Avishay Artsy

Housing in L.A. is officially the most unaffordable in the country, according to a new study from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. It's no wonder current and prospective residents are on the hunt for something more practical.  The idea of prefabricated housing—in which homes are built in a factory, shipped and quickly erected on-site—has been around for a century. But the high cost of homes in Los Angeles has led to a local resurgence of interest in prefab. Lots of inventors and architects have tinkered with the concept, from Thomas Edison and R. Buckminster Fuller to Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Factory-produced houses range from low-cost mobile homes to high-end modernist masterpieces, priced according to the structure's size, location and complexity of design.  The benefits are numerous: precision manufacturing, faster turnaround times for both construction and installation, and a 10 to 15 percent cost reduction over building a home from scratch. Prefab typically uses steel, which stands up better to earthquakes than wood or brick do and produces less construction waste. "Los Angeles is like the petri dish for experimentation," says Jennifer Siegal, founder and principal of prefab company Office of Mobile Design. "The city is less dense than older East Coast cities, and our 72 °F -and-sunny climate allows for lots of indoor-outdoor design possibilities." Photograph: Courtesy Dominique Vorillon   Photograph: Courtesy Dominique Vorillon   Siegal added thr