In courts across New York, homeowners find themselves litigating the most intimate details of their lives — where they sleep, who they live with, how they cook their dinner — all in the name of insurance.
More specifically, in the name of the “residence” or “dwelling” provision in their homeowners' policies, which insurance companies increasingly contend limit the homes eligible for coverage to those homes in which the insured “resides.” In this article, we examine how courts have addressed this almost existential question. We further argue that insurers' unwillingness to settle on a consistent — or even articulable — definition of the term has been a double-edged sword, at once providing for disclaimers over a broad swath of behavior but also planting the seeds of defeat.
Related: The dilemma of residence premises
|'Where you reside' requirement
Your homeowners insurance contains a provision that says something very close to this: Property loss will be covered only for damage to your “dwelling,” defined as “a one family building structure, identified as the insured property on the Policy Declarations, where you reside and which is typically used as a private residence.” Usually the dispute will come down to that “where you reside” requirement.
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