Why these states are helping people pay for stronger roofs

Hurricanes were getting stronger. Rising insurance premiums were hitting homeowners hard.

Afraid that Alabama’s coast was staring down a crisis, the state’s leaders made a bet: In 2016, they began handing out millions of dollars to help people put stronger roofs on their homes.

The gamble paid off four years later when a Category 2 hurricane slammed into the state. By then, thousands of residents had installed “fortified roofs,” designed specifically to survive high winds. After the storm, the state found that almost all of these homes had escaped with only minor damage.

The findings caught the attention of states that regularly get hit by hurricanes, hail storms, fires and a battery of other natural disasters that experts say can be made worse by climate change. Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina have all copied Alabama’s roof replacement program in recent years. So have Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Kentucky, states where severe wind and hail have done major damage to homes and other properties. As insurance companies start to pull back from places at high risk of wildfire, a number of Western states are also weighing bills this year that would help residents harden their homes against fire.

The surge of interest in shoring up homes reflects the growing pressure states feel to respond to the financial toll of extreme weather, experts said. In many of these states, Republican governors and lawmakers have discounted   climate change. But as disasters multiply and insurance companies raise rates and stop selling policies, the economic consequences have become more difficult to ignore.

“The states see the economic reality,” said Jesse Keenan, a professor and the director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University’s School of Architecture. If coastal cities and tourist beach towns become uninsurable and property values fall, these states could face declining tax revenue at the same time they have to spend more to recover from storms.

“Dollar for dollar, these grant programs are good for the economy. And it’s just good politics,” Keenan said.

Keenan and others said the broad appeal of Alabama’s program lies in its simplicity, as well as years of experimentation showing that upgrading roofs works.

The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, a research group funded by the insurance industry, developed the fortified standard years ago to “break the cycle of damage, rebuild and repeat for homeowners,” said Fred Malik, managing director of the organization’s fortified roof program. Though these roofs look unremarkable, they are built with different techniques and materials that IBHS has tested in its laboratory’s massive wind tunnel and observed during major hurricanes. An analysis in North Carolina found that homeowners with fortified roofs were 35 percent less likely to file a claim after a weather disaster, according to the North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association.

In the nearly 10 years since Alabama’s program began, it has helped more than 8,400 homeowners put fortified roofs on their homes, at a cost of just over $83 million. Most are clustered in the state’s two counties along the Gulf of Mexico. But as word has spread that insurers are required to offer discounts for stronger roofs, tens of thousands of homeowners across the state have paid for the upgrades themselves.

The grant program, launched after two major hurricanes raised insurance rates, is hugely popular, said Travis Taylor, director of risk and resilience for the Alabama Department of Insurance. When new applications open up each quarter, the funding is gone within minutes, he said.

“We equate it very much to getting Taylor Swift tickets — they go that fast,” he said.

Today, about 60,000 homes in Alabama have fortified roofs, accounting for the vast majority of such homes in the United States, Taylor said. Louisiana, which launched a similar grant program in 2023, is the fastest-growing market. About 2,000 homes there have received stronger roofs through the state’s grant program, while 3,000 others were done at the homeowner’s expense.

In Louisiana, home insurance is “unaffordable and continues to remain unaffordable,” said Tim Temple, the state’s commissioner of insurance. Louisiana residents spend about 7 percent of their income on insurance, more than anywhere else in the country, he said. But the situation has gotten worse as the region suffers growing insurance losses from stronger storms, sending the cost of home insurance soaring.

“We can’t do anything about the number of hurricanes that occur, that’s whatever Mother Nature throws at us,” Temple said, “but we can do something about how properties respond.”

Louisiana’s program offers coastal residents $10,000 to install a fortified roof, for which they can receive a range of discounts from insurance carriers. The program’s budget, now about $15 million, comes from the state’s general fund and has to be renewed each year. But Temple said the program has been so successful that he hopes to persuade the state legislature to make it permanent.

The financial imperative is clear. Louisiana’s coast, where sea-level rise is accelerating the destruction of wetlands, is at the heart of the state’s oil and gas industry and supports its rich history as a commercial fishing hub. If workers in these industries can’t afford insurance, or their homes are so badly damaged by a storm that they can’t return, the entire state’s economy will suffer.

“If you keep your roof on and contents dry, then all you need to get back into that building is utilities,” Temple said. The roof program “creates that resiliency.”

While the program is too new to predict its long-term effect on insurance costs, some homeowners in at-risk areas said it has made them more attractive to insurers, allowing them to shop around for a cheaper policy.

Before becoming one of the first homeowners in Louisiana to get a new roof through the grant program, Alicia Craige, a retired sheriff’s deputy living in Slidell, struggled to afford home insurance. Under Louisiana Citizens, the state’s insurer of last resort, her premium ballooned from $1,800 to $3,200 within a year, she said. Other carriers were refusing to write policies in her area.

After she paid $500 for a roof inspection, Craige said, the state grant covered the rest of the cost of installing a fortified roof on her modest home. The upgrade lowered her bills — she was soon able to leave Citizens for a carrier that would insure her for $2,200 a year — and reduced the anxiety of hurricane season.

“The storms are worse every year,” Craige said. “This gives me the sense I did the best I could do to make my house as strong as it could be.”

The promise of these grant programs has begun to attract the interest of Western states, where worsening wildfires have homeowners facing higher insurance premiums and fewer coverage options.

Experts said hardening residents’ homes against wildfire is not as straightforward as installing a stronger roof. Many different parts of a home can be susceptible to fire, and homeowners have to commit themselves to regular yard maintenance. It’s unclear whether insurers will agree to offer similar discounts for fire retrofits.

But with more Americans living in wildfire-prone areas, state leaders see Alabama’s program as a glimmer of hope.

In California, where fires in Los Angeles County destroyed more than 16,000 structures in January, a bill introduced this year would create a pool of funding to help homeowners pay for fire retrofits. Although state law requires insurance companies to give customers discounts for making their homes and yards less flammable, few residents can afford to spend thousands of dollars on a fire-resistant roof, new siding and ember-proof vents.

Dean Cameron, director of the Idaho Department of Insurance, has proposed a similar bill this year in hopes of stabilizing the state’s insurance market. Wildfires in Idaho burned nearly 1 million acres last year and incinerated about 140 structures.

“Previously, I was always able to say to the carriers, ‘We have lots of fires, but we don’t burn structures.’ But this year we did,” Cameron said.

About 90 companies sell home insurance in Idaho, he said. This year, he expects 22 of them to drop homeowner policies in areas most at risk for wildfires.

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