus to fix a problem, this will be fixed. But many problems emerge now that no consensus, no matter how global, will not fix.

And even that very idea that we are a reasonable species and we will converge to some consensus-based solution isn't actually true.

(1) The author tried to get homeowner's insurance, but was denied because their home was a significant hurricane risk

(2) The author (maybe?) got insurance through a state-run FAIR program, but then cites news reports that these programs are close to insolvency (As are a significant amount of non-state-run homeowner insurance programs).

(3) The author is like, "well, if it's so hard to insure my house, maybe I should think about living somewhere else." And then generalizes to "a lot of places should be uninsurable and uninhabited - apocalypse here we come"

People reduce or stop caring when they know insurance will cover things. In my opinion this leads to higher losses and higher costs. Especially when people choose more expensive things.

the more volatile it is (and the less you've mitigated the risks), the more expensive your insurance gets

Interestingly, there seems to a number of cultural solutions to this problem. Like, imagine if the people of LA adopted a fondness for living in dense urban environments, and a reluctance to "live near nature," the problem of wildfires becomes much more tractable. Or for example, a culture of maintenance (forests, power infrastructure, infrastructure fireproofing, risk preparedness, etc.), like outlined in the book "The Innovation Delusion," could very well reduce risk a considerable amount. Unfortunately our civilization is too much stuck in its traditional ways to consider such solutions.

This hits hard and close to home. While my heart goes out to everyone that’s shouldering misfortunes, I’m wary of the “private profits, public risks” phenomenon getting even more out of control.

Obviously we can’t afford to disappoint all the people that were forced to jump into an outrageous housing market all at once, they need affordable insurance, and also still expect to 10x their property investment, particularly in coastal areas. If we don’t do this, it will be another huge blow to the shrinking middle class.

Meanwhile, the flyover states with fewer hurricanes and wildfires will subsidize coastal insurance basically due to strength of Californias market clout, and yet flyover states won’t ever see a windfall from their own rising property values. Since remote employees in flyover states often get less salary for the same work, they are already subsidizing rent for higher density areas. Regardless of where you live, everyone should recognize that this is unsustainable and divisive.

I think it is easy for people to "dump" on some of these higher priced real estate incidents seen recently but this is also affecting people on social security. What are we going to do just let their house burn down and then just have a bunch of homeless senior citizens in the mix. Why even have government? Seems like a terrible country to live in if a 30 year old needs to plan their house situation out into their 80s.

Also seems a bit ironic to me that you get insurance to cover unexpected future expenses but when insurance takes losses then they can just drop you because .. the losses were unexpected. They've known for 20++ years and I'm sure some... money was made... Did they put some away for this situation? Also if you personally experience a loss they also drop you almost immediately.

This idea that we'd just let insurance companies do whatever is *nuts*. Has that ever worked? Honestly pure capitalism seems like the real behind the scenes American dream or fantasy. This same climate change most likely was created by companies making buckets of money with no plan to deal with the side-effects we experience now. Just let the market take care of it....

These companies aren't about making "some profit" they want to make as much profit as possible. Is some 75 year widow living in her and her dead husband's house in Eureka, CA going to convince them to keep insuring her house at a reasonable price? Even if she paid the same insurance company for 30 years?

I think the solution is going to require some government intervention because insurance companies just don't care and it will be hard for new players to innovate quickly enough to tackle such a large crisis. Ie. legislating the inspections, legislating the fire-resistant building guidelines + insurance scale, subsidizing certain low income locations, working with communities to improve fire safety and resources. Some work has happened but clearly it is not happening fast enough.

If something is worth doing, it's worth doing whether you have insurance or not.

In my opinion, the amount of resources spent on buying insurance would, in almost every case, be better spent on prevention rather than after the fact mitigation.

IMHO we should be seizing the fossil fuel companies' assets and using them for disaster relief around the world due to the catastrophe they have deliberately caused.

The talk about insurance rates is a deliberate distraction.

Many dogs (pitbulls, akitas..) are uninsurable, yet we see them everywhere. People just accept damages, and pay it out of their own pocket (or run away and do not pay).

They would spread leaflets/internal publications on "Risk Profile for the Year 20##" every year. And they would issue updates every Q or H.

Insurance companies monitor every-little-thing. If it hasn't rained for X days in Z country, they KNOW IT, monitor it, and accordingly change policies, premiums, etc.

I always tell people that the most lucrative job (imho) is "Actuary" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary) so for anyone who is young enough to make a career change or have kids on the verge of picking directions/professions, "Actuary" for-the-win!!

1. The state who sets insurance price caps for political expediency, basically to increase house prices (because they'd go down if insurance prices could float freely). BTW we have examples of areas that are uninsurable like the Florida Keys;

2. The homeowners who want their house prices to go up and want to pay as little as possible for home insurance; and

3. Insurance companies who can't write too many policies so they remain solvent. Price caps ultimately lead to insurers leaving the market.

LA in particular has competing problems: wildfires and earthquakes. If you want to avoid total loss due to wildfires, first you wouldn't build in Pacific Palisades at all. It's a vegetation rich area between hills with potentially high winds. If you want to avoid fire loss, you would build out of concrete not timber-framed buildings.

But the problem is that earthquakes have the opposite building priorities. Lumber is actually quite good in earthquake zones because you tend to get less loss of life from the collapse of timber houses.

Now you can build concrete houses that are earthquake-resistant (eg in Japan) but it's expensive.

Ultimately all of this comes down to a malaise brought on by high house prices. Voters consistently vote for policies that increase their house prices with absolutely no concern for the externalities.

If it now costs $1 million to build an "average" house, then you're going to be spending $20,000+ a year on insurance. If your house only cost $100,000, you wouldn't have that problem.

It's even worse in California because a lot of property taxes are capped so the state government can't even recoupe taxes from a lot of high-priced property but they suffer the costs of it (eg by being the insurer of last resort).

[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2Jek6a6/

Losses are very much in line with asset price inflation. If a house rises in value for no good reason other than loose monetary policy, so does the compensation. At the same time, insurers struggle to find safe yields to match these cost increases when that same monetary policy keeps interest rates low.

Looking at the chart pictured, one would expect that extreme weather events have increased dramatically after 2000, but that is not the case:

https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters

Nothing will change, houses will be rebuilt the same way in the same place.

Life on earth had dealt with 120 meters of sea level rise. So please.

This is the exact scenario every single scientist I studied under openly discussed: probably not an extinction level event, but very, very expensive… Expensive to the point of it being cheaper in the long run to switch to renewables asap and hope for the best.

It’s like a 150M conservatives are all at once are saying “Wait a minute! We should do something about this!”

Uh… yea, no shit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

At the end of the day if your house burns down you can go and get some wood / stone / whatever and build one somewhere else and this will basically always be possible to do to some degree.

The question is just about what the chance of having to do that per year is and what that represents in dollar value. It can’t not be possible.