Florida Homeowners Betrayed: How Tallahassee Turned a Public Safety Net Into a Profit Machine
Florida homeowners were promised relief. What they received instead was a system that quietly shifts risk and cost from the public to families while enriching private insurance companies. At the center of this failure is Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the insurer of last resort that has been deliberately weakened through state policy decisions sold as reform.
In the Tampa Bay region alone, approximately 150,000 Citizens policies were forced into the private market in 2025. Citizens is no longer Florida’s largest property insurer, with its market share now below ten percent. According to reporting by Axios, this shift was not driven by homeowner choice or affordability. It was driven by a state sanctioned depopulation program that allows homeowners to be removed from Citizens whenever a private insurer offers coverage priced up to twenty percent higher. That is not consumer protection. That is forced displacement.
This take out program was enacted under Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 and promoted as a way to stabilize Florida’s insurance market. In practice, it handed private insurers hundreds of thousands of fully formed policies with no acquisition cost, no marketing risk, and automatic premium increases built in. Homeowners were given no meaningful choice and were told to accept higher premiums or lose coverage entirely.
No company better illustrates how distorted this system has become than Slide Insurance. Since 2025, Slide has received more than 455,000 policies through the Citizens take out program. Shortly thereafter, the company went public with a valuation of approximately 2.6 billion dollars. According to Slide’s own Securities and Exchange Commission filings, the company paid its husband and wife executive team more than 37 million dollars in combined compensation in a single year. Chief executive officer Bruce Lucas received over 21 million dollars, while his wife, chief operating officer Shannon Lucas, received approximately 16.5 million dollars. Over the most recent reporting period, their combined compensation exceeded 50 million dollars.
That level of executive pay did not come from innovation or competition. It came from public policy that transferred risk away from the state, locked homeowners into higher priced private coverage, and funneled premium dollars upward to corporate executives while Florida families struggled to afford insurance.
Supporters of this program argue that shrinking Citizens strengthens the private market. The facts say otherwise. When private insurers are handed massive policy volume and allowed to raise rates immediately after assumption, there is no incentive to lower prices or improve service. Premiums rise. Coverage shrinks. Homeowners lose leverage. This is not a free market. It is a manipulated one.
Citizens was created to protect Floridians when the private market failed. It was never intended to serve as a policy pipeline that feeds private insurers while homeowners absorb the financial consequences. Yet that is exactly what has happened, and the people paying the price are working families, retirees, and first time homeowners who have no voice in Tallahassee.
As Chief Financial Officer, I will restore balance, transparency, and accountability to Florida’s insurance system. Citizens must return to its role as a true insurer of last resort, not a holding tank for private profit. Homeowners must have real choice, especially when private coverage costs more. Rate increases must be justified through full audits, not rubber stamp approvals. And insurers that benefit from state programs must be held to standards that put policyholders before shareholders.
Florida deserves better than backroom policy deals dressed up as reform. We deserve an insurance system that works for the people who fund it.
