How Mass Timber Could Get LA Rebuilding Faster

After the Eaton fire, a state official told David Brancaccio's family that wildfire rebuilds take an average of 3 to 5 years. Then they watched their new house go from bare foundation to framed shell in two days.
Brancaccio, host of the Marketplace Morning Report, wrote on Friday about his family's Altadena rebuild. A local general contractor and a framing crew of six from San Diego started at breakfast. "By dinner time Wednesday, you could see walls and ceilings bolted into position," he wrote. His conclusion was that Los Angeles builders could frame 10 houses in the time it takes to build one if more of them learned to use cross-laminated timber.

What mass timber actually isMass timber is a newer way to build with engineered wood. Layers of lumber are glued or pressed together into large, strong panels and beams. The best known version is cross-laminated timber (CLT), where each layer runs perpendicular to the one below it. Together these products can replace a lot of traditional stick framing, and in larger buildings some of the steel and concrete too.

Why it's so fastMost of the work happens in a factory. The panels for Brancaccio's house were made by Austria's KLH Massivholz, which says it opened the world's first cross-laminated timber plant in 1999. The panels showed up with the window and door openings already cut, so the job site was mostly assembly. The crew was bolting walls into place, not measuring and cutting every stud.

So why isn't everyone doing it?The builders who know how to work with it exist, but there aren't many of them. Pricing is competitive with conventional framing, but mass timber is still a niche product in the US. Most contractors, lenders and inspectors are more comfortable with the methods they already know, and that familiarity is a big reason it hasn't taken off yet.The opportunityThat gap is the opportunity. LA has thousands of homes to rebuild and a labor market that can't handle it the old way. If more builders get trained on mass timber and more families ask for it, it could go from niche to one of our go-to ways of building in the US. Brancaccio's two-day frame shows what's already possible. The real question is how quickly the rest of the industry catches up.