There is anger and finger-pointing in the homeowners insurance market these days. Many homeowners complain that premiums have become unaffordable. Insurers in more and more parts of the country say they can’t make a profit.

This won’t end well. Homeowners and insurers are both victims of something bigger, and that’s (mostly) climate change. “They are sitting in the same ecosystem — the challenges faced by one side are also faced by the other side,” Andy Neal, the senior managing director who leads public-private partnerships at Aon, an insurance broker and risk adviser, told me.

If you step back from the details, the picture is clear. The only way to keep the private homeowners insurance market from falling apart is to make it so rates can be affordable to homeowners and simultaneously profitable to insurers.

And the only way to make that happen is to change the physical reality. In the long run, by stopping the warming of the planet. (Essential, but incredibly difficult.) In the short to medium run, by coming to terms with the reality of more damaging floods, windstorms, fires, mudslides and so on. That mainly means either hardening homes against perils or moving out of their way.

A 5-year-old child could tell you that a sand castle can’t survive a rising tide, but people keep building mansions in the dunes. They also keep putting houses in fire-prone parts of California and erecting skyscrapers in Miami, which is just a few feet above sea level. When disaster strikes, they rebuild in the same danger zones because they’re just so pretty — and maybe because the insurance is subsidized.

My heart goes out to people who have lived in a place a long time, have put down roots and are facing unaffordable increases in their homeowners insurance costs. They feel cheated. That came through in a great package of articles last week in The Times. The lead of the main story was a guy in New Mexico who took every precaution to guard his house against fire — a steel roof, stucco walls, a gravel yard, trimmed trees — and still got dumped by his insurance company for living in “a brush fire or wildfire area.”