Stephanie Frisella and her husband live on one of the southernmost streets in New Orleans, not far from where southern Louisiana’s ever-eroding and pockmarked coastline meets the vastness of the Gulf of Mexico. They have watched violent storms approach and hit their home. The fear is that one day, it could be destroyed.

Those fears are shared among many in New Orleans and further south on Louisiana’s coastline, where hurricanes and tropical storms are regular and unwelcome guests. Most people know those dangers when they move to the Gulf of Mexico. But in recent years, the dread of being hit by a life-changing storm has been exacerbated by a home insurance crisis placing increased financial pressure on homeowners in some of the nation’s most climate-vulnerable states.

It has forced some to leave or rethink how they live entirely.

“We thought we might be here for another ten years before retiring to north Alabama,” Frisella told Reckon as she drove home from her banking job in New Orleans. “It’s totally unaffordable. We’ll have to move as soon as possible.”

The escalating costs and decreasing availability of homeowners’ insurance are pricing people like Frisella out of their home states. Climate change, increased rebuilding costs, higher reinsurance premiums, and other looming and current economic factors drive the unsettling trend. Florida’s insurance market, for example, has all but collapsed due to hurricane risks. Leading insurance companies like State Farm and Allstate have ceased offering new policies in California, partly due to wildfire risks. Inflation in construction costs and state-imposed premium caps have also not helped keep insurers in some states.

Overseas disasters are also hitting U.S. policyholders harder as the big international reinsurers – the companies that back U.S.-based insurance – are hit hard by natural disasters worldwide.

In early 2022, Frisella learned that her home insurance provider was going out of business. Her broker found another, but the annual cost increased from $2,500 to $3,500, or 40%. A month later, the new insurer also went under. Unable to find a private insurer, she turned to Louisiana Citizens, a state-formed insurer of last resort. Her costs soared to $4,500 per year. That’s an 80% increase from her original rate. It all happened in 30 days.

But she was one of the lucky ones. Around 17% of the state’s residents lost their home insurance in 2022, according to a recent Louisiana State University survey.

By law, a Louisiana Citizens policy costs about 10% more than the highest private rates charged in Louisiana’s 64 parishes. Frisella was told her new $4,500 rate wouldn’t change. However, because 2020 and 2021 were the costliest years for natural disasters, private premiums soared across the country, including Louisiana. The state’s Insurance Commissioner, Jim Donelon, had no choice but to approve a 63% average statewide increase for Citizens’ 2023 premiums.

In all, Frisella went from paying $2,500 to $5,500 in about 16 months.

“It’s scary to go from one month to the next not knowing if the insurer will make it and if we’ll need to scramble to find another one — or if there will be another one,” she said, noting that she and her husband had cut back on entertainment and hobbies. “We know that other people have to make harder choices than us, but the extra costs have changed our lives a lot and have forced us to make some big life decisions.”

Louisiana ranks as the state with the third-highest property insurance costs, with average annual costs estimated at $5,353, triple the U.S. average rate. Florida’s average premium is $7,788 a year, making it the country’s most expensive.

The states are regularly hit by hurricanes and experience severe flooding in many coastal areas. Hurricane Ian, for example, was the costliest weather-related disaster ever to hit the United States, coming in at around $113 billion. That, in turn, pushes up premiums for policyholders in climate-vulnerable states.

David Homme, a Mobile, Ala., resident, is about to put his house on the market, saying that his bundled home and car insurance costs have roughly doubled over the last two months, going from $1,350 to $2,100 annually. He has never made a claim, and his home was recently placed in a floodplain, further pushing up costs.

”We’re not leaving Mobile because this is our home, but we can’t live in the house we have right now,” he said, noting that insurers had issues with the age of the roof and the wooden structure. “We don’t want to be house-poor or at the mercy of the federal government’s flood insurance. It leaves us with very few choices but to move.”

It’s unclear when a solution might alleviate the financial burdens placed on Frisella and millions of homeowners in climate-vulnerable states.

“If natural catastrophes continue to occur with both frequency and severity, they will be a big driver of rates continuing to go up,” said Bragan Jackson, owner of Independent Risk Consultants, a Mobile, Ala.-based insurance consultancy group that typically deals with high-net-worth individuals along the Gulf coast. “For now, unfortunately, it’s going to be more of the same until we see something change in the capital markets with new investors and insurance carriers coming to the table.”

For some, it’s too much to bear.

While no data exists for how many are leaving Louisiana and other states specifically because of rising insurance, an August 2023 U.S. Census poll noted that 8% of Louisiana’s residents reported being uprooted by climate events last year, starkly contrasting with the national average of 1.6%, or about five times higher.

Louisiana is also experiencing a significant population decline, ranking among the top three states for the highest percentage of residents leaving between 2021 and 2022, according to recent census data.

After the devastating hurricane activity in 2020 and 2021, eight insurance providers serving Louisiana collapsed, and an additional twelve ceased offering new policies in the state. In an effort to lure back insurance companies, the state legislature established a $45 million incentive fund earlier this year.

Rising insurance costs are not unique to Louisiana; they’re a national issue, especially in natural-disaster-prone states like Florida, California, and Texas. While Florida has seen insurance rates triple, affecting even its wealthiest residents with annual fees over half a million dollars, the financial impact is felt more acutely in Louisiana due to its relatively low average income levels of just over $54,000 compared to a national average of about $62,000.

And at the national level, things are not looking better, with just three months left in the year. So far, 2023 has had 23 weather and climate events with losses of over $1 billion, the highest ever recorded, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It’s not yet clear if that will mean even higher rates.

In the coming months, the Frisellas will put their home on the market and plan the move to north Alabama, where they expect their home insurance costs to half. While they have a solution, they still have issues to overcome. “My biggest fear is somebody’s not going to be able to buy our house because they can’t get insurance on it,” she said. “It’s just fear and anxiety across the board.”