The insurance check to rebuild Zaire Calvin’s family properties came in at just under $300,000, a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly $2.1 million they had been worth.
His family had five homes sprawled across two lots in the leafy suburb of Altadena, California, before the Eaton Fire unleashed its wrath, leveling both his and his mother’s houses and helping to turn a tight‑knit Black homeownership enclave into prime ground for speculators.
Far more devastating, the inferno also took his sister, Evelyn McClendon.
The past 15 months – especially battling his insurance company – have been like “war,” said Calvin, 48, who is also raising a toddler throughout the ordeal. “We’ve lost everything. Families here are falling apart because they’re not able to fight,” he added.
Across the country, Black homeowners trying to recover after a natural disaster are seeing their troubles mount when the very insurers who are supposed to be coming to their aid refuse to pay out, drop long‑time customers, or demand itemized lists for total losses families can’t document. It’s part of a national home insurance crisis supercharged by climate change, where premiums are spiking in nearly every ZIP code, companies are fleeing high‑risk markets, and the costs are falling hardest on Black families.
Studies show Black households are less likely to be approved for key disaster aid, receive smaller payouts via the federal government and private home insurers, and lose wealth after disasters while white households tend to gain it, even controlling for factors like income, homeownership, and local damage.
“It’s the most predatory thing out there. You’re left begging them to pay,” Calvin said.
Even after experiencing a rate hike in the year before the fire, Calvin has spent months painstakingly trying to prove renovations and contents that burned in the fire, only to be told by his insurer that without receipts and paperwork — much of it destroyed in the blaze — they will not fully cover what he lost.
“No one’s taking a loss except for the homeowner,” Calvin said.
At least 6 million households have seen premium hikes since 2021, with the highest increases in the Southeast, where Black homeownership is concentrated. That’s straining families already burdened by rising food and transportation costs. Homeowners with a mortgage must carry insurance, and renters often feel the pinch when landlords raise rents to cover rising premiums.
Plus, at least 1.4 million households have had policies canceled outright. One in four of those cancellations are explicitly tied to extreme weather.
“Whether it was here in Altadena or in Maui or Louisiana, this is disaster capitalism at its finest.”
Zaire Calvin, Altadena, California, resident
Last year, Timothy Williams, a pastor, lost his property insurance coverage for his home in rural Elba, Alabama, after several flood incidents caused by heavier rains and by the poor drainage system of a nearby state highway.
“When we hear about a storm or flood coming or anything like tornadoes, it becomes stressful because we know that if they were to hit and damage our home, we’ll be homeless,” he said.
Hundreds of policies in the state have been canceled since 2020, when Alabama’s home insurance industry became unprofitable for the first time due to widespread damage from extreme weather.
For those who still have insurance, annual insurance premiums increased by an average of $648 across the country between 2021 and 2024.
“The state and the [insurance] companies — they’re pushing the costs they created onto homeowners and it’s causing us to sink,” Williams told Capital B in February.
Black homeowners spend a larger share of their income on home insurance than any other major racial group in the U.S. This contributes to more than 1 in 10 Black homeowners lacking insurance.
This dilemma is expanding the racial wealth gap, as nearly half of all Black wealth is tied to home equity. In counties with very large disaster damages, white households gain about $126,000 in wealth on average, while Black households lost about $27,000 on average.
“This is the new redlining,” Calvin said.
Redlining made it harder for Black families to get home loans in the 20th century and concentrated them in neighborhoods with more toxic industries and pollution. Today, those historically redlined areas face higher flood, fire, and extreme‑heat risks, in part because they sit in more vulnerable floodplains and have suffered decades of underinvestment in basic infrastructure like drainage, roads, and emergency services. Now, using artificial intelligence algorithms, insurance companies use that reality to charge higher premiums in Black neighborhoods or pull out of the areas.
Studies show that higher premiums also correlate with up to a $43,000 decrease in property values. It’s partly why the value of Black-owned homes has declined more than the value of homes owned by other racial groups since 2023.
“The home insurance crisis is not race-neutral,” Climate Power, a climate communications organization, wrote in a statement to Capital B. “It is magnifying decades of housing discrimination, draining Black wealth, and putting millions of families at risk of losing their greatest financial asset.”
Why the U.S. home insurance system is failing Black homeowners
The modern home insurance industry in the U.S. grew out of 18th‑century mutual fire associations that were supposed to spread risk among neighbors, not maximize profit. Early companies were tightly regulated and used cooperative rate‑setting that tried to match prices to long‑term loss patterns rather than the company’s quarterly earnings. Over time, that mutual model gave way to national, publicly traded firms whose profits increasingly depended on their ability to generate investment returns for shareholders from the premiums they collected. Today, climate‑risk analytics make it easier to cancel policies in “unprofitable” communities hit by disasters.
Altadena “was a community that had done everything right, and they still came up short,” said Lisa Odigie, an Altadena native and representative from the community’s Housing Committee for Long Term Recovery Group. “Black families are recovering the slowest, and systems that are built to help are not reaching us.”
Many still find themselves stalled in conversations with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, watching state and county inspectors miss appointments, and hearing insurers insist they never received forms that were hand‑delivered and stamped. Black households in Altadena have the most empty lots sitting untouched rather than moving toward rebuilding in the community.
The federal government’s response so far has been piecemeal. Historically, the National Flood Insurance Program has provided subsidized coverage in places private insurers avoid, but NFIP is deeply in debt and has underprotected most flood‑prone communities. The Treasury Department’s Federal Insurance Office has convened insurers, state regulators, and consumer groups to talk about keeping coverage affordable, and FEMA is grappling with buyout and mitigation programs that could, in theory, move people out of the most dangerous areas.
Still, those efforts are underfunded, slow, and don’t touch the core problem that home insurance is regulated state‑by‑state with virtually no federal guardrails on how companies can price or pull coverage as climate risk grows.
In North Carolina, the average homeowners’ insurance rate has risen by 75% since 2014 and more than 10,000 households saw their insurance canceled a few months before the state was devastated by Hurricane Helene in 2024.
One way the state tries to protect homeowners is through the attorney general’s Consumer Protection Division, which investigates complaints and can take legal action when it sees patterns of illegal business practices by insurers and other companies.
But “the office needs more resources to be able to take on any fight on behalf of consumers,” explained state Rep. Dante Pittman, who represents a majority-Black district in the House of Representatives.
“The state has a role in making sure that insurance is available and affordable for residents,” Pittman said, “because there are a lot of communities that are waking up to the reality that one storm can make an area completely unaffordable or make the home they’ve been in their entire lives then unaffordable for repairs.”
“It is the American way of finding a way to cash in on our pain.”
Zaire Calvin, Altadena, California, resident
Since last year’s Eaton Fire, Calvin has learned a new phrase to describe their reality.
“Whether it was here in Altadena or in Maui or Louisiana, this is disaster capitalism at its finest,” he said.
Disaster capitalism is a system that advocates and scholars have outlined where federal policies and corporate loopholes favor companies attempting to recoup their costs while survivors absorb the loss.
Decades of payments bought Calvin a payout so small that he said it made clear that the insurance industry “operates to [make] sure the shareholders are good and the company is making profits.”
“It is the American way of finding a way to cash in on our pain,” he added.
Like the homes of many Black families, the Calvins’ property has been a hub for multiple generations — grandparents, parents, and children living side by side on land his mother first bought in the 1970s, when Altadena was one of the few places Black families could own property in Southern California.
Calvin’s mother, Evelyn Cathirell, is now spending her days in a senior care facility about 15 miles from her empty lot. She cries when she watches school buses rattle past, he said. It makes her think of her namesake daughter who used to drive them before losing her life.
She tells Calvin almost daily that she just wants to be “back on our land.” It motivates him to move forward, but “at this point I thought we’d be 50% back, not 10%.”
“The longer it takes to get people back in their homes, the more people die,” he added. “When we harm this generation, that also changes life outcomes for the next generation.”
Read More: