Insurance companies are in the business of making money—not the business of giving out free money to poorly maintained complexes.

Most people will get less out of the deal than what they paid in. The idea is that you'll play smaller sums over time, but they'll take care of you if the big one hits. For home owners the option is to either pay $1000/yr for every year you own the home, or pay ~$250k to rebuild your home should it burn to the ground. Insurance companies make enough off of the majority to pay for the minority of cases which do happen.

tl;dr: Always have insurance if you can't afford to pay for something out of pocket.