The Brief

In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order for “prompt regulatory action” to address the plight of California homeowners facing availability and affordability problems in home and fire insurance.

But at its present pace — and with doubts from consumers, lawmakers and insurers about the Department of Insurance’s proposals to alleviate the crisis — help for residents may not arrive until 2026, at least according to the most pessimistic outlook by the insurance industry.

Those waiting are Californians like the Smithlines, a retired couple in Forest Hill in Placer County, who actually saw their fire insurance premium balloon to the point that they’ve decided they will have to do without it.

Bobbi Smithline said their premium this year tripled to almost $6,000 from $1,800 in 2020. They were on the FAIR Plan — the last resort for residents who can’t find traditional insurance — because Farmers would not renew their previous policy three years ago.

“Our property taxes and homeowner insurance came at the same time as the FAIR Plan (bill),” Smithline said. “We can’t afford to do all three… that’s going to leave us with no savings.”

The FAIR Plan is mandated and regulated by the state. Premiums under the plan are usually more expensive, and they’re only getting higher. In September, California’s Department of Insurance approved a rate increase long sought by the insurers that finance the plan, for an average 15.7% rate hike. As more and more people turn to the FAIR Plan because the biggest insurance providers in the state have either paused new policies or left the state altogether, the plan’s total number of policies climbed to more than 330,000 as of September, an almost 21% rise since the beginning of the year.

The Smithlines have lived in their three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bathroom house for 45 years and raised most of their eight children there. They never had a wildfire until last year, when the Mosquito Fire burned more than 76,000 acres in their county and nearby El Dorado County, Smithline said. Now she and her husband, Mike, have told their children — who will inherit the house — about their decision. If a fire destroys their house, their plan is to put a mobile home on their 7.2-acre property, or maybe live with one of their kids.

The Smithlines are among the many Californians affected by the insurance mess. But at least they have a choice. Because their home is paid off, they are not required to carry fire insurance like homeowners with a mortgage must do.

Another California homeowner, Donna Yutzy in Magalia in Butte County, told CalMatters that she will pay higher premiums — almost $7,000 a year for both fire and home insurance — because she doesn’t want to risk having no fire insurance. And Rebecca Reis, another homeowner who recently received a non-renewal notice because her San Francisco building was built before 1925, said her homeowners association will have to raise its dues to cover the increase in premiums for their building, from $7,000 to almost $30,000.

Donna Yutzy’s home in Magalia on Nov. 4, 2023. State law prohibits the use of landscaping plants and any flammable materials within a five-foot radius of the house.

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Newsom’s September order followed the failure of proposed legislation to address the crisis, and now California’s Department of Insurance is working on new regulations to try to fix the problems. The insurance industry cites a combination of inflation, climate change and several devastating and deadly wildfires since 2017, as well as what it calls outdated state regulations, as factors in carriers’ pulling back or pulling out of California.

There were a total of 8.73 million homeowners policies in 2021, and non-renewals of home and fire insurance policies climbed from 11% in 2018 to 13% in 2021, according to the state insurance department’s most recent data. FAIR Plan policies over that same period jumped from 1.6% of the total market to 3%. Since 2021, though, most of the top insurers in the state have either stopped writing or restricted new policies here; the insurance department is finalizing data for 2022.

Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara isn’t expected to finalize new rules until next year. Then insurers and consumer groups will react and possibly object, so they say regulations may not be enacted until the following year, or even 2026 — meaning more of the same in the meantime.

“We’re going to move at the speed of good policy,” said Michael Soller, spokesperson for Lara. “We’re going to be judged by the impact we have over the long term. There’s no magic solution to this.”

Soller also said the department disagrees with the forecasts that things won’t change until 2026, saying the department is moving as quickly as possible. “For instance, by enforcing existing rules we incentivize insurance companies to reduce delays caused by incomplete rate filings,” he said. Soller also said that in October, Lara expanded insurance discounts for wildfire mitigation, and that the move will have “a long-lasting impact on the survivability of homes.”

Two members of Congress from California, Reps. Katie Porter and Doug LaMalfa, may also try to help. They recently sent a letter to the chief executives of some of the big insurers that have paused, limited or are no longer issuing new policies in the state, asking for briefings and discussions on possible solutions. Porter and LaMalfa asked the CEOs of Farmers, Allstate, USAA, State Farm and CSE Insurance to respond by Nov. 17.

Porter, the Democratic lawmaker from Orange County who is running for U.S. Senate, plans to write legislation and “conduct oversight as appropriate” on this issue, she said in an emailed statement.

The staff of LaMalfa, the Republican lawmaker from Butte County, did not return a request for comment. The companies did not respond to CalMatters’ requests for comment about the letter.

Insurers want models

The insurance industry has been “grousing” about California’s regulations for years, said Rex Frazier, president of the industry group Personal Insurance Federation of California. Among the industry’s complaints: California is the only state in the nation that does not allow insurers to use forward-looking catastrophe models that take into account the increased risks from climate change; the state’s insurance-department reviews of proposed rates take too long; and the state won’t allow insurers to factor reinsurance costs into their rates.

“If we want a different outcome, we’re going to need different rules,” Frazier added.

The state is poised to adopt rules that appear to give insurers what they want as long as they write at least 85% of their statewide market share in wildfire-distressed areas. For example, a company that provides 10% of homeowner policies in the state would need to provide 8.5% of the coverage in such areas.

Also, insurers will be allowed to factor reinsurance costs into their premiums as long as they can show that California homeowners wouldn’t be bearing the cost of disasters outside the state.

The public will get a chance to weigh in as the insurance department works to finalize the regulations, said Soller, Lara’s spokesperson.

One consumer group is already slamming Lara’s strategy as presented, saying it amounts to deregulation and warning the governor and state legislators that the plan will not benefit the state’s consumers.

“We know what deregulation has done,” Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, said in an interview with CalMatters. Court said hurricane-prone Florida doesn’t have a “rigorous rate process,” which is why he said premiums in that state are much higher than in California. In 2020, the average California homeowners insurance premium was $1,241 a year, while Florida’s was $2,165, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

A cement sidewalk was built within five feet of Donna Yutzy’s house in Magalia to meet state regulations. Nov. 4, 2023.

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Court added that so far, Lara’s plan, unveiled in September, is short on specifics and that there has been “nothing in writing” in terms of an agreement between the state and the insurers.

Another consumer advocate, Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, said she was concerned about that part, too. “An actual agreement on paper” would have been nice, she said. But Bach added that she believes the insurance department is doing its best.

“I feel like they’re trying to fix the problem right alongside us,” she said. Bach also said it’s impossible for California to be the “outlier” when every other state in the country allows insurers to pass along reinsurance rates, and to use catastrophe models. Besides, she said, the insurance department will still have power over rate changes.

But the state’s Democratic lawmakers are concerned about the plan, too. Thirty-two of them, including Rep. John Garamendi, a former insurance commissioner, sent a letter to Lara on Monday. They wrote that his proposal “may result in a diminution of the authority granted by California voters,” and “could threaten the important consumer protections established in Proposition 103 and in place since 1988.” Among other things, Proposition 103 gives the state’s insurance department the authority to review rate changes.

In response, Lara sent a letter addressed to Rep. Zoe Lofgren, chair of the California Democratic Congressional Delegation, on Tuesday. In it, the insurance commissioner, who CC’d the rest of the signatories of the letter, said “Proposition 103 does not grant unlimited power.” He added that his plan is supported by residents including “wildfire survivors, ranchers and farmers… and other insurance consumers who are experiencing the impact of outdated regulatory rules and growing climate threats.” Lara also asked the Congressional members for federal help including “better management of federal forests and watersheds” and more funding for community grants to help with home hardening.

‘Too important’ to leave?

Yutzy, the Butte County resident, said she is lucky to be able to afford the higher insurance costs. It’s the price she pays for retiring in that area, she said: “We wanted to live our vacation, wake up to the trees.”

She predicted that the increased costs will change the demographics of the area, which she said people used to move to because it was affordable. That all changed after the Camp Fire in 2018, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state, which killed at least 85 people and almost completely destroyed the town of Paradise and the unincorporated area of Concow.

Sealed Vulcan vents at Donna Yutzy’s home in Magalia to prevent pine needles and other flammable debris from entering. Nov. 4, 2023. Photo by Manuel Orbegozo for CalMatters

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Yutzy said residents of the area have been doing a lot of work since then, and that insurers should take that into account as they set rates. “One thing I would ask insurers: Take a look at what the communities are doing generally in terms of fuel reduction and wildfire mitigation. We have so many things going on that insurers should be looking at.”

Those in the industry say insurers don’t want to leave the biggest market in the nation, and that urgent action is needed for the sake of all stakeholders.

Vanessa Wells, a Silicon Valley-based attorney who represents insurance companies, said that prior to 2020, the carriers would have felt that California was “too important a market to leave behind.” But the massive wildfires were followed by billions of dollars in payouts.

“Since that time, it’s too big in a different way — that you can go out of business here,” Wells said.

Imagine a sprawling network of roomy bike lanes, generously landscaped to calm relentless traffic. Think Amsterdam with newer buildings and fewer waterways. That’s been Long Beach’s goal anyway.

Instead of wide post-war boulevards, roads would become slower and leaner, transforming Long Beach into a top-five global cycling city, said former city traffic engineer Paul Van Dyk. “Some of that is tongue-in-cheek, but if you shoot for the moon you land in the stars.”

Long Beach has been working toward this vision since it adopted its bicycle master plan 25 years ago, now with mounting urgency as auto-related fatalities rise. The biggest project so far – the Studebaker Road Transformation Project – is bringing this vision to the doorstep of Studebaker Road residents.

It has drawn mixed reviews.

'The intent of the design is malicious'

“The intent of the design is malicious — it’s immoral,” said Joey Schilling, who drives the road six days a week and wrote a social media post criticizing the project that drew almost 1,000 comments. ”It’s people who do not use the road trying to tell other people how to use the road.”

Amid red cones and barriers, a woman and her dogs navigate the construction zones at Studebaker Road and Willow Street in Long Beach on Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.The $65 million project runs over five miles from Second Street all the way up to Carson Street. It includes bike lanes, greenways and stonescape with fiber-optic cable running underneath. It is crucial to the city’s long-term plan of knitting together 300 miles of bikeways by 2040 to bring bicycle culture to Long Beach, as well as create safer streets.

The massive project funded from 13 federal, state and local agencies, gives a glimpse of what’s to come for Long Beach thoroughfares. The Clark Avenue work is in progress. Pacific Avenue and Orange Avenue “backbone” plans are on deck. Now Studebaker Road, the biggest, longest and most expensive, is well underway, spending the most dollars and, arguably, drawing the most resident anger.

Schilling, who lives near Studebaker Road actually does ride his bike to work in Seal Beach and said he is OK with bike lanes in general. However, he says the project is not practical in a community where he says most drive to work. “It’s not a reasonable solution. It’s not even for the greater good, that would be to appease the 95 percent who use their cars. The cost and the benefit do not match up. The cost is too high, the benefit too low.”

Wider lanes, sturdier medians

The Studebaker project features raised bus stops and wider bike lanes than have been seen previously. No more flimsy bollards separating bikes from cars, said Van Dyk, the city traffic engineer who helped usher in the bikeway and traffic-calming street plan before he went on to consult on other urban bike projects.

The green bollards seen on Bellflower Boulevard and Studebaker before the redo often get hit by cars and can resemble thick blades of stomped grass. “People do not like the way they look, and I agree with their frustrations,” said Van Dyk. “That’s why we moved towards those concrete medians.“ He said planners “learned a lot of lessons along the way.”

Studebaker will feature roomier bike lanes – 9 feet wide compared with the old 6-foot-across version. Wider lanes will allow riders to travel two abreast for a better ride, Van Dyk said. It also makes them easier to clean. Debris-filled lanes are a sore spot with bikers.

The old bike lane sweeper the city used to clean narrow paths was notoriously difficult to move and use. (Fourth District Councilmember Daryl Supernaw joked that sightings of the small sweepers were less frequent than Bigfoot.) But a regular street sweeper can get into the broader lanes where it can’t on Broadway and Bellflower south of Atherton. (They actually set a street sweeper in a bike lane before planning and pouring the concrete to make sure it would fit.) Still, protected bike lanes are harder to clean than lanes merely separated by paint and “swept” by passing cars.

David Raslevich, a 41-year-old cyclist who frequently rides on the new lanes on Clark, said he has noticed branches, leaves and other debris. “I feel safer riding with the traffic, because they (cars) move debris out of the way for you.”

Buses stop in traffic, not turnouts

One new component of Studebaker and the other newer lanes are raised bus stops. The new stops designed to accommodate bikes and buses are about five inches off the ground and separated from the road by a curb. Buses will stop in the No. 2 lane, halting traffic behind them, and pick up passengers, instead of easing out of a bus turnout.

Van Dyk said that change evolved from talks with Long Beach Transit, which revealed that buses would sometimes get hit when pulling into traffic. Planners reasoned it’s better to have cars waiting for a bus to pick up passengers instead of forcing a bus waiting to pull into the No. 2 lane.

“It’s math my second grader can do: What’s better, 40 people on a bus wait or four people in cars,” Van Dyke said. “Which is the greatest cost to society? The bus is going to be more efficient.” He also contends the new system is safe; there is less ambiguity as a bus will slow down in front of a car, so the car would be more likely to stop instead of zipping around a protruding bus bumper.

It is too early to know how this plan will play out – the new bus lane curbs on Clark show missing chunks already from drivers that likely didn’t see them. Raslevich said he has seen cars turn into the curb by the raised bus stop. “They don’t know that there’s an island there, so they’re hitting that island, pretty much daily.”

Councilman Supernaw, whose district encompasses the $65 million project, had reservations about the price tag before ultimately supporting it.

'All anyone asked for is a repave'

“All anyone asked for is a repave, to get rid of potholes and have a smooth surface to drive on,” Supernaw said. “Should we just forgo the bike lanes and do a straight repave? The answer was no, we wanna use the grant money for the bike lanes.”

The city saw it as a grander vision, weaving together a puzzle of state and federal grants along with $8.5 million in local sales tax money for new transit stops, sidewalks and curb ramps that improve how all people can move through the city.

“It’s not just ‘I wanna ride a bike for fun.’ People need it to get to work,” said Jocelin Padilla, a spokesperson for the city’s Public Works Department.

'Communication via spraypaint'

A series of community meetings were held in 2024, drawing limited feedback. But when residents later saw painted pavement markings showing the planned curbs and bike lines, “they got involved in a big way,” Supernaw said.

“We call this communication via spraypaint,” said Supernaw. “Constituents see lines marked out and contact the council office.”

Aside from the cost and the bus islands, some residents are frustrated by the execution. Leslie Goldman, who lives near Studebaker and Stearns, said large piles of dirt – at times higher than cars – have blocked residents from crossing the street or seeing oncoming traffic. Some concerns were addressed, including a bus shelter that was added due to feedback from residents.

“We’re not saying we don’t want construction done ever, that’s life in the big city,” she said. But Goldman contends the “assembly line” construction approach, as opposed to the work done in shorter phases, is leading to more “noise, vibration, dust, traffic, blind spots, trash, roadblocks, … All at sporadic intervals unknown to residents. It’s not just an inconvenience, it’s a hardship.”

A 'once-in-a-generation' timeline

Padilla of Public Works acknowledged the hardship, but said the benefits would outweigh the short-term pain. She said doing the work in shorter segments would increase costs and project timelines – not a good thing when it needs to be finished by the Olympics. “This is a once-in-a-generation project,” she said.

Not all residents are wary. “Studebaker is gonna be awesome when it’s done,” said Dan Olsen, who lives near Studebaker and Atherton. “It’s new, it’s fresh, the neighborhood is going to benefit. It’s been a total pothole disaster for so long. … Even though there are catches and hooks, it’s still worth it.”

Long Beach still isn't Amsterdam

Long Beach is not yet Amsterdam; it’s still a patchwork of protected lanes and unprotected ones of varying degrees of newness. But Studebaker should be done in 2027. Pacific Avenue and Orange Avenue are next. The bike lanes and streets won’t uniformly connect, but there will be more of them – Artesia Boulevard to service Jordan High, Clark Avenue near Long Beach City College and now Studebaker. “Long Beach’s cycling network is reaching critical mass,” Van Dyk said.

Van Dyk and other bike proponents say it’s a long game. Amsterdam itself was car-dominated until the 1970s when the Stop de Kindermoord movement was launched in response to the high number of child deaths. “It’s a generational effort; it took multiple generations to give us the infrastructure we have today,” he said.

Will any of this make the streets safer?

Will they help make transportation safer for cars and bikes? The city racked up 53 traffic deaths in 2025, the highest in a decade, and 32 bike/pedestrian and e-scooter deaths. This year has seen 36 traffic deaths through mid-September. The city is also trying other tools; speed cameras are being installed, and tickets will go out this fall.

It’s not yet any safer to ride through Long Beach than it was 10 years ago, “but it’s not safer to do anything in Long Beach,” said Kurt Canfield, a cyclist and organizer for Car Lite Long Beach, a bike advocacy organization. He often rides the Broadway bike path, which he considers a success despite debris in the lane and other issues.

“They wanna bike, they wanna walk, people are driving 300 horsepower crossovers. We’re in conflict for the same space,” he said. “But this infrastructure gives us the ability to be safer.”

A grand piano, hauled in on a Ford F-350, will make its way next weekend to Griffith Park.

Then, right below the Hollywood sign, the flatbed will unfold into a stage for a recital by pianist Hunter Noack, who has played everywhere from Yosemite Valley to Joshua Tree National Park.

His Sept. 26 and 27 performances are all part of In a Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild, organized in partnership with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land. (The show is sold out, but you can sign up for the waitlist.)

For a decade, Noack has hauled his Steinway — the same model used at Carnegie Hall — through rough terrain to perform in unusual places: 370 concerts and counting.

The piano has survived fire, wind and 112-degree heat

"We've had the piano lid be ripped off by the wind. We've had the piano trailer tires catch fire on Highway 1. We've almost driven off the side of Mount Bachelor. We've played in 112-degree heat and negative 2 degrees in the winter," Noack said. And the piano has come out unscathed, including after it was towed down the washboard gravel along Schweitzer Mountain in Idaho — the only thing that happened was that it went out of tune.

How the show actually works

Among the pieces on the program at Griffith Park is "Nature Boy," the song Eden Ahbez wrote while living outdoors under the first L of the Hollywood sign. The song was later made famous by Nat King Cole.

Audiences at the Griffith Park show will be provided with wireless headphones for concert-hall quality sound, he said. "Some people just set up their picnic chairs or blankets right near the stage. Other people lay down," Noack said. "When there's so much else that's happening visually ... the music kind of automatically becomes a soundtrack, and we all get to experience that together."

The philosophy behind the series' name

The series is named after "In a Landscape," a piece by John Cage, who believed any sound could be music — even "somebody crinkling on a bag of chips," Noack said.

During his first show in 2016 at the Columbia River Gorge, Noack was midway through a soft Schumann piece about a delicate flower when 40 Harley-Davidsons on a memorial ride rolled up and circled the piano.

Rather than pack it in, he answered with Frederic Rzewski's "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues," a piece built to mimic the aggressive clatter of a cotton mill. "It was a conversation between the piano and these roaring Harleys," he said.

California saw the largest share of immigration arrests of people from Asian countries during the first 18 months of President Trump’s second term, a new tracker shows.

More than 25% of arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took place in California, home to the country's largest Asian population, followed by Texas and New York.

The findings come from the new Asian and Pacific Islander ICE Tracker launched by Stop AAPI Hate.

These communities are often missing from the national debate over immigration enforcement, said Cynthia Choi, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate during a briefing on the tracker.

“Asian and Pacific Islander communities deserve better than to be an afterthought in this crisis," Choi said. With the tracker, "we are aiming to ensure we cannot be ignored any longer."

The data shows that ICE actions targeting Asian immigrants rose much faster than enforcement against groups overall between January 2025 and August 2026.

Arrests were up 436% compared to a similar time period during the Biden administration; detentions up by 512%; deportations up by more than 1,100%.

The number of arrests peaked this past July with 1,1950 recorded nationwide.

In California, there have been more than 5,300 arrests of Asian immigrants and more than 11,400 detention stints, which includes separate stays at different facilities during a single detention.

As for deportations, they were not broken down by state.

The largest numbers involved people from India and China, the countries of origin for the largest Asian immigrant populations in the U.S.

Stephanie Chan, Stop AAPI Hate’s director of data and research, noted that a rise in anti-Indian rhetoric centered on H1-B visa holders and truck drivers.

"You see a lot of elected officials saying things like, 'Indians are coming to take the jobs,'" Chan said.

Researchers also found that people from smaller communities — such as those from Laos and Uzbekistan — were arrested at rates far disproportionate to their share of the Asian noncitizen population.

The tracker draws from ICE records obtained through public-records requests by the Deportation Data Project at UCLA and UC Berkeley.

Leaders at Stop AAPI Hate said the Trump administration's immigration crackdown is not only harming the people being swept up by ICE. Chan said the group’s annual survey of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders found more than half have felt the effects.

“That includes things like fearing that their status will be questioned,” Chan said. “That they will be arrested, detained, or deported.”

Choi drew parallels with how Asian Americans were scapegoated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who joined the briefing on the tracker, said the findings felt "very personal" because of the state’s large share of arrests.

A member of the Republican-led congressional China Committee focused on U.S. competition with the Chinese government, Khanna predicted Democrats would win the mid-terms and shift the tone of that panel.

"It's going to be much more about a celebration of Asian Americans — and documenting that — than the demonization of other countries," Khanna said.

Richard Foreman's home is stranded in the middle of the beach.

The stairs were ripped away by waves years ago, so there's no way in or out anymore. The house is 20 feet into the air, on stilts that were designed to protect it from hurricane storm surge. But there haven't been any big storms recently, just the rising ocean eating away at the sand year after year.

Just six years ago, the house was still a popular vacation rental in Rodanthe, North Carolina. Like many beachfront houses, it had a nickname: Sea 'n Delight. Today, the name is gone, and the house is uninhabitable. At low tide, the Atlantic Ocean laps at what used to be the driveway. At high tide, the ocean runs beneath the entire house.

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Foreman knows it will collapse eventually. Four neighboring homes have fallen into the ocean in the last two years. And more than 100 homes on North Carolina's barrier islands are at risk from erosion and sea level rise in the next decade, according to the National Park Service, which manages the area as part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

At least half a dozen of those houses are in imminent danger. In June, a high tide coupled with large waves was enough to bring down another house.

Yet there is no plan to remove most of the threatened houses or to empty them of personal belongings, because of perverse incentives created by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Bill King, the president of the North Carolina Beach Buggy Association, has traveled to Washington, D.C., to push for federal rule changes that he thinks could save homes from collapsing in coastal North Carolina.

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FEMA provides most residential flood insurance in the United States. The agency will pay homeowners after a house collapses, but not before. That means owners stand to lose tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars by tearing down a doomed house before the ocean takes it.

"The homeowner is incentivized to wait for collapse and get a payout," says John Ryan-Henry, a policy analyst at the Coastal States Organization, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of coastal state governments, including those along the Great Lakes.

And when homes collapse, they pollute the water and leave wreckage on the shore.

"Unfortunately, there's a lot of debris that comes with these collapses," says Lisa Sharrard, a longtime flood insurance agent in North Carolina who previously served as the chair of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, which is the trade group representing state flood-policy officials. "It leaves a legacy of hazard on the beach. It's almost impossible to get everything."

The National Park Service says it collected more than 480 tons of home debris from the area in the last 18 months alone, some of which washed miles down the North Carolina coast.

As sea level rise accelerates erosion around the U.S., there is growing alarm among waterfront homeowners, local officials and even members of Congress. Here, a damaged porch hangs precariously over the sand on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

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Foreman's stranded house hasn't been emptied out.

"It looked like we had just left for dinner. I mean, everything is still in there," says Foreman. The couches, the refrigerator, every steak knife and beach towel — it's all waiting to fall into the ocean.

"If they would settle with me for the insurance, I would have it torn down tomorrow," he says.

As sea level rise from climate change accelerates erosion around the country, there is growing alarm among waterfront homeowners, local officials and even members of Congress. More than 30 homes have fallen into the sea in coastal North Carolina alone since 2020. Neighborhoods in Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, Virginia and California are facing similar threats. Just last week, erosion exacerbated by a storm caused catastrophic damage to multiple homes in Southern California.

"People should not have to wait for their home to collapse into the water before they can get help," says Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine. "That is just not a smart way to deal with the reality of climate change."

FEMA says it cannot change the rules for threatened properties unless Congress amends the laws that govern the National Flood Insurance Program. Such a bill was introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers in 2025, but it is stalled in the House of Representatives.

FEMA did not respond to questions from NPR about the cost to taxpayers of letting homes collapse.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency provides most residential flood insurance in the United States. The agency will pay homeowners after a house collapses, but not before.

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Plenty of warning, but no good option

Erosion is an inescapable problem for waterfront communities. Waves remove sand and rock from some areas and deposit them in others.

Climate change is accelerating that natural erosion unevenly. Although global warming affects the entire planet, sea levels are rising more quickly in some regions because of ocean currents and the complex dynamics of melting glaciers and ice caps. Some of the fastest sea level rise in the world is occurring on the East Coast of the United States.

Coastal areas are constantly changing. Barrier islands, like the ones that form the Outer Banks of North Carolina, are particularly prone to erosion, as the ocean removes sand from some areas and deposits it in others. Even stable-seeming dunes can disappear as the ocean shapes the land.

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In North Carolina, where thousands of homes sit on narrow, sandy barrier islands, sea levels are rising faster than the global average, and the rate is accelerating.

Rising seas exacerbate the erosion that usually happens on barrier islands, says Reide Corbett, a climate scientist at East Carolina University. In the last six years, hundreds of feet of beach have disappeared in Dare County, N.C., the current epicenter of erosion-related home collapses in the United States.

"There is no way to maintain homes where they currently are," Corbett says. He has delivered the same message directly to county residents at multiple public meetings in recent years. "The only solution is to back off that front line."

Clarke Lattimore, 8, looks out the window of his family's beach house in Buxton, N.C., in May. His great-grandfather built the house behind two rows of dunes. Now, it is threatened by the ocean.

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But removing homes from the front line is expensive. Tearing down a house costs at least $30,000, according to local contractors, and the price tag is even higher if the house is very large or difficult to access. The other option is to move homes farther away from the water, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Most homeowners do not have that kind of money. Many of the at-risk properties in Dare County are vacation homes, and their owners rely on rental income to pay for the mortgage, taxes and insurance. As the ocean encroaches, many houses get damaged and become uninhabitable, saddling owners with high bills and no income at the very moment they need cash to prevent their homes from collapsing.

Michael McDaniel is in that situation with his house in Buxton, N.C., nicknamed the Sea Star. He purchased it for about $500,000 in 2011, when he retired from the Navy. He planned to eventually move there full time with his wife.

When he bought the house, about 250 feet of dune were between the front porch and the Atlantic. For years, the house seemed like a good investment. The property value rose and hit nearly $1 million just two years ago. But the beach eroded, and today the home is uninhabitable.

McDaniel says he can't afford to move the house, which would be his first choice, or to demolish it. The house has a flood insurance policy that will pay out $250,000 if it collapses, plus up to $100,000 for lost belongings.

"If it's teetering, you've got to sit and wait for it to fall in the ocean," he says.

Foreman, whose house is stranded in the middle of the Rodanthe beach, is in a similar bind.

Extra sand has bought extra time for the owners of homes damaged by waves in recent years in Dare County, but the long-term problem of beach erosion persists.

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"Environmentally, it would be far better if they would allow me to tear it down on a beautiful day where all the debris is in one spot," he says. "But by requiring the waiting game for it to fall, it's going to fall in a storm, and it's going to be scattered for miles."

Taxpayers are on the hook for increasingly expensive cleanups. Federal and county governments together estimate that they have spent more than half a million dollars cleaning up debris in coastal North Carolina since 2020. Those figures do not account for the economic costs of closed beaches and polluted ecosystems.

County officials say they are frustrated by the federal government's approach.

"If there are waves breaking under the house, that's clearly threatened," says Dare County Manager Robert Outten. "It's money they're going to spend either way. It's cheaper to tear it down."

Their frustration is even greater because they say the federal government created a solution to the problem nearly 40 years ago — and then killed it.

Homes in Buxton were originally built behind multiple rows of dunes. Today, those dunes are gone.

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The solution that Congress hated

In the mid-1980s, Congress stepped in to help homeowners with threatened homes.

The result was called the Upton-Jones Amendment to the National Flood Insurance Program. The law, named for lawmakers from the erosion hot spots of Michigan and North Carolina, allowed homeowners to access flood insurance payouts before a home fell, to pay for demolishing it or moving it.

The law took effect in 1988, and homeowners immediately started using it to get their houses out of harm's way, according to partial claims records obtained from FEMA through a public records request and analyzed by NPR. More than 400 homes in 27 states were demolished or moved under the policy.

People fish off the pier in Avon, North Carolina.

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But Congress was not happy with the results.

The goal was to avoid having houses fall into the water. But in a series of congressional hearings, experts told lawmakers that some property owners were purposely waiting to remove their houses.

"They have chosen to repair the building as it stands, get another season's rent and then look toward the possibility of demolition at a later date," explained Spencer Rogers, who managed Upton-Jones claims for North Carolina, at a June 1990 congressional hearing. "There is no particular incentive that I can see for any early action."

Lawmakers and FEMA officials expressed frustration that there was no penalty for such inaction. The longer the owner of a doomed home delayed, the more likely it was that the home would be damaged by waves or storms, leading to an expensive insurance claim. And if the house fell before the owner removed it, they could still collect their full flood insurance payout.

"People should not have to wait for their home to collapse into the water before they can get help," says Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine. Here, homes in Buxton stand over the waves in May.

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"Policyholder benefits come at the government's expense," said then-Rep. Doug Bereuter of Nebraska at another 1990 hearing about Upton-Jones.

Lawmakers were also concerned that the policy could bankrupt the National Flood Insurance Program if every eligible home took advantage of it. After years of debate about whether Upton-Jones could be fixed, Congress repealed it altogether in 1994.

Now, Congress is considering reinstating a version of the same policy.

Under pressure from homeowners and local governments, a bipartisan group of lawmakers last year proposed resurrecting a version of the Upton-Jones law.

"For some homeowners in vulnerable coastal areas, relocation or demolition may be the safest and most practical option," says Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, one of the bill's co-sponsors. She says the bill "is about giving people that option before disaster strikes, not after everything is already lost."

The new bill attempts to address some of the problems identified in Upton-Jones back in the 1990s. If a homeowner fails to remove their threatened house before it collapses, they may not get their full insurance payout. And the process for determining whether a house is in imminent danger from erosion is simplified.

But the bill has not gotten enough support to move forward. The Trump administration's efforts to slash FEMA's workforce and budget have made it harder for popular bipartisan efforts to reform the agency to find traction in Congress.

Brian Harris runs the Buxton Civic Association in Buxton. In recent years, he has been pushing the state and federal governments to change rules that make it difficult to protect waterfront homes and to remove them before they collapse.

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FEMA never analyzed the full cost of Upton-Jones

Upton-Jones retains its reputation as a failed and expensive program three decades after it was repealed. But it's unclear how accurate that reputation is, because FEMA never conducted a full analysis of its cost-effectiveness. "There was never a really robust postmortem," says Ryan-Henry, of the Coastal States Organization.

FEMA's complete data on flood insurance claims are private, making it impossible to know how Upton-Jones ultimately compares with other federal programs for removing threatened homes.

But narrower claims data obtained by NPR through a public records request offers a clue. Adjusted for inflation, the average cost to demolish a home was roughly the same as the cost of a federal home buyout, in which the government purchases repeatedly damaged homes in flood zones at market value and pays to demolish them.

In higher-cost areas, Upton-Jones could even be cheaper. The proposed program would cap payouts at $250,000, while the separate, existing buyout program pays full market value. More than 90% of the homes that have fallen in Dare County since 2020 were assessed above $250,000.

Without long-term solutions available, many local and state governments are relying on expensive alternatives such as beach nourishment and seawalls.

Removing homes before they collapse costs tens of thousands of dollars. A bill pending in Congress would let homeowners access money through their flood insurance policies to help foot that bill.

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In Maine, a project is underway to build a jetty to slow erosion near houses in the threatened community of Camp Ellis in the town of Saco. And Dare County, N.C., has two multimillion-dollar projects underway: an $8.6 million jetty repair and a roughly $15 million beach nourishment project that will pump more than 2 million cubic yards of sand in front of the most threatened houses. The sand from the last beach nourishment in the area lasted less than three years.

"Beach nourishment is temporary," says Corbett, the climate scientist at East Carolina University. "You're buying sand to buy time. You can't simply buy time and not plan for what is next."

And not every neighborhood is getting sand or other protections. At this rate, Richard Foreman doesn't see a path to either protecting or removing his stranded house in North Carolina. "Which leads you to believe they're really just hoping [the homes] will fall instead," Foreman says. "It's nuts. It's absolutely nuts."

Additional editing by Neela Banerjee. Molly Enking of Maine Public, along with Sarah Knight and Katie Daugert of NPR, contributed reporting.
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