Hot dry winds from a nearby ocean hurricane swirled across Lahaina, Hawaii, on Aug. 8, 2023, downing power lines that ignited dry grass. The brush fire on the island of Maui would become a wind-lashed inferno destroying much of the history-drenched town where Hawaiian kings and queens once presided, and whalers and missionaries clashed — a place beloved by visitors and residents at the edge of the Pacific.
The fire, which grew at terrifying speed, took the lives of 102 people. It destroyed 2,200 buildings and displaced 8,000 in a town of 13,000. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and local officials moved displaced people to hotel rooms in unharmed resorts, but many remain without adequate shelter.
Last November, five-truck convoys began arriving in town from the port of Kahului across the island, each carrying long boxes shrouded in white fabric. Cranes dropped them into place atop concrete footings on a sloping 34-acre site uphill of devastated blocks along the ocean. The shrouds were removed, revealing modest homes painted in bright hues — the answer to many prayers.
These Lahaina houses, which are modular and assembled in a factory, are the latest attempt by FEMA to address a longtime need to upgrade temporary emergency housing from travel trailers that quickly deteriorate when lived in for months or years.
Disasters are becoming more frequent and more destructive with, at this writing, some 33 large fires raging across the United States, including the Dragon Bravo fire at the Grand Canyon and the Gifford fire in California. Smoke from Canadian wildfires drifts across the Great Lakes and the Northeast. With high costs slowing rebuilding, states and cities have demanded sturdier stock that can serve for years, or even become permanent housing.
Over just seven weeks, 167 houses were set in place in the new development, called Kilohana, and turned over to residents who lost homes in the 2023 disaster. The project addresses some, but not all, of the barriers that have kept the promise of emergency housing that endures from being realized at scale.
“When I first came to this house, I loved it,” said Letitia Iikahahane, whose partner and 2-year-old son also live in the snug one-bedroom. They evacuated the house they shared with her mother just ahead of the flames that consumed it. The older woman now lives elsewhere. “Our main goal was to be back home,” in Lahaina, Iikahahane said, adding that she enjoys sitting on the modest porch. “It’s great to see familiar faces.”
The Lahaina houses, a model known as Conexus, were produced by Liv-Connected, a manufactured housing spinoff of the New York architecture firm DXA Studio, which has been innovating emergency housing with manufacturing techniques. While larger homes can be made by stacking or combining the modules, the Conexus model is just one box, stretched as needed to accommodate one to three bedrooms. They arrived with 12.5-foot-high ceilings, wood-paneled walls, finished bathrooms and kitchens, and small but convivial porches. Though they are framed in wood, the painted exterior cement-containing panels won’t burn. Nor will grounds consisting largely of gravel.
After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, in 2005, households along the Gulf Coast found themselves living in 140,000 cramped, fast-deteriorating, formaldehyde-oozing FEMA trailers for years, even though FEMA’s mandate was to house people for only 18 months.
“Trailers are made for weekend getaways, not for a family to live in full time,” said Jordan Rogove, a co-founder of DXA Studio. “They are not well insulated, they don’t meet local codes.”
States and localities are increasingly saying no to trailers, including Hawaii. Jordan Ruidas, a former dancer and resident of Lahaina, co-founded Lahaina Strong primarily to “advocate for long-term dignified housing.” As a Maui County councilperson, Tamara Paltin, explained, “We don’t want them rusting out and deteriorating in the salt breeze.”
While Kilohana residents can stay in the Lahaina dwellings for up to five years — with most paying no more than 30 percent of their income in rent — Rogove says the houses have a 30-year life span and could be kept in place or relocated. (That remains to be seen. Houses built for the Make It Right initiative after the 2005 Hurricane Katrina flooding in New Orleans proved riddled with defects — though those were not built under FEMA supervision.)
Though dimensions are tight, the tall airy rooms and ample natural light are domestic touches absent in most temporary housing. Details that lift people’s spirits are important, Rogove said in an interview in his New York office, “for people who have suffered this level of trauma.”
The dwellings meet standards for resistance to hurricane winds that are the same as used in Florida, said Eric Schaefer, chief business development officer of Fading West, the company that manufactured the houses in Buena Vista, Colo. In a phone interview, he added that they have roof-mounted solar panels to heat water for sinks and showers, reducing electric bills. Their average manufacturing cost ranged from $165,000 to $227,000 each, according to FEMA, which paid for them.
It is rare for a 25-person architecture firm to get the attention of large federal agencies like FEMA, but Rogove and DXA’s co-founder. Wayne Norbeck, with Allyssa Taylor, director of operations of Liv-Connected, persisted in engaging FEMA over years.
“We hoped to convince them that their paradigm was inhumane and had to change,” Rogove said. “The housing had to be more robust and more thoughtful about the quality of space and how it can heal.”
As refugees bused from Texas overwhelmed New York City beginning in 2022, DXA was asked to help house them. The partners hoped to design temporary buildings but the city opted instead to house 5,000 people in gigantic tents on large open sites. It fell to DXA to make sure the tent providers could meet city requirements for fire resistance, means of escape, and adequate health and sanitation.
That informed their Liv-Connected research. DXA had developed a prototype that combined fully finished modules for kitchens and baths with “flat pack” rooms in which walls and pitched roofs would be made to fold for transport. These would be flipped open on-site and attached to the modules. The parts can be tucked neatly onto a tractor-trailer for a big reduction in transport costs.
In early 2024, FEMA officials seeking alternatives to trailers asked DXA to submit for the Kilohana contract as part of a team that managed the logistics and transportation of the houses.
DXA redesigned its prototype to all-modular. Because families had lost everything, beds and night stands, sofas and kitchen appliances were stowed inside the houses before they shipped.
Once greenlighted, Fading West produced seven to 12 homes a week.
The principals involved in Kilohana see factory-built housing not just as a disaster solution but as a way to ramp up housing supply for those shut out of today’s tight market across the country — which is just about everyone who is not affluent. “We see manufacturing as a way to solve for affordability, speed and quality,” Schaefer said. Conventional homebuilding, he added, “has not seen any innovation in 50 years.”
FEMA is supposed to build only temporary housing, with the Department of Housing and Urban Development tasked with replacing permanent housing after disasters — which often does not break ground until years later. The idea of rapidly building housing that can meet short- and long-term needs typically falls through the cracks, according to an MIT report.
While the modular model ramped up under the Biden administration, the Trump administration has proposed to eliminate FEMA. The agency has been mum about the future of the remaining 231 units allocated to Lahaina. FEMA responded to queries by email, saying that “emergency management is best when led by local and state authorities.”
Gov. Josh Green of Hawaii said in an interview: “The best thing would be a national action trust fund for these needs. There’s no escaping these disasters.” Rogove’s firm has been in talks with officials in Texas and Los Angeles about providing Liv-Connected housing for future disasters there.
The panoply of differing regulations across the country limit the use of factories to build housing, though Rogove is convinced that manufacturing “can achieve 30 percent savings on housing with really modest changes in building and regulating.”
With the state of Colorado supporting modular affordable housing with subsidies, Fading West builds developments accessible to middle-income earners in ski-resort towns where “builders do homes for $5 million,” Schaefer said. The efficiencies of factory building allow the company to serve “the $80,000 to $120,000 household-income range,” he added.
Schaefer testified before Congress in May, saying, “It would be a better investment of government funds to build a $15-million housing factory that can make 500 homes a year rather than spending that $15 million on one apartment building that houses 75 families.”
Having a factory in Hawaii, for example, would vastly shorten the lengthy journey the Kilohana houses made: 1,330-miles by tractor-trailer from Buena Vista to Seattle, where cranes placed the containers on barges, which were towed 2,820 nautical miles to Maui’s Kahului harbor. Fading West is working with the state’s Department of Hawaiian Home Lands to manufacture homes on Oahu.
Many local residents go back for generations in Lahaina, and are intensely loyal to the place, yet rebuilding so far from the mainland is uniquely challenging. Much of the undamaged housing is committed to short-term tourist rentals, though Lahaina Strong successfully lobbied the state legislature “to get 7,000 such apartments restored to the long-term market to house the displaced,” Ruidas said. Unfortunately, a FEMA program that assists such renters may end as early as next February, though a 12-month extension request is pending.
Ruidas wants to focus on housing people, but rebuilding depends on water supply, which is largely in private hands, and so is very limited. Rebuilding the historic core is also hobbled by questions over worsening shoreline erosion. Lahaina Strong, she said, “has been playing whack a mole — whatever comes up.”
James S. Russell writes on architecture and cities. He is writing a book on how city culture influences business success.
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