How prefab homes can speed up rebuilding after LA's fires

My family's worst day of last year was seeing that our house in Altadena, California, was one of the thousands destroyed by one of the wind-driven firestorms of 2025. Our second worst was the day a state official told us that it takes an average of three to five years to rebuild after a wildfire. Yet after a surge of hoisting and hammering at our property as summer turns to fall, I am increasingly confident that we are going to beat that grim timetable.

If you had visited our property at breakfast time on a recent Monday, you would have seen the tidy lines of a new foundation but no house. By dinner time Wednesday, you could see walls and ceilings bolted into position, with our one-story, small house now fully framed. How did a local general contractor and a framing crew of six visiting from San Diego erect the shell of a house in two days flat? The answer is about understanding that prefab does not mean cookie-cutter.

To rebuild after a fire with a material other than the standard kindling, we chose thick, prefabricated panels made of a material called cross-laminated timber. These are chunky, sustainably-grown wood panels so thick they resist intense flames. Setting one of these alight is like trying to burn a tree stump. Tests show it scorches, but it does not catch fire. A firm called KLH, with experience making panels the size of garage doors for single-family homes, shaped the material in a distant sawmill and cut out holes for our windows and doors.

There is a prefab strategy here, but ours will not be a standardized house. It will be a small, custom house reflecting some of the idiosyncratic lines that gave our old house such personality. For the rebuild, Mary Brancaccio and I are going for the three Bs: bulwark (against what extreme weather driven by climate change throws at us); biophilic (materials rooted in nature); and beautiful (because we have to live in it). For us, mass timber, of which CLT is a subset, fits the bill.

And there are two more B-words here that might soon change the economics of rebuilding after disaster: blistering briskness. If more local building contractors learn how to use cross-laminated timber, they could frame up 10 houses in the time it takes to build one. That would be a powerful way to cut down on that wretched three-to-five-year average for rebuilding. Building with CLT at that scale would require more sawmills around the country to prefab the wood panels to the individual specifications of homeowners.

Now, to be clear: Our walls and ceilings are up, but we can't move in tomorrow. Over those ceilings, we need a roof. We need insulation, windows, doors, plumbing, power, and AC. But if the stars align, it is just possible that we might get to spend our first night in our rebuilt house soon after the two-year anniversary of that disaster.