In pricey Western towns, employers truck in workers’ homes from factories
In pricey Western towns, employers truck in workers’ homes from factories
Clark and Danielle Johnson were trying to pack up boxes in the messy living room of their Jackson, Wyoming, duplex. Their two kids — 2 and 4 years old — ran around and got in the way as the couple gathered kitchen stuff like silverware and spices.
“All the random bits and pieces that you don’t know which box to throw them in,” said Clark, “and they’ll be …”
“Lost forever,” Danielle chimed in.
Clark is a biologist for Wyoming Game and Fish, and his family is moving into one of the agency’s new modular employee houses, which were built in a factory. In contrast to mobile homes, modulars are often bigger and more customizable, and once they’re built, they’re permanent. Like Lego structures, entire sections of the house are assembled on foundations.
The Johnsons’ rent will be the same, about $2,500 a month, but the new place could rent for double that in the Jackson market and is three times as big as this one.
“You kind of see everything from where you’re standing,” Clark said, as his 4-year-old daughter, Clara, made sheep noises in the background. “Two bedrooms, bathroom. We’ve got just two little closets, and then a little living room and kitchen.”
The Johnsons might have left Jackson had subsidized housing not been an option. This 10,000-person mountain town has made headlines for rents that are just as high as New York City’s.
So some employers are trying to increase the affordable housing stock. They pay for construction and then rent to employees at below-market rates. They’re building modular homes.
“I mean, it’s the same style of construction as stick build. It just happens to be in a shop,” said Loren Woodin, the chief engineer at Game and Fish.
Woodin said it’s hard to build in Jackson in winter weather, so factory construction speeds up the schedule.
“It’s a temperature-controlled environment and guys running around in shorts in the wintertime building stuff, instead of being all covered up in Carhartts and dealing with snow all the time,” Woodin said.
Prebuilt homes bypass the challenge of trying to find local construction workers, and modulars can cost less. Wyoming Game and Fish saved more than $5 million on seven buildings, according to the architect, Greg Mason.
“Because of bulk construction, the raw materials of lumber and all that stuff, they tend to get a much better deal for all products,” Mason said.
Modular construction makes up less than 7% of new commercial and residential buildings in North America, according to the Modular Building Institute, but that number has steadily been growing. The tiny home revolution increased interest, and the quality has come a long way from your classic ’70s double-wide manufactured home.
“All modular buildings used to have plastic laminate countertops,” Mason said. “Everything comes out now with some really nice marble or stone countertops in a kitchen with very nice appliances.”
The town of Kemmerer, Wyoming, is trucking in about 90 units to house workers for a new nuclear plant. And in Colorado and Michigan, state governments are incentivizing modular home projects with loans and grants.
Still, the cost-benefit doesn’t always pan out for, say, just one single-family home, and there are some stigmas to overcome. When Danielle Johnson learned that their new place would be modular, they weren’t completely sold.
“I was like, ‘Oh-oh, what’s it gonna be like?'” she recalled. “I just was thinking like it was gonna be piecemeal, they’re not very good quality or something.”
But on move-in day, Clark said the new place looks like a typical house.
“If I hadn’t seen them come in on pieces, I wouldn’t really think that they were modulars,” he said.
The kids were busy exploring all the open floor space. There are three bedrooms, a fenced-in backyard, a walk-in pantry, even a laundry room.
“Way, way, way more space than we have been used to being in for the last eight years,” Clark said.
Now that all the furniture and boxes are moved in, next up? Getting the kids to settle into bed and digging out the silverware.
Stories You Might Like
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
