When the Station Fire burned through the Angeles National Forest in 2009, Colleen and Jason Warnesky watched it from their Altadena front porch. Eleven years later they watched the Bobcat Fire from the same spot as it swelled into one of Los Angeles County’s largest blazes. Their house survived both. When the Eaton Fire ignited more than three miles away in January 2025, they assumed they would again. Fifteen months later they stood on a fenced dirt lot where their 1,400-square-foot home once stood, the land cleared of toxins and waiting on drainage permits before a foundation could be poured.
Like dozens of neighbors, the Warneskys chose to rebuild with a manufactured home. A local effort led by city-LAB UCLA, an initiative of UCLA’s Architecture and Urban Design Department, had showcased six prefabricated housing options and produced a practical guide to financing and permitting. That effort helped convince many homeowners that prefab was a faster, safer route back to a livable house.
Climate-driven disasters — wildfires, hurricanes, floods and tornadoes — are changing how people rebuild in high-risk regions. Homeowners seeking greater resilience are increasingly turning to prefabricated homes made from fire-resistant and weather-hardy materials. Modern factory-built units are engineered to endure extreme conditions and frequently cost less than or compete with conventional on-site construction once land and local labor constraints are considered.
Manufacturers are responding with innovations designed for the new normal: prefabs that can withstand category-5 hurricane winds, survive earthquakes, and tolerate hail and heavy snow. Prices vary by materials and customization, commonly ranging from under $100 to more than $500 per square foot, not including land. For many buyers, that pricing is attractive compared with the delays and unpredictability of traditional builds in disaster-hit areas.
In the Warnesky neighborhood families are working with different modular firms — Honomobo, Bevy House and others — each offering distinct approaches. For the Warneskys, the appeal was partly practical: after the exhaustion of loss and insurance battles, decision fatigue set in. Choosing an option from a catalog that arrives largely complete felt like relief. Safety mattered too. They selected a package designed for the wildland-urban interface, where homes meet wild vegetation, and their planned house replaces flammable redwood deck and wood framing with glass, steel and concrete.
Industry data underline prefab’s reach. The Manufactured Housing Institute reports that 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 in 2024. Most new manufactured-home sales occur in states with frequent flooding, hurricanes or wildfires — Texas, Florida and California — and three U.S.-based companies now hold roughly 83% of the market share.
Some builders say conventional on-site construction is ill-suited to today’s climate threats. Harrison Langley, CEO of MDLR Brands, which has built prefabricated housing in places such as the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian, describes modern materials and methods as offering superior resilience. His firm uses composite structural insulated panels with a 30-minute fire rating; layered cement board can extend protection, giving occupants more time to escape. The panels flex more than wood framing, improving earthquake performance, and an exterior fiberglass layer helps resist impact from flying debris — tested by propelling a two-by-four at speed to simulate storm damage.
Acceptance is not all technical. Resistance to prefab is often stylistic: some homeowners fear modular homes will look generic or boxy. That concern led Linda and Liam Mennis, who lost their 1940s home in the Eaton Fire, to work with a company that translates custom architectural designs into modular components. Bevy House adapts personalized plans into modules fabricated off-site and assembled on site. The firm has worked extensively in California post-fire, including a partial rebuild after the 2018 Woolsey Fire where reclaimed beams and custom detailing were used to restore a Spanish revival home.
Bevy’s process starts with a finished design, then uses 3-D renderings to break the plan into modules and move into production. The result can look and feel like a bespoke house while delivering the time and quality benefits of factory building.
Prefab has deep roots. Midcentury designers such as Ray and Charles Eames imagined modular, affordable modern homes; their Case Study House No. 8 remains an icon of that era. The lineage continues: Eames Demetrios has teamed with Spanish furniture brand Kettal on the Eames Pavilion system, an aluminum-framed kit with interchangeable panels that began as single-room studios and is planned to expand into customizable single- and multi-level dwellings by 2027. Priced to keep costs under $500 per square foot, the system is intended to evolve as new materials and technologies emerge.
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 practical route not only to rebuild quickly but to design a home with fewer vulnerabilities — a deliberate trade of familiar aesthetics for durability and peace of mind in an era of growing environmental risk.