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Factory-built homes attract impatient displaced residents
04/10/2006
By Deon Roberts


Michael Brown’s company has been building homes slower lately.

 

It can take up to six months to build a home, roughly twice the time it took before Hurricane Katrina, due largely to demand and difficulty in finding materials and labor, said Brown, general manager of L.A. Homes Inc. of Harvey.

 

Brown’s company is not alone; many homebuilders say it is taking two to three months longer to build a home post-Katrina.

 

Karen Fontana, who has been living in an apartment since her Lakeview home took on 6 feet of water, is not waiting around for busy homebuilders to find time for her.

 

Fontana is considering a faster and typically cheaper option for rebuilding in her old Lakeview neighborhood — a modular home built in a factory and pieced together onsite in about three months.

 

In post-Katrina New Orleans, modular and other factory-built homes are an increasingly viable option for homeowners tired of waiting to rebuild.

Modular home developers Nurhan Gokturk, left, and Troy Von Otnott, CEO of NOLA Homebuilder, stand on the porch of a modular home on Martin Luther King Drive. The house was designed to replicate New Orleans home styles.

 

“The hurricanes have generated a large increase in sales and even more so in interest and people wanting more information in factory-built housing and what options they have,” said Steve Duke, executive director and general counsel of the Louisiana Manufactured Housing Association in Baton Rouge.

 

Mayor C. Ray Nagin recently became a supporter of modular homes. Fed up with the federal government’s trailer parks, Nagin said he wants more permanent housing solutions, such as modular homes.

 

Some traditional homebuilders are worried about the “cookie-cutter” effect they say factory-built housing will have on New Orleans, a city known for its neighborhood charm.

 

“If people want a quick fix, a quick fix is not what we should be doing right now. New Orleans has been built on neighborhoods. I don’t think the general public wants to change that,” said Toni Wendel, president of the Home Builders Association of Greater New Orleans.

 

Historic home replicas

 

Fontana bought her home from NOLA Homebuilder, whose president is Nurhan Gokturk, a 34-year-old Harvard graduate who has sold approximately 25 modular homes in New Orleans the past three years. The homes are located in some of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.

 

Modular homes save time and money. Modular housing officials quote average construction costs of $90 per square foot compared with $120 to $160 for traditional home construction.

Wendel said the figures seem accurate.

Modular homebuilding has its limitations. While NOLA Homebuilder has some custom-designed homes — Fontana designed her home — the company says it cannot tailor homes for all customers. Buyers will have the option of choosing various New Orleans styles, though.

 

“I just don’t think you’re going to have the freedom of design that you’re going to have in a stick-built home. That’s a personal opinion,” Wendel said.

 

‘Topic du jour’

 

Until now, factory-built housing has been a rarity in the New Orleans area, said Jon Luther, HBA executive vice president.

“But post-hurricane, I think a lot of the modular companies throughout the country have obviously been exploring the feasibility of bringing their product to this market place now,” Luther said.

 

Wendel says he doesn’t know how many modular homes are under construction in the metro area.

 

As of roughly three weeks ago, NOLA Homebuilder had built one home since Katrina at 2500 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

 

But there are other people like Fontana looking for quick ways to rebuild.

 

Prior to Katrina, Gokturk ran a modular home company called Hometime LLC in New Orleans.

 

“The Hometime Web site used to get 14,000 hits a month. September it got 68,000. I think now we get about 110,000 hits a month, and the server would continually crash,” Gokturk said.

 

Troy Von Otnott, CEO of NOLA Homebuilder, called modular homes “the topic du jour of coffee house conversations all across the city.”

 

To prepare for a post-Katrina boom, NOLA Homebuilder added roughly 10 employees and partnered with Baronne Street-based homebuilder G&H Construction & Renovation, which will perform onsite labor, Gokturk said.

 

G&H can build at least 500 units a year, Gokturk said, about 10 times what Hometime LLC could do before Katrina, he said

 

Von Otnott estimates 90 percent of NOLA Homebuilder’s customers are from Lakeview or Gentilly. Von Otnott said the company offers a new line of homes ranging from 2,000 to 3,600 square feet selling from $240,000 to $340,000.

 

Fontana, an attorney, said she learned of NOLA Homebuilder through a Lakeview community Web site.

 

Modular homes can be elevated. Fontana’s will be raised 9 feet off the ground.

 

Zimmerer, the FEMA mapper, said generally that the federal flood models take into account public-works improvements. For instance, he said, they will factor in the levee work that the corps is doing now, including armoring of the levees and installing gates at the mouths of major drainage canals.

 

But it's not clear how the historical flooding data, which may not be relevant in every case because of recent improvements, will affect the maps. (The data has other limits as well: Homes in an older neighborhood such as Broadmoor may be more vulnerable to flooding in part because they were built at elevations lower than what federal maps would now require. More modern areas such as Lakewood South presumably have few homes built below required elevations.)

 

“Folks in Lakeview have been talking about all the available options, one of which is modular,” she said.


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