Even Mobile Homes Need Insurance

Mobile home insurance?

It sounds like insurance for white trash.

I've needed owned a home. I'm looking into renters insurance. It can come to your aid if you are a blogger and you get sued for libel (in addition to other protections). One will usually get the best deal on things like renters insurance if you get it through the same company that insures your car, etc.

I got offers on renters insurance through my bank, Bank of America, but it was only for up to $30,000, which is not much help if you get sued for libel.

Well, maybe, but even white trash need home insurance, as this article illustrates:

As fire tore through Oakridge Mobile Home Park in Sylmar on Friday, some of its residents likely knew they would bear the entire burden of rebuilding.

About 500 mobile homes were destroyed in the fire. While it's unclear how many were uninsured, about one-fourth of mobile homes statewide – 82,000 – don't carry insurance, according to a Bee analysis of 2007 census data. Another 200,000 houses don't carry insurance.

"It's hard to determine why someone wouldn't get insurance on their home," said Tully Lehman, a spokesman for the Insurance Information Network of California, a nonprofit education organization. "Maybe they assume a disaster will never happen to them."

It's a problem that plagues Northern California wildfire hot spots, too. In Butte County, site of several large wildfires this year, about 8 percent of homes don't carry insurance.