New Report Shows Insurers Are Sabotaging the American Housing Market
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 3, 2026
Contact: contact@insurancefairnessproject.com
New Report Shows Insurers Are Sabotaging the American Housing Market
Experts Warn Home Insurance Crisis Is Destabilizing an Already Fragile U.S. Housing and Real Estate Market
Watch the recording here.
Earlier today, the Insurance Fairness Project hosted a press conference with housing, insurance, and climate experts to examine how the home insurance crisis is disrupting the real estate market nationwide. As premiums soar and insurers pull back from high-risk markets, home sales are falling apart, new construction is being delayed, and homeownership is getting increasingly out of reach for American families.
“Insurers are making it burdensome or even impossible to insure a home at closing. That doesn’t just affect individual policyholders, it determines who can buy a home, who can sell one, and where new housing can be built,” said TJ Helmstetter, a spokesperson for the Insurance Fairness Project. “We cannot solve the housing affordability crisis while ignoring the insurance crisis driving up costs and reducing the availability of housing.”
“Rising insurance costs are significantly threatening the sustainability of affordable housing developments and limiting options for low-income families,” said Mandy Pant, Director of Real Estate Development and Asset Management at the American Indian Community Development Corporation. “Between 2022 and 2023, property insurance costs increased by 25% across AICDC’s portfolio, and it continues to be an incredibly challenging market at a time when providers like us are struggling to preserve deeply affordable housing.”
Experts warned that home insurance is no longer simply a cost of homeownership, it is becoming a prerequisite for whether Americans can buy, sell, build, or even keep a home at all. Buyers with signed contracts and approved mortgages are seeing deals collapse in the final days before closing because they cannot acquire coverage, while homeowners in high-risk areas with frequent weather catastrophes are finding their properties increasingly difficult to sell.
The crisis is impacting more than just homeowners accessibility, as it’s also fundamentally reshaping the broader housing market. Developers are struggling to obtain affordable coverage for new and affordable housing projects, certain regions are experiencing constrained housing supply as insurers retreat from high-risk markets, and rising premiums are adding thousands of dollars to the annual cost of owning a home. For families already stretched by high home prices and mortgage rates, insurance can be the difference between being able to afford a home and being priced out entirely.
"Today's insurance crisis contributes to fewer affordable housing units, greater costs for tenants, financial strains on housing developers and providers, and deferred maintenance and resilience upgrades,” said Moira Birss, Senior Fellow at Climate and Community Institute. “Tinkering at the edges will not solve this. Instead, we must stop corporate greed and create public programs that provide adequate, affordable, and available insurance coverage for all housing types.”
Panelists also highlighted how insurers' pricing and coverage decisions can compound existing inequities. Homeowners with lower credit scores can face significantly higher premiums, while communities exposed to climate-driven disasters are increasingly confronting the risks of nonrenewals, coverage restrictions, and limited options for replacement coverage. Meanwhile, developers and homeowners face uncertainty over whether coverage available today will remain available tomorrow.
"The insurance market has recently made homeownership unrealistic or unsustainable for many across the nation," said Douglas Heller, Director of Insurance at Consumer Federation of America. “Between the skyrocketing premiums, policy non-renewals, discriminatory pricing, and unfair claims handling, American consumers need better regulation of the insurance companies that sell a product we are required to purchase if we want to own a home.”
Today’s conversation also spotlighted new findings from the Insurance Fairness Project's latest report, No Policy, No Sale: How Insurers Are Weighing Down the U.S. Housing Market, which documents how rising premiums and shrinking insurance availability are colliding with an already fragile housing market. Read the full report here.
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The Insurance Fairness Project works to raise awareness of the nation’s climate-driven property insurance crisis. We bring together consumer advocates, homeowners, disaster survivors, and policy experts to increase understanding of the crisis and its causes, and we work to advance possible solutions through research, media engagement, and public education.
