Uninsurable Risk? Environmental Catastrophe and Institutional Adaptation in the Florida Property Insurance Market

Climate change and urban growth are causing a global increase in the economic costs of natural disasters, shifting the geography of risk and straining existing systems of public and private disaster insurance. Yet in spite of rising losses and increasingly disruptive insurance crises, property insurance coverage remains widely available in disaster-prone regions, providing the financial infrastructure for continued urban growth and ultimately enabling future disasters. This dissertation project investigates this paradox through a mixed-methods case study of Florida, a state which has seen repeated hurricane-driven property insurance crises since the early 1990s, yet has maintained access to coverage through periodic, selective expansions of public home insurance provision. Drawing on archival, interview, and quantitative data, I ask: how have state actors (legislators, regulators, administrators, and experts) shifted the costs of disaster between public and private insurers to maintain the availability of private property insurance coverage? My three empirical chapters address this question through a comparison of three public home insurance, reinsurance, and hazard mitigation programs developed in Florida to finance hurricane risk, and examine 1) how policymakers have iteratively developed these programs since the early 1990s, 2) how their organizational design has shaped the financial burdens they present to the state, and 3) how policymakers have attempted to manage these burdens over time. Ultimately I argue that these programs have allowed the Florida state government to diffuse the problem of catastrophe disruptions in the short-term by offloading costs while deferring longer-term forms of adaptation.