Prefab housing builders seek to show their stuff in L.A. fire recovery

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Set us as preferred Inside a factory alongside Interstate 5 in the San Joaquin Valley, a forklift delivered a stack of precut lumber to two waiting carpenters.Consulting a design on a computer screen, the workers arranged the numbered pieces — from 14 inches to 12 feet long — into a grid on an oversize worktable and attached them with rapid nail gun blasts.Within an hour they had assembled a section of subfloor for a house that is soon to be delivered to East Palm Street in Altadena.In other stations on the factory floor, modules were taking shape for two houses that will replace houses lost in the Palisades fire.Those three fire replacement projects will be followed by dozens more lined up by Plant Prefab, a public benefit corporation that seeks to wed profit with a mission to apply factory efficiency to the region’s housing needs.Plant Prefab founder and Chief Executive Steve Glenn sees the massive fire rebuilding project as a crisis-born window of opportunity for an industry that has long fallen short of expectations that it would revolutionize housing construction with greater efficiency, lower cost and quicker delivery.

“We’ll be busy for years dealing with the fires from last year,” Glenn said.The 97 homes Plant Prefab currently has under contract may be only a tiny fraction of upward of 12,000 destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades fires.But Glenn and other devotees of factory-built housing hope to use the spotlight on recovery to show a still-skeptical public that prefab doesn’t mean second-class.Friends of Prefab, a Pasadena-based volunteer organization formed as a forum for Altadena fire victims, has compiled a photo gallery of prefab offerings from 33 firms.“Since last July we’ve been participating in various efforts to demystify prefab housing for people in Altadena and the Palisades,” co-founder...