Or, the insurance didn’t provide coverage for a temporary residence while her home was being rebuilt.
My parents’ home burned down, and the insurance company put them up first in a hotel, then in a “short term” rental home while their place was rebuilt. They had the “platinum” level insurance, which included temporary housing. I don’t know what other levels of insurance would provide, but she could have been in a position of having to pay a mortgage and rent while the place was rebuilt.
If she owned and the insurance company were to rebuild, she’d still need to replace the essential items lost in the fire (work equipment, clothes, a bed, food, pots and pans, soap, etc.), find someplace to live, hook up utilities and internet, etc. It’s a lot of moving parts. If she lost her ID(s) and credit cards in the fire, it would take even longer. If she had no friends in the area where she could crash temporarily… well, even with great insurance, it’s a difficult task. Not to mention all the paperwork for the claim, and even if the insurance company played it level, she may only get paid the amortized value of her loss, which is diddly for most personal belongings.
Or as @ejeffrey mentioned, if it only paid off the mortgage. If that happened, she’d be the proud owner of a burnt hole in the ground, still be responsible for property taxes, subject to fines for the eyesore and public hazard, and still have to figure out how to clothe, shelter, and feed herself.
Thank you for keeping the crosshairs of blame squarely where they belong: on the predatory insurers and cruel, intentionally-gutted support structures that allows this to happen.
NOT on this woman, who should never have ended up in the situation she’s in, regardless of the choices she made.
This case also shows the pointlessness and inefficiency of the capitalist system in sharp relief. Her education must be put on hold and her skills must lie absolutely idle, because the money is not flowing in the correct way to please the great god of the Market. Because the correct little green pieces of paper are not in the right place, society must starve itself of any contribution that this woman could make to it. The path of talent is indeed a dead end if it doesn’t move money around.
Thank you for your post, Pa. I hadn’t really ever read anyone else talking about this from a 1st person perspective once stability and advancement with other life projects becomes the norm.
I was housing insecure for a while with brief (less than a year each) periods of living in car or motels or squatting. Very few nights literally spent out on the beach or streets entirely.
And yet … it still messes with me, too. I have never in 20 years since felt myself to be more than two banana peels away from nowhere to go again, or if I can hold on long enough, a horrid state sponsored geriatric facility where they mistreat me.
This is all very real to me.
(CW) When I feel my body tired and worry I won’t be able to churn out enough work long enough to stave off the inevitable backslide into renting, then renting rooms, then renting rooms sometimes, then …
Just about a week ago I had a flare up. I was actually still feeling disappointed in myself for the crying and carrying on, embarrassing myself in front of my partner and step kid. Thought that compared to others I was just oversensitive and fantastical.
Your post threw me a real lifeline.
The lede is pretty buried here with people debating the nuances of fire insurance, but she has mental health issues. That’s the core of what is making her vulnerable and made her unable to leverage support systems that many of us would have been able to in this situation.
The real story here, as with so many people experiencing homelessness, is that mental health issues have effectively been criminalized in the US. Virtually every system that used to exist to support mental health for the underinsured was dismantled in the 1970s and 1980s, and never replaced with anything. This is the result. Intelligent, productive people like her may well die on the street. In the richest country in the history of the world.
Always up for a chat, you’re not alone. It’s near impossible to properly narrate what happens to a human when they become homeless, it’s isolating beyond most folks comprehension, and having to put it into words, well that can and is opening a wound that is a nasty mess to push back to an operational level that can at the very least get us through a day as other humans do. No experience makes us less, in fact it makes us more, and in that more you can build a stable life.
P.S. showing your humanity in all its frailty is good for your family, it opens doors to conversations that would not otherwise be happening. You’re a human being not a machine, cut yourself some slack, breath, and take care of those that take care of you.
It will get better, it is better, and tomorrow is a new day for all of us.
It is troubling that a person can become homeless overnight, yet it takes a large group of securely employed, well-fed, and sheltered individuals years to conceive of and build adequate housing to mitigate this type of situation.
I clicked on this article/video via a BoingBoing facebook post…
The very next fb post in my feed was a BoingBoing “sponsored” post about Renters Insurance, shilling for a specific Renters Insurance company - in an “article” from Oct-2020.
I recall meeting a particularly eloquent homeless man in SF who told my wife and I how he had ended up homeless after sickness / being forced to live in his car whilst working for a software company.
I think that particular encounter will stay with me until the day I die, not least because he seemed to take great pleasure in telling us a number of things we had no idea about re the history of SF, and specifically how it related to the UN.
This is the crushing truth, and in so very many different ways. From the very bottom to the top, you get more discounts the more money you have. It’s just not fair.
I know people who cancelled their insurance as soon as they paid off their mortgage because, “I didn’t need it anymore,” and then got flooded.
To me it seems shortsighted, but I have never had to make the choice between paying for home insurance and paying for food or other necessities, so I try not to judge too harshly.
Just to be clear here, the woman doesn’t appear to have owned her house, so all this talk about insurance and mortgages are missing the point. I guess it’s sort of interesting to speculate how a home owner might end up homeless, but that does not appear to be the case here.
The headline is misleading and the video is 11 mins so I get that most people probably didn’t watch it and are assuming a lot of facts here. As I said above, in the video she says she has mental health issues. I wish people were talking about how she can’t get help with that in the US, not concocting scenarios where a home owner might not have fire insurance.
