Risky grounds: Insurance in mobile home parks at the fault lines of the climate and housing crisis in California

The Los Angeles fires of 2024 were not only materially devastating for residents who lost their homes, but also exposed a larger, less spectacular problem: the mounting home insurance crisis in California. Premiums are expected to rise an average of 20% this year, while private insurers dropped coverage for 2.8 million home insurance customers between 2020 and 2022 alone. This suggests that insurance has and will continue to be not only one of the main mechanisms for governing climate risk, but also where the contradictions in this governance will first manifest.

This research focuses on insurance in mobile home parks (MHPs) as an extreme case to explore the overlap of the climate and home affordability crisis in California. Mobile home parks are critical because they provide affordable housing in a market where affordability is otherwise scarce. While only 18% of all California housing units are affordable to very low-income households, 47% of mobile home units are affordable. However, MHP residents are doubly burdened: They are vulnerable to both climate risks and financial exploitation. Historically zoned to less desirable industrial and flood-prone areas, MHPs are disproportionately exposed to hazards, while the ownership structure — in which residents own homes but not the land — exposes them to displacement pressures. The fact that mobile homes are almost never “mobile” undercuts the foundational assumption of insurance as a flexible market-based risk response, and sheds light on how California’s most marginalized communities face risk in the face of different, often compounding, types of immobility.

Although insurance challenges in MHPs have been noted in policy documents, they remain under-explored academically. Given that MHPs have been among the worst-affected housing types during California’s recent wildfires and floods, understanding this intersection is urgent. MHPs highlight how insurance struggles to manage immobility — of land, housing, and economic vulnerability — in an era of accelerating environmental risks. Ultimately, MHPs provide us a unique theoretical entry point on how insurance handles the (im)mobility of land and housing, shedding light on the intersection between economic and climate vulnerability.

The study employs an exploratory mixed-methods approach focused on Bakersfield, which has one of the state’s highest concentration of MHPs. In September of 2025, Ph.D. candidate Isabel Peñaranda spent a week in Bakersfield interviewing MHPs residents to document their lived experiences of insurance access, risk perception, and housing precarity. Next steps involve incorporating geospatial data from Zach Lamb and Zoé Hamstead’s existing research on MHP hazards to build a narrative on how housing precarity and climate change interact.