Feel free to speculate why that might be. More responsible people tend to have better scores (and also drive better) and perhaps take better care of their homes, having trees trimmed that might fall on their house in a storm, etc.
Well, I’d speculate that people with worse credit scores don’t buy new houses, they buy older houses. Probably not in the best parts of town. Obviously there are lots and lots of exceptions, as when developers put up low cost housing plots using lesser grade materials, but the concept is the same.
If you have money you probably live in a nicer section of town. There is less crime. There is less vandalism. You probably don’t have a bar a half block away, or public housing one street over, or lead paint in the walls, or inadequate wiring to handle a space heater when your old furnace doesn’t give you enough heat on a really cold day.
Your street probably doesn’t have as many potholes, and you spend more on car maintenance because you had to get a car from Goofy’s Seriously Used Car Emporium. Perhaps your streetlight has been out for four months and the city hasn’t gotten around to replacing it yet.
You don’t have a lot of money because you were raised by a single mom in a house that was redlined by the banks, so she never accrued any assets to speak of, and you didn’t go to college because you couldn’t afford it, and …
Well, you get the idea. I’m sure there is a correlation, I don’t argue that. I also get the argument that everyone should pay according to their risk, I just don’t think it’s that clear cut. For instance, using the “drivers” model, if you are an unsafe driver we nick you with higher premiums. But if you are a really unsafe driver we still give you insurance, even at a loss, and you are put into an assigned risk pool which is unprofitable for insurance companies and even safe drivers pay higher rates because of it but we make them take a piece of it because we recognize that people have to be able to drive in a modern society. (If you are a criminally bad driver we put you in jail, of course, so that’s that.)
A large part of middle class wealth is tied up one way or another with real estate; for a century we gave away land to some people but not others. Then those others were herded into areas by discrimination (overt and otherwise), those properties were redlined making it financially impossible and impractical to upgrade them. We created these areas, inadvertently perhaps, but now we institute financial penalties for people we have trapped in them making it even harder to climb out and acquire the wealth (and characteristics of wealth) we so take for granted.
Yes, I am aware that no matter how much you do some people will live that way, that no financial penalty or advantage will change things for them, and I am at a loss to solve that problem. That said, I don’t think it’s a lot that homeowners be charged reasonably for their own particular risks, and not be dumped into a class with others which may or may not have anything to do with them.
As one poster here so often says “Correlation is not causation.” I would just add that using correlation can perpetuate the root causes that brought the correlation to be, ignoring the actual reasons for causation.