When the Station Fire raced through the Angeles National Forest in 2009, Colleen and Jason Warnesky watched it from their Altadena, Calif., front porch. Eleven years later they saw the Bobcat Fire from the same spot as it grew into one of Los Angeles County’s largest blazes. Their house survived both events. So when the Eaton Fire ignited more than three miles away in January 2025, they assumed they’d escape again.
They were wrong. Fifteen months after the Eaton Fire, the couple paced a fenced dirt lot where their 1,400-square-foot home once stood. The land has been cleared of toxins, and they wait for the city to approve drainage permits before a foundation can be poured.
Like dozens of neighbors, the Warneskys decided to rebuild with a manufactured home. A local effort led by city-LAB UCLA, an initiative of UCLA’s Architecture and Urban Design Department, offered a showcase of six prefabricated housing options and a guide to financing and permitting that helped convince many homeowners to consider prefab as a viable path to faster, safer rebuilding.
Climate-driven disasters — wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes and floods — are reshaping how people rebuild in risk-prone regions. Homeowners who want greater resilience are increasingly choosing prefabricated homes made from fire-resistant and weather-hardy materials. Those structures are now built to withstand extreme conditions and are often more affordable than traditional site-built homes.
Manufacturers are responding with innovations: prefabs that can resist category 5 hurricane winds, survive earthquakes, and endure hail and heavy snow. Costs vary with customization and materials, commonly ranging from under $100 to more than $500 per square foot, excluding land — often competitive with conventional construction in many markets.
In the Warnesky neighborhood, different families are working with different modular firms — Honomobo, Bevy House and others — each offering distinct approaches. For the Warneskys, the appeal was partly practical: the exhaustion of recovering from loss and navigating insurance left them with decision fatigue. Picking an option from a catalog that arrives largely complete felt like relief. Safety was another major factor; they selected a package designed for the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where development meets wild vegetation. Their planned home will use glass, steel and concrete rather than the redwood decking of their prior post-WWII house — a feature they suspect contributed to that home’s vulnerability.
Industry numbers show prefab’s reach. The Manufactured Housing Institute reports that as of 2024 nearly 21 million people in the U.S. live in manufactured or mobile homes, and manufactured homes accounted for more than 9% of new home starts that year. Most new manufactured-home sales occur in states that face frequent flooding, hurricanes or wildfires: Texas, Florida and California. The institute also notes that three U.S.-based companies hold roughly 83% of the market share.
Some builders argue traditional on-site construction is outdated for today’s climate risks. Harrison Langley, CEO of MDLR Brands, which has built prefabricated housing in places including the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian, says modern materials and methods offer superior resilience. His firm uses composite structural insulated panels with a 30-minute fire rating; adding cement board can extend that protection, providing occupants more time to escape. The panels are more flexible than wood framing, improving earthquake performance, and an exterior fiberglass layer helps resist hurricane-force impacts — tested by propelling a two-by-four at high speed to simulate debris strikes.
Langley and others point to the growing ubiquity of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) as a “proof of concept”: seeing prefab units on many properties makes the technology familiar and more acceptable to homeowners.
Resistance to prefab is often stylistic rather than technical. Some homeowners worry modular homes will look generic or boxy. That concern is what led Linda and Liam Mennis, who lost their 1940s, 1,600-square-foot home in the Eaton Fire, to work with a firm that translates custom architectural designs into modular components. Bevy House, which brands itself as fixing a broken conventional building process, adapts personalized plans into modules fabricated off-site and assembled on location. Bevy has worked extensively in California, including post-fire rebuilds; after the 2018 Woolsey Fire they completed a partial rebuild of a nearly 8,000-square-foot Spanish revival home using reclaimed beams and custom detailing, one of the first homes to receive occupancy after that fire.
For the Mennises, the process was straightforward: once the design was finalized, Bevy used 3-D renderings to determine how to break the plan into modules and moved into production.
Prefab has a deeper history. In the 1940s and 1950s, designers like Ray and Charles Eames envisioned modular, affordable modern homes assembled from off-the-shelf materials. Their Case Study House No. 8 exemplified a vision of accessible modernist architecture.
That legacy continues. Eames Demetrios, director of the Eames Office, teamed with Spanish furniture brand Kettal to launch the Eames Pavilion system at the Triennale di Milano. The system uses aluminum frames with interchangeable glass, wood and composite panels. Initially offered as a single-room studio or office, the modular kit is planned to expand by 2027 into customizable single- and multi-level dwellings. Priced to keep costs below $500 per square foot, the system aims to allow easier incorporation of new materials and technologies as they emerge. Demetrios predicts that within a few years people will struggle to recognize houses coming from the same modular system — a sign of design variety and maturation in the field.
As climate risks intensify and homeowners prioritize speed, cost and safety, modular and manufactured options are gaining traction. For families like the Warneskys and the Mennises, prefab has become a pathway not only to rebuild but to design for a future with fewer vulnerabilities.