Homeowners in Michigan have been getting some surprising news lately from their insurance companies their premiums are going down as insurers fight for their business.

Not so for the owners of homes on the coast from Texas as far north as Cape Cod their premiums are going up, if they are lucky enough to keep their policies.

Call it the Katrina effect. As the nation's home insurers prepare for an expected onslaught of powerful hurricanes over the next decade or so, they are trying to woo new customers in the heartland of America, where hurricanes rarely if ever tread, to make up for lost revenue from the tens of thousands of customers they are abandoning on the coasts.

Rates have begun to drop in the Midwest and West, and insurance experts say they expect the trend to spread across most of the interior of the country. Allstate, for example, has cut rates in Michigan by an average of 16.5 percent in the last six months and lowered rates in Montana by 14.8 percent.

But in places like Long Island and Cape Cod as well as the coasts in the Southeast, insurers are doubling prices for some customers and refusing to sell new policies or renew old ones. Recently, State Farm, the largest home insurer, sought an increase averaging 71 percent for home insurance in Florida.

The insurers have been raising prices and cutting back coverage for homes in Florida and the Gulf Coast for years. But now, they have begun to apply the same measures in coastal areas that have not experienced a devastating storm in decades.

"The insurers simply can't bet the entire farm on insuring the coastal areas," said Robert P. Hartwig, the chief economist for the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group in New York. They "are looking to the rest of the country as an opportunity for profitability."

The changes are the most sweeping in the home insurance business in decades. For the first time, the insurers are effectively creating a two-zone system, with homeowners along the coast struggling to get coverage at any price while those inland choose the least expensive among competing offers. The insurers' measures are infuriating consumer advocates, who say the cutbacks and price increases are unnecessary. "They're overreacting," said J. Robert Hunter, the director of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America. The risk suddenly seems greater to the insurers, Mr. Hunter said, partly because they have begun to base their calculations on short-term projections rather than long-range weather patterns.

"They're supposed to bring stability, but that's not happening," Mr. Hunter said. "They're putting short-term profits ahead of people. It's because of hurricanes. But some people haven't had a hurricane for years and they're being dumped. That's not right."

Until recently, it would not have occurred to the insurers to look inland for profits because they were losing money on home insurance everywhere. In fact, home insurance used to be sold as a loss-leader to attract customers for more lucrative auto insurance. But after a surge in fraudulent claims pushed auto insurance into the red, the insurers decided to overhaul the two lines of coverage.

Claims fell in many places, according to Jeff Rieder, the president of the Ward Group, a national insurance consulting company in Cincinnati, as some customers chose policies with higher deductibles to offset the increased prices. Also, he said, some homeowners decided not to file claims for routine damage, worried that their policies might not be renewed.

Now, home insurers are making money everywhere but in hurricane territory. Auto insurance is also doing well. So strong has the home insurance business become that the insurers ended 2004 with a profit, even after $15 billion in hurricane losses. The losses from Hurricane Katrina and other storms in 2005 were almost double, $28 billion, and still, insurance experts say, the business is expected to show a profit. Mr. Hartwig of the Insurance Information Institute said about half the hurricane losses were covered by reinsurance that insurers bought to protect themselves.

Now, the strategy on home insurance is to stanch the coastal losses and stoke the inland profits. From the insurers' perspective, even though tornadoes and hailstorms are common in the Midwest, the damage pales in comparison with that from a major hurricane.

Mr. Rieder said he found in an informal survey that home insurers were reducing rates in a dozen states, including Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and the Dakotas.

Michael Trevino, a spokesman for Allstate, said his company, saw "good opportunities to grow our homeowners' business in the central part of the United States."

Himanshu I. Patel, a senior vice president dealing with home insurance at the Liberty Mutual Insurance Group in Boston, said in an interview, "In Illinois, we want as much business as we can write."

For 25 years, from 1970 to 1995, few big hurricanes hit the United States. During that time the coastal economies boomed with new houses, apartment buildings and office towers. Now, meteorologists say, the country is in the midst of a 20- to 40-year cycle of more and stronger hurricanes that puts all those buildings, and insurance company finances, in jeopardy.

Storm experts are debating whether the increase in hurricane activity is a result of global warming or a shift in warm ocean currents that have historically alternated in the Atlantic Ocean over at least the last century. But they are unanimous that the country is in for a long run of powerful storms.

This season, from June to November, nine hurricanes are expected, five of them major, compared with a historical average of two major hurricanes in a season going back to 1950.

When insurance companies refuse to provide coverage, the states offer bare-bones policies through insurance pools or state-run companies. But in Florida and Louisiana, the state-run companies are on the verge of collapse. In Mississippi, the officials who run the state insurance agency have told regulators they need to raise rates fivefold to remain in operation.

Edward Liddy, the chief executive of Allstate, and Florida officials have been campaigning for a federal program to take the strain off insurers and provide guarantees that home insurance will remain available to everyone.

The insurers are taking the toughest measures in Florida, which has been hit by more hurricanes than any state. On May 12, in addition to requesting a sharp increase in rates, State Farm said it was eliminating hurricane coverage for 39,000 customers near the beaches and getting out of the business of insuring condominium and co-op complexes in the state. At the same time, Allstate said it was cutting back on its exposure in the state by transferring 215,000 customers to two other, smaller companies.

Even before Hurricane Katrina, the insurers had been cutting back on coverage on Cape Cod, the nearby islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket and the rest of the Massachusetts shore. This spring, they began pulling back from Long Island and New York City.

Even though New York rarely gets hurricanes, the upturn in hurricane activity and the recent heavy losses have reminded insurers of a 1938 storm known as the Long Island Express, which leveled stretches of Long Island and went on to hit several New England states.

Mr. Trevino, the Allstate spokesman, said his company believed that the chances of a major hurricane hitting Long Island in the next few years have greatly increased. "We're the largest insurer in the state," he said, "and our exposure to catastrophic loss in New York is higher than we'd like it to be."

As a result, Allstate is refusing to renew 28,000 policies in Long Island, Westchester County and the five boroughs of New York City and is no longer taking on new home insurance customers there.

Beginning in June, said Joe Case, a spokesman for Nationwide, "we are not writing new policies in eastern Long Island or on any property within 2,500 feet of the coast" in the rest of the state. Other companies are pulling back on their coverage in New York, too. Mr. Case said Nationwide was also cutting back on sales of new policies to residents near the coasts in Maryland and Virginia.

The cutbacks are disruptive for customers, and some say the insurers may be hurting themselves. Jeffrey A. Hornstein, an investment banker at Peter J. Solomon, said that when Allstate told him it was not renewing coverage on his home in Sagaponack on Long Island, he called another insurance agent and three days later shifted coverage on the house plus his two cars and his apartment in the city to the American International Group.

"I don't think this was a good business decision for Allstate," he said. "They're going to lose a lot of other business. They didn't lose one policy in my case, they lost four. I'm a mile from the beach. What's the potential for loss out here if the last big hurricane was in 1938? This isn't South Florida."

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