Three months after the Los Angeles-area wildfires added more fuel to California’s growing home insurance crisis, residents of the Golden State say there’s plenty of blame to go around for the rise in policy cancellations and coverage costs, according to a recent survey from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

SIEPR’s latest California Economic Survey — a quarterly measure of Californians’ views on a host of key economic issues that launched earlier this year — finds that residents consider insurance companies and government officials, as opposed to climate change, to be most responsible for problems in the home and property insurance markets. They also say that these two groups, along with the utility companies that oversee power lines, aren’t doing enough to limit wildfire risks.

Although most survey participants are worried about the scarcity and high prices of home and property insurance policies, they are unsure about what policymakers should be doing in response. For example, 56 percent of Californians say they support government subsidies to reduce the cost of insurance for homeowners living in fire-prone areas. Of those favoring subsidies, however, only 41 percent say they would be willing to pay higher taxes or premiums to make those subsidies possible.

“These survey results confirm that there is widespread concern around the ability of California property owners to protect themselves from the potentially devastating economic consequences of more frequent and intense natural disasters,” says Neale Mahoney, the Trione Director at SIEPR and an economics professor in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. “Californians clearly recognize the severity of the insurance crisis and want something done about it.”

“We want to understand the economic consquences of wildfires and how they affect our health, our communities, and our local and state budgets,” Mahoney says.

The California Economic Survey (CES), launched earlier this year, measures residents’ views on timely state and national matters. Conducted by YouGov, the quarterly survey is largely modeled on the University of Michigan’s closely watched monthly measure of consumer confidence nationally. The CES also gauges Californians’ opinions on topics that are especially current in their state.

“California just became the world’s fourth-largest economy,” says Preeti Hehmeyer, the managing director of SIEPR’s California Policy Research Initiative (CAPRI), which publishes the CES. “The state not only leads nationally — but globally — when it comes to policy challenges and solutions.”

Among the other key findings in the March poll of 1,735 Californians, taken two months into Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president:

• Inflation and housing remain — as they were in December — the most important issues facing California residents today.
• Climate change and the environment overtook homelessness as the state’s third most pressing issue, likely reflecting the effects of the Southern California wildfires in January. Homelessness, ranked No. 3 in December’s poll, moved down a notch to become Californians’ fourth biggest concern.
• Golden State residents, like the nation at large, are expressing more negative consumer sentiment — a catchall measure of where people think unemployment, inflation, gas prices, and other key economic indicators are headed. The California consumer sentiment score dropped 15 percent from December 2024, when former president Joe Biden was in office.
• As President Trump made good on campaign promises to levy steep tariffs on U.S. imports, nearly 74 percent of Californians expect the levies to hurt the average American; just over 69 percent said they would feel the hit personally, and close to 58 percent said they would adversely impact their employers.

Results of the next CES will be released in June.