Vivien Winneke adores the views from her home in Dewey-Humboldt, a tiny town of fewer than 5,000 residents east of Prescott. Standing in her backyard, there are rolling hills as far as the eye can see, carpeted in desert shrubs, with the occasional creosote and juniper tree rustling in the wind.
“You just don’t get this everywhere,” Winneke said, looking out from her backyard.
To protect her three acres, Winneke spends hours “firewising” to mitigate the risk of wildfire. It includes trimming up her trees and clearing space out between shrubs.
“I've got a pretty good break around the property, but it could be better,” she said.
Winneke knows what it takes to prevent the spread of wildfires. She’s an assessor for the Dewey-Humboldt Firewise community. She advises her neighbors on how to mitigate fire risk and gives out grants for that purpose.
Winneke has made her home as safe and risk averse as possible.
“It was all fine until August, and then all of a sudden my renewal went up from $1,450 a year to $4,500,” she said. “That’s more than my property taxes.”
When Winneke realized she wouldn’t be able to pay her new insurance rates, she panicked.
“I actually felt like I might have to sell the house,” she said.
“I'm on a fixed income, like most of the people in Dewey-Humboldt,” Winneke added. "Most of the people here are retired, and they're not high income.”
Winneke isn’t alone.
State Rep. Selina Bliss (R-Prescott), who represents Dewey-Humboldt, said she’s heard of other homeowners who’ve seen insurance premiums tripled or quadrupled. Some of them simply lost coverage entirely.
“My parents even lost their homeowners insurance about a year ago,” Bliss said. “So, you know when you get trends from the constituents, you realize, oh, we got an issue.”
Heightened awareness of wildfire risk
It’s an issue that’s garnered recent attention in California, as many Los Angeles County residents who lost their homes in last month’s deadly wildfires are struggling to recover without homeowners insurance.
Rising costs — and in some cases, outright cancellations by insurers citing wildfire risks — are a problem not just in California, but Arizona too.
Winneke said she was rejected by 22 insurance companies before finding one that offered a rate she can afford. Even still, she’s paying more than she used to.
And the policy only covers about half of what her home is worth. Winneke’s home is worth about $550,000, but it’s only insured for $280,000.
“It's almost not worth having insurance, but you can't have a mortgage without insurance, and you’ve got to be insured for a reasonable amount,” Winneke said. “So I'm not even sure if my mortgage company knows that I'm slightly underinsured.”
Homeowners insurance rates have increased in Arizona by 9% between 2018 and 2021, according to data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. And rates have continued to rise nationally.
Laura Curtis is the vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association. She says hikes in premiums coincide with rising costs of rebuilding a home, which is up 44% with inflation in the last 5 years.
“It is the law of Arizona for insurers to remain solvent and we just want to ensure that you know, if we are insuring something that we have the ability and the resources to do so,” Curtis said.
Rising premiums are most likely to affect rural parts of the state the Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions considers at greatest risk for wildfires — counties like Gila, Navajo and Greenlee.
But Arizona Fire Chiefs Association President Jake Rhoades warns that longer and hotter summers have extended the duration of fire seasons and increased risk across the entire state.
“If we think over in Apache Junction, the Superstition area, there's a lot of wildland-urban interface here in Maricopa County,” Rhoades said. “We're not just talking about Show Low and Flagstaff, we're talking right here in the Phoenix metro as well.”
Keeping Arizona homeowners insured
Thomas Torres is the head of the state Department of Forestry and Fire Management. The number of Arizona homes has more than doubled since 1990, he says, and many have been built in high risk areas.
Many of those are in areas between developed land and wildland. It’s called the Wildland Urban Interface, or WUI.
“There are almost over 1.4 million homes in the WUI and you know the WUI exists in all of the counties in Arizona,” Torres said.
The WUI zone is growing in places like Flagstaff, as the city expands its footprint. Neil Chapman, the Wildland Forest Health Specialist for Flagstaff, says he’s seen more fires encroaching on communities over the past year, even though the Flagstaff area has undergone a decades-long effort to mitigate fire risk.
“It’s vegetation in and amongst the community that can drive some of these fires, and buildings that haven't been built, or communities that haven't been designed with this sort of risk in mind,” Chapman said.
Insurance companies have taken notice — and so has the Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions.
Members of the state’s Resilience and Mitigation Council are studying how to address rising costs in rural and WUI areas where wildland and urban settings collide. The council includes representatives of insurance companies, municipalities and fire chiefs.
The council is supposed to make formal recommendations on how to keep insurance costs down by the end of the year.
At the state Capitol, Bliss says insurance companies are using outdated information to make their policies, or information that unfairly disregards mitigation efforts. She supports legislation that intends to require insurers to consider a community’s firewising efforts when setting rates.
The bill would also restrict insurers from cancelling policies for wildfire risks near, but not on, a homeowners property.
Winneke said she understands the business decisions insurance companies have to make.
“Their claims are in the billions,” she says. “I don't even know how they’re in business. I wouldn't be.”
She said it makes sense that some companies are abandoning parts of California.
“Shortly, it’ll be Arizona, where they just don't want to do business here anymore. And I don't blame them,” Winneke said.
For now, she’s preparing for a summer with a heavier wildfire risk. Arizona has had an unusually hot and dry winter.
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