LA Needs To House The Unhoused Fast. Are Plastic Homes An Answer?

When it comes to plastic, architect Charles Wee has heard it all. Awful for the environment. Flammable. Flimsy.

But as Southern California tries to pull itself out of a homelessness crisis, Wee is bullish on plastic being part of the fix.

His company LifeArk is drawing attention for making 8-by-8-foot modules molded from 30% post-consumer recycled plastic that fit together like Legos – if the pieces were made out of a high-density polymer.

LifeArk built a "proof-of-concept" development serving 18 formerly unhoused people in El Monte.

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“Plastic is such a surprising material,” said Wee, who designed skyscrapers in Asia before making the sharp turn to affordable housing. “We’ve just been using it the wrong way.”

In a world where stick-built homes are the convention, houses made of plastic can be a hard sell. The mention of plastic — already ubiquitous in daily life, including in our bodies — may turn off some. But there’s nothing like an emergency to shift views.

The unhoused population in L.A. County has climbed to 69,000, a situation made worse by long waits for permanent housing affordable to people with low incomes.

The common area of LifeArk's El Monte development is intended to build community.

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To quickly move people from encampments to interim housing, cities and non-profits have turned to alternative types of housing like shed-like units made of aluminum or shipping containers stacked like building blocks.

But as concerns about cost and habitability with some of those structures emerge, companies like LifeArk are gaining a foothold in the pre-fabricated housing space.

Proof-of-concept in El Monte

The Duarte-based company has started to land contracts up and down California's Central Coast. Its modules are going to into a new interim housing project in Santa Maria and another one in Paso Robles. Next it plans to build a campus of 80 units of permanent and interim housing in San Luis Obispo for a project led by the homeless services division of San Luis Obispo County.

An overhead view of LifeArk's plastic housing development in El Monte which are the three beige buildings on a narrow lot.

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Closer to home, possible collaborations are being discussed with the offices of L.A. city councilmembers and church leaders who are looking to develop unused land.

As a proof of concept, LifeArk used its own product to develop a narrow lot in El Monte last year, partly with a $1 million innovation grant it won from the county.

Workers stitched together dozens of modules to create three beige-gray, low-lying buildings that blend into a neighborhood that includes an ice cream supplier and faded stucco apartment complex. One of the 19 units is reserved for case managers offering homelessness support services through the Santa Ana-based Illumination Foundation, which is part owner of the El Monte property.

The inside of an individual’s living unit at LifeArk affordable plastic modular homes in El Monte.

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The inside of an individual’s living unit at LifeArk affordable plastic modular homes in El Monte.

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LAist

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“It looks all brand-new, like a modern place,” said Sharon Downing, resident and on-site property manager, surveying her nearly 200-square-foot space that comes with its own bathroom and kitchenette.

Downing had stayed for 17 years in an encampment in the Azusa Canyon. Rocks and sticks she collected during her life in the mountains accent her unit. A carpeted tower for her cat Kiss Kiss stands near a neatly-made bed she's topped with teddy bears. Outside her window is a garden where she tends to raised beds of green onions and lettuce.

"You wouldn't even think that you're living in plastic," Downing said.

LifeArk resident and property manager Sharon Downing tends to blackberries in the garden.

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The price tag

The high cost of land and materials in California makes affordable housing, like all housing, expensive to build. Add to that the drawn-out and costly process of securing funding and government subsidies and meeting environmental and labor regulations.

But LifeArk says it managed to slash the cost of the El Monte development to $3.6 million by completing 90% of the construction at its factory in the Central Valley city of Madera.

LifeArk plastic components are stamped out of a rotational molding machine in a Madera facility.

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Site work was also minimal. There no trenching. And instead of hooking up individual units to utilities, all the rooms in a building access water, power and gas from the same lines.

A recent report prepared for the United Way of Greater L.A. showed LifeArk's $190,000 per-unit cost in El Monte was the lowest out of 28 permanent supportive housing projects studied by the authors.

The median per unit cost was $470,000 — 2.5 times more than what LifeArk spent.

From the Amazon to L.A.

The original plan hadn’t been to house L.A.’s unhoused population.

Wee, who studied architecture at UCLA, said he had grown “jaded” designing high-rises for corporations, which included the much-discussed “invisible skyscraper” in South Korea.

About eight years ago, he decided to accept a long-standing invite to visit his cousin who had left South Korea to be a missionary in the Amazon. Wee was struck by how locals living along the river had to move whenever waters rose.

Foam insulation fills the plastic shell of LifeArk modular unit. The foam not only lowers energy costs but provides the buoyancy that architect Charles Wee wanted in a home that could float.

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“I decided, ‘Let me actually see if I can come up with housing that can float on the water,” Wee said. Hence the name LifeArk.

Around the same time, Paul Cho was trying to find the most affordable way to build homes for Illumination Foundation, the homelessness services provider he had co-founded in Orange County.

A co-worker, who happened to be Wee’s cousin, had told him about the architect's quest to build floatable plastic housing. Cho visited Wee’s studio, then located in South Pasadena, highly skeptical.

“But the more I learned about it, I thought, actually, this concept would have applications for the homeless right here in our backyard,” Cho recalled.

Charles Wee (l.) and Paul Cho (r.) left lucrative careers in architecture and finance, respectively, before entering the world of affordable housing.

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The two men decided to join forces. Cho left his post as chief financial officer at Illumination Foundation to become LifeArk’s CFO but still advises the nonprofit, bringing it onto provide support services at the El Monte property.

The pair, both Korean Americans who emigrated to the U.S. with their families as pre-teens, became a rare executive team of color in a home manufacturing industry dominated by white men.

They found other commonalities. Both are in their early 60's. Both had mid-life crises that led to job changes. When he was in his early 40's, Cho quit being an investment banker for firms like Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. He attended graduate school at the University of California, Irvine to start a new career in human services.

Both are also devout Christians. Wee's fellow church-goers, in fact, manage the El Monte property through a non-profit, and have an ownership stake.

Architect Charles Wee points to a single 8x8 plastic module used to build homes.

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LifeArk's faith-driven mission was apparent to the Rev. Paige Eaves, a leader in the California-Pacific Conference of The United Methodist Church who met Cho at a summit on homelessness convened for religious organizations.

Eaves and her colleagues have been in discussions with LifeArk about developing church-owned land in the region.

"It definitely helps that we have partners with a common heart because there's a common language and it makes it easy for us to understand what motivates us," Eaves said.

Fireballs and earthquakes

Word-of-mouth about the El Monte location has led to regular requests for visits by those active in L.A.’s housing circles.

Cho and Wee recently gave a tour to a group of real estate agents and community leaders, including Jackie Dupont-Walker, who works on affordable housing as a Metro board director and president of Ward Economic Development Corp. in South L.A.

The LifeArk duo answered questions they knew were coming. How fast can you build? Cho said a 3,600-square-foot building with 12 bedrooms took 55 days to assemble.

What about flammability? Wee explained that the company spent five years formulating a polymer with a non-toxic retardant.

“We're able to get what's called a Class A roof, which means I can actually throw a fireball on my roof and it will self-extinguish,” Wee said.

Then there’s the little problem of earthquakes. Wee said the moldability of plastic allowed him to shape modular parts to withstand cracks and heavy loads. Testing showed it could survive a 9.0 magnitude quake, he said. (For reference, the Northridge quake measured 6.7.)

Metro board member and founding president of Ward Economic Development Corporation Jackie Dupont-Walker (l.) toured the LifeArk development in El Monte along with Lori Gay, CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services of Los Angeles County. (r.)

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Those on the tour marveled at the speed with which the development was constructed and how it offered both privacy and common space where residents could play games and share meals.

The visitors also envisioned uses for the modules beyond interim housing, such as senior living centers and backyard houses.

“If we have to tweak it a little bit to be back in South Central L.A., that's what we'll do,” Dupont-Walker said. “This absolutely is visionary."

The use of plastic didn't seem to bother anyone. The group's members pointed out plastic is everywhere in homes — in vinyl siding, patio furniture. Why not entire houses?

The other kids on the block

As cities look to pre-fab structures as homelessness solutions, other companies have already gotten in the door.

The Washington-based company Pallet emerged as a market leader in L.A. during the pandemic. City officials, under legal pressure to create more beds, saw in the stand-alone units a fast way to get people into their own space and avoid the coronavirus.

Since 2021, the city and county have bought hundreds of 64-square-foot Pallet units made of aluminum and composite to build "tiny home villages." The expansion of these communities, however, have come with criticism that the units resemble jail cells and that the city overspends on site work to accommodate housing with a limited life span and questionable resistance to fires.

The same time Pallet shelters were proliferating, shipping containers also entered the spotlight. Interim housing projects unveiled during the pandemic had repurposed containers into modular units at the Hilda L. Solis Care First Village near downtown L.A. and “bridge” housing opened by the city of L.A. in Westlake.

But the pandemic exposed how wildly the cost of shipping containers can fluctuate. Container prices surged alongside the demand for imported goods from people sequestered at home, according to Ross Zelen, who wrote a recent white paper on homeless housing for the Urban Land Institute.

“All of the builders who were thinking about using shipping containers were like, ‘Stick-building is now the better option because it's more expensive to think about this innovative shipping container model,’” Zelen said. “It's like, ‘Okay, well, what comes next?”

Finding new spaces for building

LifeArk may be the new kid in town but it already has influential supporters such as Lewis Horne, a top executive at CBRE, the country’s largest commercial real estate services company.

Horne said as part of CBRE’s commitment to social responsibility, he is trying to help locate properties to site LifeArk units. He said LifeArk stands out because of its ability to mass-produce durable and "dignified" homes that can be configured to fit on odd-shaped parcels, of which there are many in L.A.

“We're not going to solve this problem by putting large communities on large land parcels,” Horne said. “We’re going to be dealing with smaller sites, so the idea is to get better density."

LifeArk’s ability to scale up helped to win over the Nonprofit Finance Fund, which provides loans and other financial services to nonprofits.

Resident Sharon Downing works closely with Rebecca Wee, who runs programming for LifeArk and is also the daughter of founder Charles Wee.

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The fund lent LifeArk $2.1 million to build its El Monte location at a time when traditional banks didn’t want to take the underwriting risk on an untested building technology.

“Why we entered into this was to demonstrate to others that it is a worthwhile investment,” said Kristin Giantris, the fund’s chief of client services. "Not fundable by philanthropy but investable."

Wee, for his part, is still set on his original dream of getting plastic modules to disaster-prone places like the Amazon. But the housing crunch in his backyard is the focus now and he said he is “eternally grateful” that he met Cho, which put them on a challenging but clear path together.

“If you're really looking at solving not only the homeless crisis, but the affordable housing crisis, you got to be able to pump out houses. Literally,” Wee said.