Today, most think of the California FAIR plan as a safeguard against wildfire risk. Few are aware that the state’s insurance provider of last resort was created as a Band-Aid response to a very different L.A. conflagration: the Watts uprising of 1965.

Sixty years later, as climate change triggers a new crisis for insurance markets, firms and policymakers can draw an important lesson from the program’s first decades, when it not only allowed the wounds of injustice to fester, but ultimately stood in the way of transformative change.

By continuing to lean on insurance-based solutions to deep-seated societal problems, California has put itself on a path toward repeating the mistakes of the past.

The proximate spark for the Watts rebellion, which began on Aug. 11, 1965, was the violent arre

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