PROVINCETOWN — A residence for people living with HIV. A 19th-century colonial with a deck in Wellfleet. An Eastham property upstream of Boat Meadow. A church whose turquoise dome can be seen from Wellfleet Harbor.

These Outer Cape buildings vary in value and purpose, but they have one thing in common: their property insurance bills have spiked. Their owners and managers are among many who report higher premiums, more limited coverage, and fewer insurers willing to cover properties on the Outer Cape.

In Provincetown, the average home insurance premium rose by 30 percent from $3,594 in 2018 to $4,658 in 2022, according to a U.S. Treasury study released in January 2025. Average premiums in the other Outer Cape towns ranged from $3,300 to over $5,000 — rates closer to those in coastal Louisiana or wildfire-prone Los Angeles than in most of New England, according to the data in the study.

Insurers have also dropped Outer Cape homeowners at some of the highest rates in the Northeast, according to the Treasury study, which cited the increased disaster risks of climate change as a major reason. Last week’s blizzard and hurricane-force winds are just the most recent example of the powerful storms the North Atlantic can bring.

According to another study published last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research, property insurance costs across the Cape rose 30 percent from 2020 to 2024. That study did not include zip-code-level data, but it indicates that increases across the county continued from 2022, when the Treasury study ended, through 2024.

“It has just gotten progressively worse,” said Jane Logan, an insurance agent who has worked on the Cape for more than 30 years, referring to what she called a “home insurance crisis” of rising costs and companies exiting the market.

“You can’t get a mortgage unless you have property insurance,” she said. “The average person can’t financially survive having their house destroyed and having no insurance.”

External pressures like higher construction and labor costs on the Outer Cape, as well as rising valuations here, have driven costs upward, said Scott Kerry, an insurance agent in Eastham. He also pointed to steep costs of “reinsurance” — essentially insurance for insurance companies — which reflect the broader spread of climate risks in every insurer’s portfolio.

Some consumer advocates instead focus on the state’s regulation of insurers, which they say is far too friendly to the industry. Paula Aschettino, a retired insurance activist, sometimes debates the matter with Kerry, who has been her agent for 28 years.

“The whole system has the citizens taking the brunt,” she said.

High Costs, Dropped Plans

Doug Franklin, a lawyer in South Wellfleet, built his four-bedroom house in 1990 on a three-quarter-acre Eastwind Circle parcel he bought with his wife, Cynthia, for $69,000. He’s seen his annual premium through Barnstable County Mutual climb steadily over the past two decades, he said.

It soared to $4,189 in 2025, a 52-percent increase in two years. The premium would be even higher had he not increased his deductible to $5,000 on top of a $14,000 wind damage deductible, he said.

The Franklins’ agent at Benson, Young & Downs said alternatives were limited, and the premium was competitive. Although their mortgage is paid up, the family kept their insurance.

Franklin, 76, worries that such costs are helping to drive home ownership here out of younger generations’ reach. “My kids are looking in Maine because they can’t afford to buy anything on the Cape,” he said. “The only way you’re going to get financing is to buy insurance.”

That makes dropped policies a significant issue, and South Wellfleet and Provincetown stand out in the Treasury data. In South Wellfleet, 7.8 percent of home insurance policies were dropped by the insurer in 2022 — the highest rate of any New England zip code that year, and a fivefold increase from 2018.

In Provincetown, the nonrenewal rate rose from 2.5 percent to 3.7 percent over the same period — a figure that excludes policies that were dropped by the homeowner because of high prices.

Aschettino remembers when she was first dropped by an insurance company in 2005 despite never making a claim and having a premium of about $1,800.

“I didn’t know a thing about insurance,” said Aschettino, 78, who had worked as a registered nurse and real estate broker before becoming an activist. “But when I lost my insurance, I was angry — I couldn’t understand how that could happen.”

The more she read about insurance regulation, the angrier she got, she said. So, in 2006, “I went over to Stop & Shop with a clipboard, and I asked permission if I could stand outside and ask people to sign a petition,” she said.

Industry Rules

Her petition asked the state to offer more protections for Cape and Islands households dropped by their insurer, and it launched the Citizens for Homeowners Insurance Reform, which grew to 8,000 members. The group organized Cape Codders to call legislators and testify at insurance rate hearings to secure greater oversight and lower costs.

Chief among Aschettino’s demands was more transparency in how the state reviewed insurers’ requests for rate hikes — a process that usually requires just a filing, not a public hearing. Typically, all that needs to happen for insurers to start charging higher rates is for the state Div. of Insurance not to flag the proposal within 30 days, said Logan, the insurance agent, who joined Aschettino’s group in the 2000s.

Insurers requesting higher rates in coastal areas often cite outside-vendor projections that show the high risks of future hurricanes, Aschettino said. But both she and Logan questioned their math.

“Hurricane modeling is really easy to abuse,” Logan said. Because insurers don’t release their models, even the insurance commission has “no way to verify what they’re doing is legit.”

The lack of oversight means that models are “really easily manipulated to the insurance company’s benefit,” Logan said.

Aschettino said that the Div. of Insurance (DOI) has appeared to accept models even when the projected results seemed implausible. “The Cape certainly could have a rare Category 3 hurricane,” she said. (The last Category 3 hurricane to hit here was in 1938.) “But we’re being modeled where we could even have Category 5 hurricanes.”

In some models submitted to the state’s insurance commission, she said, hurricane risk here is calculated using weather data from New Jersey to Maine. Aschettino wants the state to require models to use only data from storms expected to make landfall in Massachusetts rather than storms farther south.

“When companies model the amount of loss that can happen from an event like a Category 4 or a Category 5 hurricane for New England — they’re huge,” she said. The resulting rates are “rubber stamped — or if it didn’t get stamped at all, in so many days, it automatically goes into effect.”

Florida has a separate commission solely to review hurricane loss projections from insurance companies, and it must certify any model before it is used to set rates.

Aschettino and Logan said that the state should find a similar way to review industry science.

Their view gained momentum in 2016 when the state Senate’s Post Audit and Oversight Committee released a highly critical report about the DOI. The report found that the agency “does not question industry assertions enough” when approving insurer requests to raise rates, citing Aschettino’s and Logan’s testimony.

Yet the legislature did little after that report, Aschettino and Logan said. The DOI restructured the state’s FAIR plan — the “last resort” insurance plan for properties deemed risky by private insurers — in 2024 and paused rate hikes for two years.

Nearly 40 percent of homes on the Cape and Islands were insured through the FAIR plan in 2024, according to a report from the state insurance commissioner — up from 33 percent in 2021.

“The Massachusetts home insurance market remains relatively stable and competitive,” DOI spokesperson Michele Campbell told the Independent in a written statement. She said while “increased climate risks” have caused insurance companies to tighten their balance sheets, “climate risks are not the only reason that insurers non-renew.”

Insurers “regularly review their book of business and might decide that there are some risks that they no longer wish to cover,” she wrote.

Running Out of Options

When the insurer Church Mutual canceled the First Congregational Church’s $18,000 annual policy in November 2024, the Wellfleet church was hard-pressed to find an alternative, according to Pastor John Elsensohn. “Having a historic building from the 1850s, you don’t want to be without insurance, certainly not in the wintertime,” he said.

The church now pays about $30,000 — over a tenth of its operating budget — for an alternative policy with USLI, he said.

Church Mutual didn’t provide any reason for the cancellation, Elsensohn said. The church hadn’t made any recent claims or major alterations to its building.

Kristin Hatch, director of the Provincetown Housing Authority, said that the insurance premium at the Foley House, a 10-bedroom property reserved for low-income people living with HIV, had doubled from about $9,000 five years ago to about $18,000 last year.

In January, Hatch told the housing authority board that the annual operating costs at the Foley House are about $102,000 per year, which makes insurance roughly a sixth of that budget.

Charlie Sidoti, a co-founder of InnSure, a Cambridge nonprofit that works with insurers and communities facing climate risks, said that reinsurance companies rarely factor in highly localized information.

“Those reinsurance companies look at Cape Cod and see where Provincetown is relative to the ocean — I mean, it can be really that simple,” he said. “They’re not even trying to understand the resilience measures that are happening inside communities.”

Sidoti agreed with Logan and Aschettino that “regulators could be much more aggressive on the data — the requirements of being more transparent” about modeling.

In September 2023, the month before Marianne Boswell, 72, bought a 19th-century colonial with a second-floor deck and an out-of-use cottage in downtown Wellfleet, a third-party inspector hired by her insurer, ShoreOne, visited to take interior and exterior pictures.

After the inspection, Boswell’s agent at Benson, Young & Downs relayed an ultimatum from ShoreOne: replace the damaged balusters on the railing within 45 days or “a notice of cancellation could be sent.”

Boswell fixed the railing — but when she started making repairs to the cottage, ShoreOne dumped her anyway, she said. In January 2024, her agent proposed an alternative: coverage through Lloyd’s of London, the world’s largest insurance marketplace composed of different syndicates that underwrite a multitude of policies.

Property owners on the Cape are increasingly resorting to Lloyd’s, which tends to be expensive, Sidoti and Logan said. Boswell’s annual premium is now $7,248.

Lloyd’s is also a “non-admitted” insurer in Massachusetts, meaning it lacks a state license and can’t participate in the normal market. It’s allowed to cover risky properties that licensed insurers have rejected — but those policies aren’t guaranteed by the state insolvency fund, Logan said.

“If the syndicate for Lloyd’s goes bankrupt, you can’t go to the state for help,” she said. Agents sometimes “have no choice” besides Lloyd’s, she said. “We have no companies that want to write around here.”

Boswell said she was never told that her new insurer wasn’t licensed in Massachusetts.

Local insurance broker Fireside Insurance declined to comment for this story. Benson, Young & Downs didn’t respond to multiple interview requests.

Logan, who still insures clients in Truro and Provincetown, spoke to the Independent on the condition that her company not be named. Agencies are “afraid of retribution” from insurance companies that may drop them, she said.