Manufactured Houses

Welcome to Canyon View Estates in Santa Clarita. This gated community features a pool and spa, two tennis courts, a basketball court and a 6,500-square-foot clubhouse. New single-family homes here start at $69,950, and a 1,836-square-foot home with appliances, drapes and floor coverings will set you back just $109,950. By the way, Canyon View Estates is a mobile-home community. Mobile-home parks aren't what they used to be.

NEW YORK -- Stocks are snapping back from Friday's big losses as stronger-than-expected reports on manufacturing and housing ease investors' concerns about how durable the economic recovery will be. Major indexes rose more than 0.5 percent in midday trading Monday, including the Dow Jones industrials, which jumped about 80 points after tumbling 250 points on Friday. Investors also scooped up commodities like oil and gold as they moved out of safe-haven assets like the dollar and Treasurys.

When Ken Steigall sold his modest mobile home in the Los Angeles suburb of Canyon Country, he hoped to clear enough profit to make a down payment on a traditional house. But to his surprise, the $8,000 in sale proceeds wasn't nearly enough for a down payment on a conventional home in the same area. And even if Steigall had more cash, a friend in real estate explained, he probably wouldn't be able to qualify for a loan based on the modest salary he earns as a pool cleaner.

Reports on manufacturing and housing this week will probably show that the U.S. economy in May, although still in a recession, took additional steps toward establishing a recovery this year, economists said. A 1% drop in industrial production last month, based on the median of 68 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey, mainly was due to auto-industry shutdowns that swamped gains elsewhere, analysts said.

In a dusty field on the outskirts of China's capital, Fan Zhi has built the American dream. The two-bedroom cottage comes with a front porch. The rocking chair is not included. By capturing the attention of Americans weary of high heating bills and soaring construction costs, Fan hopes to turn this prefab home into the McBungalow of the home-building world.

Gail Foy wouldn't want to live anyplace that looks like her old vision of a mobile-home park: "a whole bunch of these homes-on-wheels plopped on a great big lot with maybe a tree at the end." But Foy does want to own a house in the city of Santa Clarita, where she works, and she can't afford a conventional house on a private lot there.

Looking to enhance its distribution of factory-built homes, Fleetwood Enterprises Inc. said Wednesday that it will form a joint venture with the country's biggest home builder to establish retail centers nationwide. The Riverside manufacturer and Pulte Corp. of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., agreed to form a new corporation, Expression Homes, to sell manufactured houses and to provide home financing and insurance through a growing number of outlets.

Some people spend a lifetime chasing the American dream, but David Gonzales had his dropped off in Boyle Heights by crane. For Tanzolia Williams, it was brought to Watts on a truck. Gonzales and Williams are getting the first two deliveries of a new vision of home ownership--manufactured houses for inner-city customers--being marketed by an Alhambra firm.

SHORTLY after Craig and Kim Proctor moved into their Monrovia house in 1993, they discovered the original blueprints for their two-story 1926 Tudor. Much to their surprise, they learned they were living in a house built from a kit. Craig turned to the Web and learned that the classy oak floors downstairs, the gleaming Douglas fir floors upstairs, the charming built-ins and the sconces in every room all came as part of a do-it-yourself kit ordered from a Pacific Ready-Cut Homes catalog.

Sarah Thurston Park is a community like no other. For most of its residents, flower-fringed footpaths provide the only access. Almost no one has a garage. The Laguna Canyon neighborhood, originally subdivided as campsites in the 1920s, boasts some of the city's oldest homes. Spared by last October's firestorm, it is a mix of old world charm, friendly funkiness and palpable deterioration. And by late summer it will become home to an incongruous new structure: a manufactured house.

When Buster Keaton gets a build-it-yourself house in the 1920 short "One Week," he winds up spending seven days constructing a pieced-together dwelling with windows askew and a pitched roof that looks tipsy. Prefab has come a long way since then. If you have about 700 square feet and $223,000 to spare, you can order a smart guesthouse or office from L.A. architects Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner. The new Rincon 5 is a clean, rectangular box of a house with a bamboo floor, well-proportioned deck and breezeway.

It's an appealing idea: Order a prefabricated steel building, have it shipped to your home, bolt it together with a few buddies over a weekend -- and save over traditional construction. Many people have purchased a garage, barn or workshop from one of the nation's numerous sellers of such buy-and-build products with this scenario in mind. But, says John Knight, founder of Santa Clarita-based Knight Building Systems, some Southlanders end up disappointed.

Architectural writer and music critic Thomas Small, 49, and wife Joanna Brody, 44, a public relations consultant, had outgrown their two-bedroom town house in Santa Monica. So in 2004, they bought a "decrepit" Culver City cottage to remodel.

ALLISON ARIEFF wrote the book "Prefab" in 2002, chronicling the history of prefabricated houses and mapping the possible future of environmentally responsible modular home design and fabrication. "When I told people what I was doing, they giggled," says Arieff, one of the founders of Dwell and formerly the magazine's editor. "Like, why would anybody write a book on this really mundane ugly architecture?" Since then, the laughable increasingly has become laudable.

IF Jennifer Siegal has her way, new homes won't be constructed anymore. They'll be installed. That's the philosophy behind her recently completed Venice SwellHouse, a 3,130-square-foot, two-story residence assembled out of prefabricated structural insulated panels, or SIPs. The panels forming the walls, floors and ceilings were trucked in pre-cut, cored for wiring or plumbing, and numbered -- ready to be snapped together and attached to the steel frame.

A massive tractor-trailer whined in first gear Friday as it pulled a 48-ton house off a barge and onto a remote Santa Catalina Island pier, nearly completing a herculean effort by movers who improvised to overcome tidal flows, equipment failures and other unexpected obstacles.

Like many Orange County developers, John A. Jones has visions of wooded hillsides covered in ranch-style homes. The difference is that Jones' vision doesn't stop at Temecula or Rancho Santa Margarita or any of the Southland's new edge cities. The hillsides he sees are near the Chinese free enterprise zone of Shenzhen, China--just north of the Hong Kong border. And Jones isn't a builder, he's an exporter. His company, Largo Vista Group Ltd.

Architectural writer and music critic Thomas Small, 49, and wife Joanna Brody, 44, a public relations consultant, had outgrown their two-bedroom town house in Santa Monica. So in 2004, they bought a "decrepit" Culver City cottage to remodel.

In a dusty field on the outskirts of China's capital, Fan Zhi has built the American dream. The two-bedroom cottage comes with a front porch. The rocking chair is not included. By capturing the attention of Americans weary of high heating bills and soaring construction costs, Fan hopes to turn this prefab home into the McBungalow of the home-building world.

U.S. employers added more workers than expected in November, the Labor Department reported Friday, as strong hiring in finance, healthcare and other service industries raised expectations that the economy would avoid recession. Recruiting by financial services firms contributed heavily to a net gain of 132,000 U.S. jobs last month, offsetting weakness in construction and manufacturing. For example, Edward Jones, a St.