Ranger Ed and I bought our Key West house in August 2008, just weeks before the Sept. 29 subprime banking fiasco tanked the housing market. The house, which was in foreclosure and had been listed at $1.2 million in 2006 at the height of one of Key West’s frenzied real estate bubbles, was little more than a concrete block shell.

But it had good bones, as they say, and it loosely met our “must-have” list: two bedrooms, two baths, off-street parking, a pool and enough outdoor space for the ranger to putter with plants. It is also in the X floodplain, which meant we were likely to stay dry and technically no flood insurance was required. We bought the flood insurance. It was a couple hundred bucks.

As Ranger Ed and I moved multiple times over 40 years we always added flood insurance, even to houses whose plat maps indicated there wasn’t enough water to drown a gnat. Seemed prudent, if a bit excessive for that 1990s’ New Jersey house on a bluff so high we could see the World Trade Center Towers in the distance and the Flemington Raceway in the valley below.

Buying that cheap flood insurance in Key West paid off. Even though my annual flood insurance is four times what it was in 2008, it’s still more than four times less than it would be if I tried to buy it today. Think $1,071 versus $4,773. (Yeah, I know some of you are thinking even $4,773 sounds cheap since you’re paying three times that.)

Our Citizens wind insurance has doubled — give or take a little — since 2008 and now tickles $12,000 a year. It would likely be double that if not for the legislative advocacy of Fair Insurance Rates for Monroe, a small, grassroots nonprofit organization started by Key West neighbors almost 20 years ago. FIRM, using data from Citizens, estimates that its legislative and policy work since 2006 has saved Monroe County residents more than $760 million in the company’s wind premiums.

Insurance costs | The sticker shock of buying a home

Soaring flood, wind and property insurance costs in Florida and especially in the Keys rival monthly mortgage payments. Outsized real estate prices put single-family homes out of reach — unless you’re an all-cash buyer who need not concern oneself with such things as mortgage payments and insurance premiums. (I’m baffled as to why anyone would go without flood and wind insurance. I guess folks who can pay cash for a multimillion-dollar home have a tidy emergency fund lying around.)

The sticker shock for home buyers new to the Key West market ain’t pretty. Just as they’ve come to grips with managing a mortgage on a house whose market value has tripled in the past 10 years and with interest rates in the 6 percent range, along comes the tally for wind, flood and property insurance and property taxes, all of which get a reset — usually higher — when the house sale closes.

There are breaks for homesteading, for mitigating flood and wind risks and for being a senior citizen. There are local and state caps on how much those things can increase. But those don’t kick in for at least a year and they’re unlikely to be offset by the mortgage deduction on your income taxes.

While longtime homeowners complain about ever-increasing costs, buyers new to the market are wondering whether renting is cheaper than buying, which it likely is. Except there’s nothing to rent. The homes that once housed Key West’s families have morphed into vacation rentals and second homes. And that has driven home values into exuberant territory. Great for my retirement fund if I were to sell today, but I couldn’t afford Key West if I were in the market today.

So what’s the point? Roiling underneath the legislative headlines about fixing Florida’s spiraling, unstable and prohibitively expensive costs for flood and wind insurance — and now add in the state’s current grab for local property tax revenue — is a financial debacle that will eventually bring this house of cards crashing down. It won’t be pretty, but maybe that’s the only way Florida, the Keys and Key West can reset our love affair with profligate growth and development.

I leave you with good news. If you bought my house, you’d pay $1,071 instead of $4,773 for flood insurance. That’s because a FEMA flood insurance policy (almost all flood insurance comes from the Federal Emergency Management Administration) is assumable by the buyer. If I were buying a Key West home today, one of my first questions would be “Do you have an existing flood insurance policy?” The answer could save you thousands of dollars a year.