The challenges of fire-resistant rebuilding

A year after the fires in California, homeowners are worried about whether rebuilt homes can be insurance. Building and landscaping to keep fire out should help. We lost our house in Altadena, but we’re finding building in new ways for fire prevention isn’t easy.

Part of that is because many single-family homes in the United States are still built piece by piece on site, rather than being produced at scale in factories like so much else these days.

“You're back in the 19th century,” University of San Diego architecture professor Daniel López-Pérez said. “You’re building one two-by-four at a time. Our mission is to accelerate the production of housing, bringing technologies that are revolutionizing much larger buildings down to that individual house scale.”