In L.A.’s fire zone, factory-built houses are meeting the moment

At 3:20 a.m. on January 8, Steve Gibson and his wife were jolted awake by a phone call: the Eaton fire was approaching their home in Altadena, California, and they had to evacuate.

“We left in about 15 minutes,” Gibson says. “So we only took our passports, our insurance papers, three pairs of underwear, and our little dog, Cantinflas.” They thought that they’d be able to come back within a few hours. But they soon learned that their house—and their entire block—had been destroyed.

They spent the next few weeks moving from short-term rental to short-term rental, and finally moved into an apartment, though they knew that insurance would only cover the cost temporarily. Then they faced the next challenge: what would it take to rebuild their home?

More than 10 months after the L.A. fires, the rebuilding process in the fire zone is painfully slow. In Altadena, where more than 5,000 houses burned in the Eaton fire, only a few hundred are currently being rebuilt. (Only one, an ADU, has been completed as of mid-November.) But some—including Gibson’s—are moving faster than others because homeowners have turned to prefab construction.

Prefab companies like Villa, Cover, and Samara are all working on projects in the fire zone, as well as in the nearby burn areas in Pacific Palisades and Malibu. Some companies that initially focused on making backyard ADUs have expanded into full single-family prefab homes in the area, helping fire survivors rebuild more quickly. And as more homeowners choose prefab after the disaster, the approach could become a more mainstream option for new construction, even outside fire-prone areas.

“Before the fire, I had never thought of a prefab home,” Gibson says. The small house that he and his wife lost, where they’d lived for 24 years, was built in the 1920s. They’d always lived in traditional homes. But when they started to research the timelines for a new traditional build, they were told it would take two or three years. A prefab home, in theory, could take months.

A faster way to build

The couple started working with a company called Cover, which builds components like wall panels in a factory in the nearby city of Gardena, and then assembles the pieces on the building site. After getting permits, building all of the parts for Gibson’s house took roughly a month in the factory; assembling it on the lot is taking a little more than two months. Gibson and his wife hope to move in before the end of the year.

Prefab is “much faster because we move most of the complexity into the factory,” says Alexis Rivas, CEO of Cover. “Our wall panels, floor panels, roof panels are made in the factory with insulation, with waterproofing, with a lot of the mechanical, electrical, plumbing, already fabricated. And then what’s happening on site is primarily assembly work.”

The design process can also happen quickly. While some companies, like Cover, offer more customization, others offer preset designs. And while traditional construction moves in a strict sequence, and a delay from one subcontractor slows down the whole process, factory-built homes run multiple production lines in parallel.

Pouring the foundation and other site work can also happen at the same time. Inside the factory, each step is also more efficient. Instead of having to reach at an awkward angle to install a duct in a ceiling, for example, a work station is set up ergonomically, and the work can happen faster.

Right now, relatively few homes have started construction in the fire zone. But more than 2,300 are at some stage of the permitting process, and next year, building a traditional house will also face the additional challenge of trying to find construction crews.

“If you fast-forward six months, nine months, 12 months down the road, with a lot of construction activity, the labor base of trades and subcontractors is going to be really, really, really stretched,” says Sean Roberts, CEO of Villa, another prefab company working with homeowners in Altadena and Pacific Palisades.

“That’s going to make building traditionally on site really hard, if you can even do it. That will drive cost up. It will drive speeds way slower. It will create a lot of uncertainty. So our approach is do it in the factory. The benefit of that is the amount of labor that we need on site in Altadena basically acts as a force multiplier.”

Villa takes a different approach than Cover, building modules that arrive fully constructed rather than flat panels. “The blinds are on the windows, the appliances are in—it comes pretty much close to done,” Roberts says.

A range of options

There are a wide range of prefab options for homeowners to pick from, both in terms of style and price. Because many homeowners aren’t necessarily familiar with prefab housing, UCLA’s cityLAB, a design research organization, has temporarily installed a showcase of six different homes on an empty lot in Altadena.

“Our sense was that folks are sort of arriving at this conversation with a bias,” says Ryan Conroy, cityLAB’s director of architecture. “Manufactured and prefab homes carry a sort of stigma often that doesn’t track with the quality of the building construction or the diverse architectural styles they come in, and really just the way technology has changed. In one sense, that needs to be seen for itself: folks need to be able to walk through. They need to understand the quality and the livability of some of the homes.”

Many options, like Cover’s, have a modern aesthetic inspired by California’s Eichler and Case Study homes. Others, including some models that Villa designed specifically for Altadena, nod to the traditional 1920s Craftsman homes that were common in the neighborhood. Some are higher end. Villa’s are affordable, with the base cost before site work starting as low as $147,000. “These are simple homes,” says Roberts. “These are not high-end, luxury builds. But they are representative of what the neighborhood was.”

The more affordable options can help homeowners who don’t have enough insurance coverage to rebuild an exact replica of the home they lost. In a couple of cases, prefab home companies are donating some homes to fire victims who couldn’t otherwise afford to rebuild.

Many of the options are more sustainable than what was lost. Cosmic, a startup that uses a mobile “micro factory” to build homes with robots, is building ultra-efficient all-electric homes in the fire zone. Like other new construction in California, everything comes with solar on the roof to help reduce emissions and electric bills. The new builds are also safer in fires. Cover, for example, builds with steel instead of wood.

Some projects are also using prefab to rebuild multifamily buildings. Beacon Housing, for example, recently got a grant from the Altadena Builds Back Foundation and Pasadena Community Foundation to build a small prefab bungalow court with 14 units for low-income residents. The bungalows will be built by Clayton Homes, which makes manufactured housing—what used to be known in the past as a trailer home, though the quality is very different now.

The UCLA team also created a guide that homeowners can use to learn about relative costs and timelines and how prefab construction works, including the fact that it can offer more certainty. “I think what’s as attractive as this sort of expedited format is actually just knowing exactly when it will be done, which doesn’t necessarily track with traditional construction,” Conroy says.

A long road to rebuild—but a turning point for the industry

Even with faster construction timelines, prefab homes still face challenges. Although the local government has tried to streamline the post-fire paperwork process—for example, L.A. County set up a one-stop center for permitting in Altadena—builders told me that they still face bureaucratic delays. On some blocks, depending on how much infrastructure was destroyed in the fire, homeowners might face other delays connecting to utilities. Others may need to do more work to remediate their lot to make it safe to build.

But several prefab projects are underway in Altadena, and it’s likely that many more people will choose that path. “This is a multiyear effort here,” says Roberts. “But doing at least some portion of the rebuild with factory-built homes is going to help get the community back up on its feet a heck of a lot faster than doing everything traditionally and on site.”

As it expands, it could help the industry become more mainstream. “This feels like a catalytic moment for the industry,” says UCLA’s Conroy. “More than anything, it’s a chance to pull prefab into a building scale that actually matches how infill gets built across Southern California. Before the fires, prefab was basically split: either a single ADU box, or big multifamily projects with enough repetition to justify the factory work. Now we’re seeing builders get comfortable using prefab for larger single-family homes and smaller multifamily projects, and that familiarity is what will push prefab beyond the burn area.”

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