“Does anybody know if it’s possible to get fire insurance in this neighborhood?”

When I looked at buying a house on Birch Bluff in 2007, I asked my State Farm guy the same question. He said as long the house didn’t back up to open brush land, he could write me pretty much a standard homeowners policy. If we buy a house that backs up to open brush land, it would “cost me.” And the was before the October 2007 fires. Didn’t matter anyway because my wife insisted we buy a house close to Mission Bay.