Last November, a vacant lot in Los Angeles County’s Altadena neighborhood was transformed into a “prefab village” for the month with the installation of six prefabricated and modular model housing units. Visitors were able to peruse a selection that ranged from a compact, 185-square-foot mobile unit with robotically printed siding from Gardena, California–based modular homebuilder Azure to a more traditional 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom house from Villa Homes. Organized by cityLAB-UCLA’s housing and urban-design research center, the Altadena Prefab Showcase was an opportunity for Los Angeles wildfire survivors to learn how prefabricated construction might offer an expedited and cost-effective pathway to recovery.

In the wake of last year’s wildfires, the question of rebuilding has spurred discussions about the future of the city’s residents and, in particular, how to construct more resilient housing in a place where the threats of our rapidly changing climate will intensify. CityLAB quickly mobilized to assist. In the weeks following the fire, its team facilitated a series of meetings and workshops to gauge the community’s rebuilding priorities.

“Immediately after the fire, people’s reactions were one: ‘What do I do, and how much is it going to cost?’ because everybody’s underinsured. But then also ‘What does my new neighborhood look like, and how do we stop this from happening again?’” Ryan Conroy, associate director of architecture at cityLAB, told AN.

With community outreach, cityLAB also sought to destigmatize prefabricated construction, which, despite its gains, still battles a reputation for cheap construction made with flimsy materials and standardized, cookie-cutter designs. “It was all about educating folks who have never sort of been on the commissioning or client side of a building project about how this might stabilize their process,” explained Conroy, “without overselling that it will take half the time and half the cost.”

The new models on show are a definite step up. Beyond finished kitchens and bathrooms with modern fixtures, they also feature elements like wildfire-urban interface-compliant siding for enhanced fire resilience.

Choosing prefab also gives Angelenos and Altadenans a more affordable pathway to quickly reoccupy their property while rebuilding continues on their permanent homes: Thanks to a recent change, Los Angeles County now allows stand-alone ADUs on the property without a primary residence.

For many, prefabrication is one of the few affordable avenues for postdisaster reconstruction. The devastation from the wildfires has compounded pressures from Los Angeles’s existing housing crisis as well as rising costs for traditional home construction, which have been exacerbated by tariffs on materials and a scarce labor pool. For Los Angeles wildfire survivors—as well as for other communities across the country picking up the pieces after climate catastrophe—affordability can be its own private disaster.

One year out from the fires, fewer than a dozen houses have been rebuilt across Altadena and the Pacific Palisades. According to a report compiled by Department of Angels, a nonprofit advocacy group for those affected by the Los Angeles wildfires, 70 percent of those who were displaced still have not returned to their homes. And, as survivors continue to wait on insurance checks, 48 percent have reported depleting a significant portion of their savings, while 43 percent have reported taking on debt in their recovery efforts. Community members have also raised alarms about “climate gentrifiers,” or speculators who swoop in to purchase and redevelop ruined lots, pricing out existing residents. Their concerns are not unfounded: Recent reports have found that roughly 40 percent of lots sold in the Altadena and Pacific Palisades neighborhoods were sold to real estate investors. With the current economic conditions, middle- and working-class families who were already at the margins in terms of housing are the most vulnerable.

To combat displacement, organizers have begun exploring community land trust models, forming the Altadena Earthseed Community Land Trust, which is named after the Earthseed community from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower series. Community land trusts have been used as a postdisaster recovery strategy for preserving affordable housing in places like Lahaina, Hawaii, where the Lahaina Community Land Trust was formed following the 2023 wildfires to protect land from investors. In addition to reserving land for affordable housing, the organization constructs affordable housing and provides grants to fill insurance gaps for community members constructing their homes. The community land trust has since purchased nearly 20 properties, which are zoned to provide up to 40 units of affordable housing, in addition to providing financial support to eight families to rebuild their homes on their existing properties. “It’s not simply about building affordable housing, but creating affordable housing—sometimes that means looking at your existing housing stock and finding new avenues for affordability,” said Autumn Ness, executive director of Lahaina Community Trust, who pointed out that much new development on the island is limited by scarce water resources.

“A land trust can mean different things to different people,” said Steve Kirk, president of Rural Neighborhoods, a nonprofit affordable housing developer that manages the Florida Keys Community Land Trust (FKCLT). “But it is essential, postdisaster, because it tells people what you are doing, which is banking land. And creating that land bank for affordable housing is key, otherwise by the time FEMA and congressional appropriations arrive 36 months after, the land will already be gone.”

In 2017, Hurricane Irma swept through the Florida Keys, destroying more than 7 percent of the housing stock. FKCLT was created with the express purpose of building workforce housing in a region already dealing with affordability issues. Prior to the storm, high rents meant much of the affordable housing on the islands consisted of trailer homes and older, nonweatherproofed buildings that were unable to stand up to the storm’s gale-force winds. For FKCLT, a key to solving the affordable housing problem was to create a resilient housing stock that could stand up to future storms. By the summer of 2018, the land trust had finished construction on four single-family cottages on Big Pine Key. Today, the land trust has completed construction on 31 units across two more developments on the same island; one of these, Seahorse Cottages, replaced a former RV park that was destroyed during Hurricane Irma.

“We chose to build modular units because of cost, but I’m not sure if we would choose to do that again,” reflected Kirk. “But design was important to us. We wanted the units to be unique, so we hired an architect to design within the constraints of our modular framework.”

The resulting two-bedroom units, priced at $1,000 per month, are distinctive with their playful colors and large porches, which were implemented to accommodate the indoor/outdoor lifestyle many Keys residents enjoy. Set atop concrete columns, each house is also designed to meet hurricane safety standards, with corrugated metal roofs and impact glass and doors to withstand 180-mile-per-hour winds.

For communities building out their own disaster-recovery contingency plans, Ness recommended creating community land trusts now: “My biggest regret is not having the community land trust ten years ago.” She argued that land trusts are a proactive, generalized strategy for cultivating systems of resiliency against the manifold crises communities are anticipating. “[Lahaina] was not a climate disaster, it was a disaster that resulted from inequitable water distribution on the island. And there’s a second type of incoming disaster: the predicted increase in private-equity ownership of our housing stock. Once they get a hold of that, we’re screwed. And so there’s an urgency—making our communities resilient means that we have to get control of as much land and [as many] units of housing as possible.”

As climate change accelerates, weather and climate disasters are becoming regular occurrences. With the frequency of storms, fire, and flooding on the rise, some are also encouraging the government to incorporate housing into its postdisaster recovery plans to anticipate the strains on demand for affordable housing that natural disasters can create. “The question is, why don’t we build an inventory of these houses that are ready to go in case of disaster?” said Jordan Rogrove, founder and chief operating officer of Liv-Connected, a manufactured-home spin-off of DXA Studio, a New York–based architecture firm.

After the Lahaina wildfires in 2023, Liv-Connected was awarded a contract from FEMA to build 167 homes to house members of the community who had been displaced by the fire’s destruction. The total timeline to build and ship the homes was only four months. Rogrove and his cofounder, Wayne Norbeck, explained that this was only achievable because they already had an established supply chain at the ready. Working with their Colorado-based manufacturer, Fading West, the company was able to commission two factories to meet the deadline. The units were transported to Seattle and then shipped by barge to Hawaii.

The resulting Kilohana development uses a variation of Liv-Connected’s Conexus model. With their pitched roofs and colorfully painted exteriors—which, despite resembling wood, consist of flame-resistant cement—the units are reminiscent of small farmhouses. Consisting of one to three bedrooms, each unit features finished bathrooms and a kitchen too. “We also insisted on adding a porch,” said Rogrove. “It was important to us that people felt that they had this small space where they could be in community with one another.”

Designed to last 30 years, Liv-Connected’s Conexus development at Kilohana signals a necessary shift away from the temporary mindset that previously defined the disaster-recovery housing deployed by FEMA. “Our mission has always been to provide permanent housing, because whether or not that’s the mandate for the program, that’s what ends up happening,” said Norbeck.

As Ness reflected, “Keeping a community intact long term and making sure there is a continuity of [place-based] understanding from generation to generation, that in itself is a form of community resiliency.” Our collective climate future seems full of uncertainty. Still, through proper planning and innovative approaches, designers, developers, and organizers around the country are working toward postdisaster scenarios in which no one gets left behind.