Prefab finds a home in fire-ravaged areas of California
In January, Ann Peden had just finished step two of a ninestep process to clean up the land where her house used to be. “I’m past the hazardous waste part of it,” she said, speaking on the phone from Sonoma, Calif. “I have a guy out there digging through the ashes to see what he can find,” meaning any of her surviving possessions.
Her home in Glen Ellen, a hamlet southeast of Santa Rosa, was one of 6,000 destroyed by the North Bay wildfires that ripped through Northern California in October. It will be months before the soil has tested free of contaminants and the permits are in place for rebuilding.
When Peden, 77, is ready to start over, she will not reproduce the 1964 ranch house she lost, or any other traditional style. Her new home will be contemporary. It will have big windows through which she can look at the mountains and watch for the return of the valley oaks. Its main components will be shipped from a factory and assembled on site. It will be, in short, a prefab.
“Most of the people I know are going with a prefab,” she said of her neighbors in the Trinity Oaks section of Glen Ellen, where about three-quarters of the 60-odd homes were severely damaged. “It just makes sense.”
For decades, utopian designers and populist dreamers have glorified prefabricated housing. The idea to mass-produce a home like an automobile, with much of the process standardized in a factory, promised greater efficiency and lower costs than traditional stick-built architecture.
“It’s a dream that has confounded generations of architects and developers,” said Amanda Dameron, until recently the editor-in-chief of Dwell, a shelter magazine that is one of prefab’s biggest proselytizers.
Less than 3 percent of housing starts in the United States in 2016 were some sort of prefab. On one hand, there is a “resistance to prefab as ugly boxes,” she noted.
Even before the fires, stringent statewide building regulations and a shortage of contractors and construction workers made erecting a home a challenge.