The New York Times – Without insurance, it’s impossible to get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home…Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less tax revenue for schools, police and other basic services. As insurers pull back, they can destabilize the communities left behind, making their decisions a predictor of the disruption to come. Now, for the first time, the scale of that pullback is becoming public. Last fall, the Senate Budget Committee demanded the country’s largest insurance companies provide the number of nonrenewals by county and year. The result is a map that tracks the climate crisis in a new way. The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, a trade group, said information about nonrenewals was “unsuitable for providing meaningful information about climate change impacts,” because the data doesn’t show why individual insurers made decisions. The group added that efforts to gather data from insurers “could have an anticompetitive effect on the market.” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and the committee’s chairman, said the new information was crucial. In an interview, he called the new data as good an indicator as any “for predicting the likelihood and timing of a significant, systemic economic crash,” as disruption in the insurance market spreads to property values.  The map of dropped policies shows how the crisis in the American home insurance market has spread beyond well-known problems in Florida and California. The jump in nonrenewals now extends along the Gulf Coast, through Alabama and Mississippi; up the Atlantic seaboard, through the Carolinas, Virginia and into southern New England; inland, to parts of the plains and Intermountain West; and even as far as Hawaii…”