For Filicia Porter, the insurance bills were the final straw. They’d been climbing steeply for her assisted-living business as Florida was battered with ever more-powerful storms, and eventually, the numbers stopped adding up.
So in March, she finally decided to call it quits, shutting the facility near Palm Beach that she opened just two years ago. That came four months after she closed an older location in Port St. Lucie, opened in 2017. Together, they left a dozen residents scrambling to find another place to live.
“Each year you see a rise. Why pay more?” said Porter, who first started The House of Cares to capitalize on the burgeoning demand for elder care as baby boomers flooded into the Sunshine State. But now, as her premiums soared on top of all her other costs, she just couldn’t “continue to deplete” herself.
Porter is just one small example among many in Florida, where two major, generational forces are colliding: The toll of climate change, and the challenge of caring for an aging society. Drawn to the state’s warm weather and low taxes, baby boomers have been piling into the retirement haven for years, leaving it with one of the most elderly populations in the US. That’s turning it into a harbinger for other states as the consequences of rising temperatures ripple through the economy in ways few had envisioned.
With Florida being threatened by more powerful hurricanes, commercial-property insurance costs last year surged at nearly five times the national pace, according to credit rating firm AM Best Co. Inc. That’s slapping what care providers say is effectively a new — if little noticed — tax on an industry already contending with labor shortages, soaring wages and rising supply costs.
The result? More and more nursing homes are closing down each year, while others are missing debt payments. At the same time, the costs for senior care – at all levels from independent living to around-the-clock nursing — are rising, threatening to become unaffordable for a growing number of retirees.
“We are headed into a train wreck,” said Pilar Carvajal, founder and CEO of Innovation Senior Living, a Winter Park-based nursing home chain for 339 individuals. The operator’s insurance costs jumped at least 50% in the past five years. “We need help to solve this societal problem,” she said.