California mountain towns are too risky for insurers, but residents want to stay

BIG BEAR LAKE, Calif. — The snow-blanketed peaks, fishing holes and cool alpine air of the San Bernardino Mountains have beckoned Southern Californians for generations. As far back as the 1880s, travelers braved a 6,000-foot climb in horse-drawn carriages to reach the pine forests that now surround the resort towns of Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear.

High in “the Alps of Southern California,” about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, vacationers would bathe in hot springs, hunt deer, hike to waterfalls and, primarily, escape the troubles of city life. In 1909, The San Bernardino County Sun observed that in the mountains, where the sky is a clear azure and songbirds never quiet, “all is peace and beauty.”

Not so in the 2020s.

The San Bernardino Mountains still draw millions of tourists annually, but the 50,000 full-time residents are increasingly besieged by crises.

This week, locals are returning home after a fast-moving wildfire forced widespread evacuations and scorched 61 square miles of the landscape. Some fleeing residents took refuge in the same hotels where they had stayed last year, when a deadly snowstorm collapsed roofs, blocked exit routes and cut off power for days.

The risk of ever more severe wildfires and blizzards, driven by the effects of climate change, has placed the San Bernardino Mountains at the center of California’s insurance crisis. Underwriters have in recent years abandoned the market, deciding that the disaster risks are simply too great to bear. The region has the highest percentage of homeowners whose only option is the state’s costly insurance plan of last resort, exacerbating what locals say is an affordable housing shortage.

Brian Gomez, 49, worries that the high insurance costs are to blame for the growing number of “For Sale” signs he has noticed in his small community, Running Springs. But Gomez, who moved there with his wife three years ago from “the flatlands” in San Bernardino County, said little could make him leave, not even the flames that come dangerously close. In the latest blaze, one home in Running Springs burned down and four were damaged, and the boulders and pine needles that line the road through town are still stained pink with flame retardant.

Gomez said his four-bedroom house, with a deck where he watches squirrels and bright blue jays flit among the pine trees, still offers a quietude he had long dreamed of. “I was born to be in the mountains,” said Gomez, who works as a construction manager.

Nearly 20 million people live within a two-hour drive of the San Bernardino Mountains, making it Southern California’s answer to Lake Tahoe and a popular weekend getaway for skiing, boating and relaxing in cabins warmed by log fireplaces. Some people who drive up the Rim of the World Scenic Byway to reach the mountains decide not to leave.

In the mid-1980s, Georgia Coalson moved to Big Bear Lake, the only incorporated city in the San Bernardino Mountains. It took her two months to decompress enough from her job working 80 hours a week as a custom decorator in Orange County to even notice where she was: in the middle of a national forest, where A-frame wooden cabins are situated among bighorn sheep, bald eagles and even flying squirrels.

“I looked around, and it was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen,” said Coalson, now 73. “It was truly an enchanted valley.”

That beauty comes with danger, too. The San Bernardino Mountains have been catching fire for thousands of years, but the potential for destruction rises as the population grows. In 2003, an enormous fire killed six people and destroyed nearly 1,000 homes, becoming the most devastating fire ever recorded in the mountain range. In 2020, a Big Bear firefighter died in another fire in the hills.

On Monday morning, a waterfront park with well-maintained walking paths along the shores of Big Bear Lake was deserted but for a fire truck and a few fatigued firefighters. The lake’s typically crystalline water looked dull in the smoky air, and the air itself smelled charred.

Richard Minnich, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who studies fire in the San Bernardino Mountains, said that a century of suppressing even the smallest of blazes had left behind excess vegetation that was primed to burn and could create larger and more destructive fires over time. Warmer weather, one of the effects of climate change, is drying out the land at a faster pace and turning plants into prime tinder.

“People want to live with nature, but they don’t recognize that nature is explosively flammable,” Minnich said.

In 2018, California suffered its deadliest wildfire ever, a wind-whipped blaze that killed 85 people and razed the town of Paradise in the Sierra Nevada foothills in Northern California. Soon after, Randall Putz, a council member from Big Bear Lake, met a Paradise official who warned him that his own mountain town could suffer a similar fate.

“‘I know Big Bear, and I think it’s just a matter of time,’” Putz recalled being told.

In the five years after the Paradise fire, the number of California homeowners enrolled in the state’s last-resort insurance plan has soared from 155,000 to 408,000, according to state data.

The number enrolled in the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements plan, known as the FAIR plan, remains a small percentage of the state’s overall homeowners. But in the San Bernardino Mountains, as many as three-quarters of homeowners rely on the plan because they have no other option, according to state data. Annual premiums for some homes exceed $15,000, local real estate agents say.

“The cost of Big Bear has far exceeded what I could’ve imagined,” said Rick Herrick, 67, a former mayor of Big Bear Lake who has lived there for 30 years.

Private insurers can reject homeowners in regions they determine are too risky for their business model. But those who do business in California are mandated by the state to participate in the FAIR plan, which is privately funded but spreads the risk across all insurers rather than one company. Enrollees pay higher rates and receive less coverage than homeowners do in a competitive market.

Dawn Rowe, who represents mountain residents on the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, said that many people had been forced to go without insurance, pay for the costly FAIR plan or try to sell their homes and move. The board passed a resolution in June asking the state to intervene and help area residents secure affordable insurance for their homes.

“It’s horrible,” she said, adding that it was the top issue she had been hearing about from her constituents.

The latest fires may actually help some homeowners on the insurance front, at least in the short term. A California law prevents insurance companies from canceling policies for a year after a homeowner’s region has been affected by a wildfire, which is likely to protect most of those in the San Bernardino Mountains who still have regular commercial policies.

Those residents are already “bearing the brunt of our insurance crisis,” said the state’s insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara. “This creates much-needed breathing room,” he said, adding that he was pursuing additional regulations to try to improve the state’s insurance market.

Despite the growing risks, the allure of the San Bernardino Mountains continues. Homes are still cheap enough by coastal standards that some Southern Californians move there to become first-time homeowners, often willing to overlook the insurance challenges. Simone Knepper, a local real estate agent, said that she had closed a deal on a house with a FAIR plan policy on Friday, just as fire was raging through the nearby mountains.

Knepper relocated from Los Angeles to Lake Arrowhead with her husband a decade ago, seeking a tranquil place to raise their three young children. She said they now cherish a kind of lifestyle that she hadn’t thought existed in 2024: snow days, boating on the lake, no traffic, knowing your neighbors by name.

“We have not looked back once,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.