Just as authorities declared this week they had finally solved the mystery of who set the fire that devastated Pacific Palisades, Californians got the news that the FAIR Plan—the state’s insurer of last resort—is proposing to raise its home insurance rates by an average of almost 36 percent. The news that Jonathan Rinderknecht, 29, has been arrested and charged with setting a fire that led directly to the cataclysmic conflagration provides some closure. Kenny Cooper, Special Agent in Charge of the ATF Los Angeles Field Division, stated “We know this is [an] incendiary fire and that the subject that we arrested started it.”

But the news about the FAIR Plan brings no such resolution. There is no arsonist to blame—just deepening, widening uncertainty. The private home insurance market in California is not functioning. As insurers exit the state, there is enormous pressure on the FAIR Plan to take up a hugely expanded range of policies. “The math doesn’t work,” FAIR Plan president Victoria Roach said in May.

What’s ahead? Increasingly expensive and unreliable insurance, the routine shifting to homeowners of assessments needed to shore the whole scheme up, and a weakening property market that will reprice in surprising ways.