Why do we build homes after 21st century fires like it's the 19th century?

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles, one year since the urban firestorms here.

An emerging question is, can rebuild homes get insurance?

Building and landscaping to keep fire out should help.

We lost our house in Altadena,

but we're finding building in new ways isn't easy. A car must have a strong foundation. Imagine if

replacing your car lost to disaster meant ordering parts from Chevy or AutoZone. And in an automobile,

the foundation is the frame.

Then hiring a contractor to assemble the new car in your driveway.

That's how we build single-family houses in America.

You're back in the 19th century.

You're building one, two-by-four at a time.

University of San Diego architecture professor Daniel Lopez Perez.

Our mission is to accelerate the production of housing, bringing technologies that are revolutionizing much larger buildings down to that individual house scale.

One technology is called cross-laminated timber, or CLT, thick wooden panels,

the size of garage doors that screw together quickly for walls, ceilings, and floors.

Lopez Perez built a small house in San Diego from panels customized at a CLT factory. Polly House was framed up by a crew of three in just two and a half days.

We optimize labor, right, where small general contractors building individual standalone houses

are able to just build more units.

Building more faster is a big deal after a disaster like those fires a year ago. It also addresses

the housing affordability crisis if, as Lopez Perez calculates, with these panels, you could get

maybe five single-family houses enclosed with the same labor and speed as one.

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