Moira Birss
All Contributions
National Disaster Insurance for All: Single-Payer Disaster Insurance and Community Resilience Investments for Safer and More Affordable Housing
A federal National Housing Resilience Agency can provide adequate, affordable, and available national disaster insurance for homes, and carry out proactive adaptation and risk mitigation so homes are safer to begin with.
Insurance: The Hidden Market Force Threatening Affordable Housing
Increasing insurance costs are making an already painful housing affordability crisis even worse. Interventions are needed to put the public sector in the driver’s seat.
Protection or Profit? Transformative Solutions to the Home Insurance Crisis
Across the country, the chaotic and financially ruinous aftermath of climate disasters demonstrates that reliance on traditional home insurance models is unsustainable and perpetuates inequalities. Only …
Insurers of Last Resort: Why Today’s FAIR Plans Need a Redesign to Address the Home Insurance Crisis
As extreme weather escalates, insurance prices balloon, and insurance companies refuse to renew existing policies or write new ones, insurers of last resort increasingly provide the …
Green Industrial Policy Needs a New Financial Architecture
One of the biggest obstacles for enacting green industrial policy (GIP), particularly for fiscally constrained countries in the Global South, is financing it. This is especially …
Penalized: The Hidden Cost of Credit Score in Homeowners Insurance Premiums
New research from Consumer Federation of America and Climate and Community Institute shows that a typical homeowner with a low credit score will pay nearly $2,000 …
Shared Fates: Rising Insurance Costs in Louisiana
To understand how the home insurance crisis is affecting households across the state, we compared price quotes for a hypothetical private insurance policy that we standardized …
Shared Fates
Every year, more people across the United States experience climate disasters, forcing them to leave their homes, lose their belongings, and be separated from jobs and …
How Do We Fix Public Insurance Programs?
Hurricane season has begun in the U.S. – and is predicted to be “extraordinary.” Wildfire season has started and thousands of acres have already burned. These …
Disaster Response and Recovery Systems are Failing Black and Brown Communities in Texas
Andrew Barley is co-director of rebuild and voter engagement at West Street Recovery, a horizontally–structured and worker–directed disaster recovery nonprofıt based in Northeast Houston, Texas. Barley …
Who’s left out of the Florida insurance crisis conversation
MacKenzie Marcelin is a Florida resident and the climate justice director with Florida Rising, a grassroots organization that works with Black and brown low-income communities across …
How the insurance crisis threatens affordable housing development
Brendan Mitchell and Seana O’Shaugnessy both help run non-profits focused on affordable housing preservation, development and management, though they do so from opposite sides of the …