The 900-Pound Gorilla in Your Living Room!

Written by JS Contributor, Don Brown

Why Florida’s insurance crisis isn’t about the storms — it’s about where we built

There’s an old joke about a 900-pound gorilla. Where does he sit? Anywhere he wants.

Florida has a 900-pound gorilla in the room, and for thirty years we’ve been pretending he’s not there. We’ve rearranged the furniture around him. We’ve hung curtains to block the view. We’ve held countless meetings to discuss the smell without ever mentioning its source.

And all the while, the gorilla has been growing.

His name is risk concentration. And if you own a home in Florida — whether you live on the beach or a hundred miles inland — he’s sitting in your living room right now.

The Number Nobody Mentions

Since Hurricane Andrew struck in 1992, Florida has added approximately 6.3 million new residents. That growth has been celebrated, cultivated, and marketed. Retirees seeking warmth, families seeking opportunity, businesses seeking favorable tax treatment — Florida became one of the great migration destinations in American history.

What nobody talked about was where those 6.3 million people settled.

Nearly 4.7 million of them moved directly into harm’s way.

They built homes on barrier islands. They purchased condominiums in storm surge zones. They developed subdivisions in coastal counties where the question isn’t whether a major hurricane will strike, but when. They did this not because they were foolish, but because every signal told them it was safe. Insurance was available. Mortgages were approved. Permits were issued. Real estate agents emphasized the water views.

Nobody mentioned the gorilla.

Today, 8.1 million Floridians — roughly 35 percent of our state’s population — live in zones classified as high-risk for hurricane damage. Those zones contain approximately $3.2 trillion in insured property value. That’s the accumulated wealth of generations, the life savings of millions of families, and the collateral underlying countless mortgages — all concentrated in precisely the places where nature keeps reminding us that permanence is an illusion.

Why This Matters to You

Here’s where it gets personal.

If you live on the coast, you’re sitting on top of the risk. Your insurance premiums reflect only a fraction of the true cost, because the rest has been hidden, shifted, and deferred through state mechanisms most people never think about. When the next major hurricane strikes, the gap between what’s been collected and what’s owed will show up as assessments on your policy — potentially $3,000 to $5,000 or more, arriving exactly when you can least afford it.

If you live inland, you might think you’re safe from all this. You’re not. Florida’s insurance structure makes every policyholder in the state a guarantor of coastal risk. The homeowner in Ocala, whose exposure to hurricane storm surge is nearly zero, pays premiums that help support coverage in Miami-Dade. The small business in Tallahassee subsidizes condominium towers in Broward County. Whether you chose coastal risk or not, you’re already paying for it.

The Three-Legged Beast

The gorilla didn’t appear overnight. He was born from the collision of three forces, each powerful on its own, catastrophic in combination.

The first leg is uncontrolled population growth concentrated on the coasts. If Florida’s 6.3 million new residents since Andrew had distributed themselves proportionally — some coastal, some inland, some urban, some rural — we’d face manageable challenges. Instead, growth concentrated overwhelmingly in the highest-risk counties. Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Hillsborough, Pinellas, Lee, Collier — these counties absorbed the lion’s share of new residents, and these are precisely the counties most exposed to hurricane wind, storm surge, and flood.

The second leg is hurricanes themselves. Florida sits in the crosshairs of the Atlantic hurricane basin. Our peninsula extends into warm waters that fuel tropical cyclones. Our geography offers no natural protection — no mountain ranges to weaken approaching storms, no continental mass to provide buffer. Hurricanes in Florida are not anomalies. They are certainties. The only question is timing.

The third leg is stubborn human behavior — the instinct to seek benefit while avoiding cost, to enjoy paradise without paying for the risk that comes with it. Homeowners wanting the water view without the actuarial bill. Politicians suppressing rates to win elections. Local governments welcoming tax revenue from coastal development without considering the insurance consequences. All of us, collectively, looking the other way.

Any one of these forces would be manageable. Together, they’ve created a crisis that no amount of rate reform, litigation reform, or market restructuring can solve on its own — because the problem isn’t the insurance. The problem is the concentration underneath it.

That’s what my new book (See Note#1 below), The Florida Resilience Doctrine, is about. Not panic. Not doom. But a clear-eyed look at the gorilla, a measurement of how fast he’s growing, and a practical plan for what we can do about it while we still have time.

Because here’s the thing about 900-pound gorillas: ignoring them doesn’t make them go away. It just means they’re bigger when you finally have to deal with them.

Florida’s gorilla has been growing for thirty years. He’s not going to wait much longer.

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NOTE #1: Don D. Brown served four terms in the Florida House of Representatives (2000–2008) and chaired the House Insurance Committee. He currently serves on the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund Advisory Council and The Florida Building Commission. His new book, The Florida Resilience Doctrine, will soon be out on Amazon and is available now at books.by/dondbrown.com. Watch the companion video series on the Florida Resilience Doctrine Channel on YouTube.

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