When David Martinez saw his home burn down, he and his family—his wife, Lauren, and their twin daughters—had lived in Altadena, California, in their light-filled, ranch-style bungalow, for eight years. “It was the first home we bought after we got married,” Lauren, who works for a streaming company, told me. “It was the house the girls grew up in.” She showed me a framed watercolor, painted by a friend: the house’s nineteen-forties façade was white stucco and black trim, set against a backdrop of palm trees and the San Gabriel Mountains. “Altadena is weird, it’s quiet, there’s nature everywhere,” she said, when I asked why they had chosen to raise a family there. “It’s full of artists and artisans and different types of people. It was a really special place.”
On the evening of January 7, 2025, Lauren was at a work dinner in Hollywood, eight months pregnant with her third child. “A producer was showing me his Ring camera in the Palisades, saying that his neighbor’s house was on fire, and I thought to myself, Wow, I can’t imagine what I’d do if that was my house,” she recalled, with a laugh. When she got into an Uber later that night, she realized that she had dozens of missed calls and messages. There was another fire, this one in her neighborhood, and David and the girls had evacuated. “I just never went home,” Lauren said. “I told the Uber driver I needed to change my destination and then I threw up in the car.”
The next day, David drove back to Altadena while Lauren took the girls to Target to buy toothbrushes and underwear. “He walked our street, and all the other homes were burned,” she said. “As he arrived at our house, it had just caught fire, and there was nothing he could do.” Of her life’s belongings, all Lauren was left with was her pajama bottoms—in the scramble to get out, David hadn’t grabbed the top half of the set, let alone anything else—and the clothes she had worn to dinner.
At first, the Martinez family planned to rebuild. They hired an architect, who drew up plans. But, like the majority of their neighbors, they quickly realized that they were underinsured. Home-insurance companies had estimated a typical rebuild to cost around four hundred dollars per square foot; in Los Angeles, after the fires, contractors have been quoting prices that are closer to seven hundred dollars per square foot. “The average, I would say, is around seventy cents on the dollar,” Lauren said. “Which means you get seventy per cent of the house you had.” In the immediate aftermath of the Eaton Fire, which had ignited in the San Gabriel Mountains before consuming much of Altadena, the Martinez family hoped that they could “build back better,” as L.A.’s mayor, Karen Bass, had promised. In reality, David told me, it looked as though they were going to end up with “a soulless, very generic box that was smaller and more modern than what we had before.”
Then, in May, 2025, Lauren met a man named Evan Chambers at the Pasadena Convention Center, which was hosting a listening session on the county’s failures during the evacuation process. Chambers, a fourth-generation Altadenan, had also lost his home in the fire, but he mentioned that he wasn’t rebuilding: instead, he had found a historic house that was set to be demolished, bought it for a dollar, and planned to move it to his lot. “I was, like, that’s not real,” Lauren said. “Then I was, like, tell me more!”
The Historic House Relocation Project was officially launched in July, 2025, with the goal of getting Altadenans back into homes more quickly, and more cheaply, than by building from scratch. The project’s institutional home is Omgivning, a small architectural firm specializing in adaptive reuse, and the basic idea—that unwanted houses across the city could be moved en masse—is so simple that it occurred to several people at once. One of them was Morgan Sykes Jaybush, Omgivning’s creative director, who told me that, as soon as he and his colleagues grasped the scale of the destruction in Altadena—half of the area’s structures, including more than six thousand homes, had burned—they began discussing ways they could help the neighborhood rebuild. Jaybush also serves on the board of the Santa Monica Conservancy, where he reviews demolition permits, and he was struck, during the board’s first post-fire meeting, by the unusually long list of homes set to be razed.
“I left that meeting thinking, What the heck are we doing?” Jaybush said. “All these houses just burned, and now we’re tearing down these perfectly cute homes. It doesn’t make sense.” The next day, his rebuild group met, and one of the architects brought up prefabricated housing as an option to speed things along. “It just hit me like a lightning bolt,” Jaybush said. “House moving is recycled prefab.” At Omgivning, he had worked on the renovation of a Craftsman house that had been moved from Koreatown to Silver Lake in the nineteen-twenties, so he knew the concept was feasible, or at least had been. Jaybush started to call anyone he could think of who might know how to move a house. “I was just trying to pick everyone’s brains—do people still do this?” he said.
Around the same time, the idea of moving a house suggested itself to Caitlin Chambers, Evan’s wife. Their home had been a lovingly restored 1921 bungalow. “It was already on our radar,” Caitlin told me. “Evan’s dad”—a stonemason—“helped move a house to Porter and East Altadena Drive back in the eighties.” After the fire, Caitlin had been lying in bed one afternoon, scrolling through Instagram, when she saw a post about three historic Craftsman homes on Taft Avenue, which were set to be demolished for an affordable-apartment complex. Without thinking, she replied, “I would love to move these homes to our lot in Altadena.” This comment—made from a horizontal position, half jokingly—was seen by a couple of friends, one of whom connected Caitlin to Jaybush, and the other to a former banker named Brad Chambers (no relation), who’d previously moved a handful of Victorian houses to plots he’d acquired in the Garvanza neighborhood of Los Angeles.
House moving was once routine in America. When the Scottish engineer David Stevenson published an account of his travels in the country, “Sketch of the Civil Engineering of North America,” in 1838, he devoted an entire chapter to the phenomenon. “In consequence of the great value of labour, the Americans adopt, with a view to economy, many mechanical expedients, which, in the eyes of British engineers, seem very extraordinary,” he wrote. “Perhaps the most curious of these, is the operation of moving houses.” Stevenson recounted the journey of a four-story brick house in New York City as it was pushed, in the course of seven hours, nearly fifteen feet back to make way for a newly widened street, supplying the reader with detailed diagrams and an astonished note that the building’s occupants hadn’t taken down their pictures and mirrors beforehand.
But it was Los Angeles, not New York, that became the house-moving capital of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The wood-framed houses common in the city sit less heavily on the land than the masonry and brick of the East Coast; they’re easier to lift off their foundations and more flexible in motion. Before trucks, freeways, and shipping containers—and before L.A., a city without a natural harbor, constructed a port—building materials were also hard to come by. “When you had those, you didn’t waste them,” Brad Chambers said. “But what was plentiful was land.”
So were people. The population of L.A. grew from around six thousand residents, in 1870, to more than a million by 1930. “It was doubling every decade,” Rodney Kemerer, a real-estate investor, told me. Kemerer became the unofficial archivist of Los Angeles’s king of house moving, George Kress, after buying Kress’s former home. Kress learned the trade in Pittsburgh and went West in 1913. “He saw the opportunity,” Kemerer said. “The city was expanding so rapidly that people could not keep up with it.”
As business districts spread, lots that had been zoned for single-family homes were reclassified for commercial use. “People found themselves sitting on very valuable dirt,” Kemerer said; they could sell their land, pay for house moving, and still pocket a tidy profit. Meanwhile, as cars replaced horses, streets had to be widened, and several of the city’s many inconvenient hills were flattened—some houses were demolished, but plenty were simply rolled out of the way. Kemerer estimates that Kress moved roughly two hundred and fifty structures a year through the nineteen-twenties, and he was just one of many names in the business. “There were others, but if you had money, or if you had a difficult move, you went to him,” Kemerer said.
In his prime, Kress was a kind of P. T. Barnum figure, dazzling the city with his ambition and showmanship. He moved greenhouses without breaking a pane, entire high schools in one piece, and office buildings while workers remained at their desks. In 1924, his clients hosted a party—with the mayor in attendance—inside a nine-bedroom Queen Anne-style building while Kress moved it more than two miles west, on Wilshire Boulevard, from the newly commercial neighborhood of Westlake to the upscale Windsor Square. The same year, he used horses to haul the Alhambra Hotel—six stories and around eleven thousand tons of steel and concrete—up Broadway, to make way for the city’s new Hall of Justice.
By the forties, though, the glory days were over. Kress lost his own home to a bank and ended up selling real estate in Laguna Beach. Houses were no longer on the move: the city had too many overhead power lines, too much traffic, too many layers of bureaucracy, and, most significantly, too few empty lots. In the fifties and sixties, an increasingly dense Los Angeles also had plenty of labor, and the infrastructure to bring in cheap materials. “Now your issue was land,” Brad Chambers told me. “Even though you might still want to move something, most of the time, you couldn’t make it work, because you had no place to bring it.”
The Eaton and Palisades fires changed that equation. For the first time in more than half a century, Los Angeles had a glut of vacant lots—and, thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariffs and ICE raids, materials and labor were expensive and in short supply. House moving once again made sense.
