Home insurance non-renewals by county
Note: To view more, scroll the map. Jovi Dai Bay Area News Group’s map
Carolina Villaseca’s Brentwood neighborhood, with its rows of neat two-story, stucco-clad, tile-roofed homes and well-trimmed shrubs, hardly looks like a tinderbox a spark away from exploding in flames and joining the list of California communities scorched by wildfires that has alarmed insurers throughout the state, resulting in steep rate increases and lost coverage.
The annual price to renew Villaseca’s coverage, which had already increased significantly, would more than double from $2,700 to $5,770, according to a notice received by her insurer, Safeco Insurance, in October.
Villaseca, who has lived in the house with her husband for nine years, said there were no claims and the insurance company had no explanation at all. The price has increased annually, and in the last three years, it has increased tremendously, in my opinion. They make it impossible for many to afford insurance renewals.
Even though the cost was startling, Villaseca was able to find coverage when Mercury, another insurance, offered a policy for $3,100. According to a Bay Area News Group review of California Department of Insurance data, from 2015 to 2024, her Contra Costa County ZIP code, 94513, had around one out of ten house insurance policy non-renewals, the highest rate in the nine-county Bay Area.
In California, there have been almost 7.6 million non-renewals. According to the data, the state’s hardest-hit ZIP code was 92592 in the Riverside County city of Temecula, with 26,918 non-renewals over that time. The Brentwood ZIP code, with 19,366 non-renewals during that time, came in at number 16. Seven of the 15 California ZIP codes with higher non-renewals than Brentwood were located in Riverside County, which is located east of Los Angeles.
South San Francisco (94536) in San Mateo County, Gilroy (95020) and San Jose (95123) in Santa Clara County, Dublin (94568) and Fremont (94536) in Alameda County, and Santa Cruz (95060) in Santa Cruz County are the ZIP codes with the highest non-renewals in the region, according to the data. However, a number of additional ZIP codes with the highest Bay Area non-renewals were located in Contra Costa County, such as Antioch (94509) and Bay Point (94565).
Igor Dubrovsky, a co-owner of ESI Insurance Brokers, a San Francisco-based company that has been providing services to roughly 5,000 clients in the Bay Area for the past 15 years, was not surprised by that.
Every day, our organization received perhaps 300% more phone calls, and nearly all of the stories were the same, according to Dubrovsky. People come to me to tell me that they are looking for insurance since their provider has dumped them.
With estimated losses of over $35.8 billion, a string of destructive and expensive wildfires over the past ten years have left California’s property insurance industry in ruins. According to insurers, they are forced to limit their liability exposure or exit the California market entirely since they are unable to raise their rates to reflect growing costs and risk due to antiquated voter-approved regulations that were implemented in the late 1980s to ensure more equitable pricing.
Encouraged by Governor Gavin Newsom, Ricardo Lara, the state’s elected insurance commissioner, last fall proposed a plan to adopt new regulations by the end of this year that would address the main demands of insurers: the ability to pass on to consumers their own costs for reinsurance against catastrophic losses; rates based on risk modeling rather than historic losses; and faster rate hike approvals. Lara promised that insurers will be required to provide additional coverage in parts of the state that are at risk of fire.
Those efforts are nearing completion, and relief is on the way with insurers such as Allstate and Farmers announcing plans to expand coverage in the state as reforms are implemented, said Michael Soller, a spokesman for the insurance department.
All of the changes Commissioner Lara announced late last year are going to be in effect and finalized by the end of this month, Soller said. The risk of wildfires has increased, but under our 30-year-old rules, insurance companies are increasing the costs but not writing more policies. We re updating rules so that insurance companies actually have to write more policies. And for the very first time in California s history, that will happen.
But insurers have cautioned that it could take years for changes to be reflected in coverage, and consumer advocates have questioned whether the new rules will deliver more than just higher premiums.
All homeowners are going to pay a lot more for their insurance under Lara s regulations, said Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court.
Homeowners in areas that insurers consider high risk have found themselves with few options. Many have turned to the state-mandated, last-resort California FAIR Plan, a privately run high-risk pool that offers limited coverage and can leave homeowners paying two to three times as much as a standard policy. Over the last five years, the number of FAIR Plan policies in the state has more than doubled, from 204,800 to 449,800.
Others are turning to what are called non-admitted or surplus line insurers licensed in other states but not California and not subject to the state s rate regulation, and also can be expensive.
Either way, premiums tend to be higher, and even those who receive offers for standard policies are seeing massive cost increases.
Most of the clients rates are going up significantly more, Dubrovsky said.
So why has home insurance suddenly become so expensive and hard to get in so many parts of California like Brentwood? Areas with many trees or wood susceptible to fire, including suburban areas on the outskirts of the Bay Area s major cities, are seen as high risk, Dubrovsky said.
Dirk Ziegler, CFO of Zeigler Insurance in Brentwood, said insurance companies are scrutinizing underwriting guidelines more stringently than in the past, especially in areas like Contra Costa County that are regarded as high fire risk. Brentwood has seen many non-renewals due to aging roofs, poor maintenance and other fire hazards in older homes.
You have a lot of the older homes that were here from many, many, many years ago, Ziegler said. Now we have much more data from all the wildfires and things like that to be able to predict what s going to happen in the future and potential losses and so forth.
Susanna Thompson, vice chair of the Contra Costa County Fire Commission, said revised California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection fire hazard zone maps for the parklands outside Brentwood showed higher risk than in the past. Undeveloped areas adjacent to the Trilogy and Vista Dorado neighborhoods as well as parts of Summerset such as John Marsh State Park have been upgraded from moderate to high hazard levels, she said.
This area is primarily grassland not dense timber like you d see in the mountains but dry grass becomes highly flammable in summer, and grass fires can spread extremely fast, Thompson said. Many of my neighbors have faced non-renewals, likely due to recent changes in hazard zone designation.
Thompson doesn t think the higher risk rating is fair those lands often are used for cattle grazing and hay farming, which keeps combustible fuels in check. But she also acknowledges that fire seasons have gotten longer.
Chris Bachman, assistant chief and fire marshal at Contra Costa County Fire Protection District, said things may get worse when Cal Fire releases new fire hazard maps for local urban areas next year. Those will add additional high and moderate ratings to maps that currently only show very high risk.
This means that more communities will likely be impacted, Bachman said.
Brian Oftedal, a senior captain in the Oakland Fire Department, said additional fire stations may help reduce homeowners risk exposure.
We re getting ready to break ground on at least one, if not two, fire stations in Brentwood shortly here, which is also part of the fix for addressing some fire insurance-related issues, Oftedal said.
For homeowners like Villaseca, it hasn t felt like the state has had their back, leaving her and her neighbors to use social media to share information about insurance rates and insurers who are offering policies in their neighborhoods.
I really don t know what they re doing, Villaseca said. That s why we use Nextdoor.
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