A Ready-Made Solution : Laguna Turns to Prefab Houses for Affordable Replacements
Sarah Thurston Park is a community like no other. For most of its residents, flower-fringed footpaths provide the only access. Almost no one has a garage.
The Laguna Canyon neighborhood, originally subdivided as campsites in the 1920s, boasts some of the city’s oldest homes. Spared by last October’s firestorm, it is a mix of old world charm, friendly funkiness and palpable deterioration.
And by late summer it will become home to an incongruous new structure: a manufactured house.
In a surprising move for a city bent on preserving its village ambience, Laguna Beach has become first to sign up for a county-run program that helps low- and moderate-income residents get low-interest loans to buy prefabricated houses.
And Donna and Gordon Connolly, who live in a sagging sandwich-shop-turned-cottage with crooked walls and a purple wooden floor, are in line for the first one: a three-bedroom version with a $47,000 price tag.
Donna Connolly, an artist and yoga instructor, who is nicknamed Regumbah, said her goal is to “funk it up” so the prefabricated structure will blend into the community.
Her neighbors are watching. And some of them are also pondering the benefits of ready-to-wear houses.
“Actually, we’ve got quite a lot of interest in the area,” said Connolly, who has lived at Sarah Thurston Park since 1968. “It’s going to have a real impact on the neighborhood.”
County and city officials say the Manufactured Housing Program now being launched by the county will provide a welcome option for qualifying residents, including some who lost homes in the fall blaze that destroyed or damaged more than 400 homes.
In particular, they say, the program could benefit the fire-racked Canyon Acres community next door to Sarah Thurston Park.
“The (fire victims) who have not started rebuilding . . . once they see these homes, there could be a sizable number of people who are interested,” said Ken Baer, community development representative for the county’s Housing and Redevelopment Department.
The county program is designed primarily for owners of empty lots or families with houses too dilapidated to refurbish--the Connollys, for example, whose half-century-old home is draped with tarp and sags slightly in the center because it has no foundation.
As fond as she is of her rickety abode, Donna Connolly said she longs for the day she will be able to bake a level cake. And it will be nice not to fret about mushrooms sprouting inside her house after a heavy rain.
“I’m probably the only person you know who has to edge a bedroom,” she said.
The Manufactured Housing Program is a joint venture with the Orange County Affordable Housing Clearing House, a consortium of 32 banks that provide low-cost loans for affordable housing.
The loan pays for the house and landscaping and the county uses state or federal funds to demolish the old home, temporarily relocate residents and ready the lot for redevelopment, including installation of fencing or preparation of the parcel for utilities, if necessary.
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The program is fueled largely by money generated by bond sales from the 1988 Neighborhood Development and Preservation Program, Baer said.
Cities with more than 50,000 residents can apply to the state or federal government to operate their own program, and some already have, including Orange, Anaheim, Lake Forest and Santa Ana, Baer said.
In Laguna Beach, manufactured houses, like all new homes, must clear that sometimes-formidable hurdle known as the Design Review Board to ensure they are compatible with the neighborhood. But city planner David Ebeling said plans for prefab houses are malleable.
“These things can be made to look however you want them to look,” he said. “Materials can change, window treatments can change.”
The homes are built to withstand up to a 7.0-magnitude earthquake and range from 1,000 to 4,000 square feet, Baer said, with most averaging 1,300 square feet. The majority have three bedrooms and two baths. The average cost is $55,000, he said.
Prefabricated houses are generally built in modules--complete with appliances in place--on an assembly line, then assembled at the site. Most can be erected in a day.
It is still unclear, however, how many Laguna Beach residents will warm to the idea of ready-made homes. Most Canyon Acres residents, for example, say they want their scarred neighborhood re-created in its former image.
But former Sarah Thurston Park resident John Thorne, who now lives in South Pasadena, said he has already made up his mind.
Thorne was forced from Sarah Thurston Park seven years ago when his old house was condemned and demolished. He has long-hoped to retire in his old neighborhood and is eager to plunk a prefab house on his now vacant lot.
“Those manufactured houses, once they put them together, you couldn’t tell if their manufactured houses or not,” Thorne said. “It seems as comfortable as any other house.”
Donna Connolly, whose own prefab home should be ready by September, said she is eager to have Thorne and his wife back as neighbors. Still, she is ambivalent about blazing the trail for manufactured homes.
“They can’t look like real weird, cheap houses,” she said. “They’ve got to have charm to them or it’s going to have a real negative impact on the neighborhood. The neighbors won’t like that. I won’t like that.
“But then I look at the house I’m living in,” she added. “Anything’s got to be better than that.”
One-Day Solution Prefabricated houses differ from the site-built varietyi in that they are produced on an assembly line. They can be erected in single day. Average life expectancy is about 50 years. *The Process The houses come as a finished product, appliances in place. But some assembly is required: Sections joined at roof beams using clamps and bolts. Inside house seams covered with panels or filled. Carpeting laid after fall sections are connected. Roof seams covered with ridge cap, shingled. Plumbing connected with prefabricated fixtures. Home plugged into on-site electrical power. Source: Manufactured Housing Institue; Researched by APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times
