The Great Floating Homes of Los Angeles
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.
Shortly after meeting with Evan and Caitlin Chambers, Jaybush tracked down the Taft Avenue developer, who agreed to sell one of the doomed Craftsman homes for a dollar. Brad Chambers offered his crew to help, pre- and post-move. Evan Chambers, who is both an acclaimed glassblower and a skilled craftsman, became the project manager, and by July the house was ready to migrate.
The art of house moving is almost unchanged since Kress’s day. Ricky Craig, who works for American Heavy Moving, in Montclair, California, told me that he was the third generation in the family trade, and that his boss, Earl Sutton, was fifth. “That’s the way it is in house moving,” he said. “If you really get down to it, most of your movers came from Missouri or Oklahoma, looking for work back in the day.” Craig, now a devoted granddad with a dry sense of humor, began working alongside his father at thirteen, quitting school even though teachers warned him that house moving was a dying trade. “I thought it was so cool,” he said. “I couldn’t wait to start.”
The key to moving a house, Craig told me, is to get underneath it, so you can slide in a lattice of beams that will serve as a temporary foundation. This often means digging a trench, though, in California, where raised foundations are more common, a contractor can sometimes slice around the base of the house with a power saw to free the structure, then punch holes through the foundation. Once the house is resting on I-beams, Craig and his crew excavate some more, to put hydraulic jacks under the beams. In Kress’s day, however, dozens of workers were required to turn each screw jack by hand, working in perfect synchrony so that the building remained level as it began to float above the ground. “Luckily, that was before me,” Craig said. “They’d say, Give me an inch, and you’d have to go like hell to get that inch, everybody working together. That was real men.”
As the house begins to rise, the crew stacks wooden cribbing, like Lincoln Logs, into pillars underneath, to help support the structure. “Once it’s up, then I can go clean out everything, bring wheels and stuff in,” Craig said. Although modern machinery makes the job easier, a house move today also involves more preparation: owing to the proliferation of signage, underpasses, and traffic in the city, it’s no longer possible to move most houses in one piece. Exactly how much deconstruction is required depends on the route and the mover; Craig told Jaybush that they haven’t moved a two-story house in fifteen years, and would prefer to keep it that way, while Rick Ellison, whose business, Dinuba House Movers, is the only other California-based moving company that will work in the city, isn’t deterred. “He said that all we have to do is lift the second floor up, pull the first floor out from underneath, and then lower the second floor down onto a truck,” Jaybush said. “No big deal.” Roof shingles then need to be removed; brick fireplaces and chimneys have to be dismantled, their pieces carefully numbered for reconstruction later; and the entire structure must be sliced into road-ready sections like a loaf of bread. At this point in the operation, even formerly adorable homes begin to look hideous. “Our house was perfect and beautiful till it got cut up,” Evan Chambers said. “Then it looked real ugly.”
The Chambers home would serve as a guinea pig for the Historic House Relocation Project. Jaybush consulted with L.A. County’s planning officials, who confirmed that the house would be covered by the state’s building code for existing structures, which meant that it wouldn’t have to be rebuilt to comply with a new set of standards. Together, Jaybush, Brad Chambers, and the American Heavy Moving team figured out a route through the city that avoided street trees, tight turns, and roads that run above old, fragile sewer pipes, which aren’t rated for heavy loads. Finally, during a series of long, stressful August nights, the team moved three sections of the Chamberses’ house from Hollywood to Altadena, speeding east along the freeway, and then crawling in millimetre increments as the driver precision-parked each section snugly against its siblings on the lot. When the crew jacked the house level, it creaked softly, as if exhaling. “What’s crazy,” Craig said, “is that all this will look like it never happened.”
With proof of concept in hand, Jaybush decided to go public. He built a spreadsheet that served as a kind of Tinder for homes, with pictures of all the houses that he knew were facing demolition, sortable by square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and architectural style. Another spreadsheet functioned as a sign-up form; when the list of interested Altadenans reached a hundred, Jaybush scheduled a handful of information sessions. Evan and Caitlin Chambers attended to answer questions, hoping they could help others in the community.
To many, including the Martinez family, it seemed like a no-brainer. The price tag—which included deconstructing, moving, and repairing a house, along with a fee for Omgivning’s services—would likely be substantially less than what it would cost to rebuild from scratch. It also promised to be faster than rebuilding, which matters to fire victims not only for a return to normalcy but also because insurance companies provide mortgage relief for a limited period—typically just a year. Anecdotally, Jaybush told me, he’d heard many Altadenans say that they didn’t anticipate being able to move back into a new house for three to four years, at least; by contrast, the Chambers expect to be living in their new home a little more than a year after moving it. In addition to these benefits, older homes are typically built with first-growth redwood and Douglas fir, which are tougher and more termite-resistant than anything available today, and reusing materials involves a dramatically smaller carbon footprint than a new construction.
Lauren and David picked their top ten properties from Jaybush’s spreadsheet, and began visiting homes. The third one they saw—a pastel-pink, Tudor-style cottage in West Hollywood that Lauren immediately christened Pinky—had everything they wanted. It would fit on their long, narrow lot; it had the right number of bedrooms and bathrooms; and it “was just lovely and inviting and looked like a home that belonged in Altadena,” Lauren said.
The corner lot on which Pinky had sat for the past hundred years was now some of the most desirable real estate in Los Angeles, and its new owner, who had other plans for the land, was thrilled to sell the house for a dollar. (He was saving somewhere between fifty and seventy thousand dollars in demolition costs by doing so.) The children who’d grown up in the house—eight of them, raised by a single mother who emigrated from Ireland—were equally, if not more, delighted. One of the sons told me that the house had meant everything to his mother. She’d painted it her favorite color, inside and out; after her divorce, it was always filled with people who stopped by for cups of tea or one of her legendary Sunday dinners. “Nothing would have made her happier than to know that the house was going to another family, particularly a family that’s in need,” he said.
Everything seemed perfect, the moving date was pencilled in for October, and then things went sideways. The contractor hired to deconstruct the house was new to the art and struggled; he also discovered asbestos while slicing the home, which required abatement. These delays pushed the move into November, but Sutton and Craig, of American Heavy Moving, had no availability that month. (Sutton was apparently in Louisiana, hunting his Thanksgiving turkey.) Then Los Angeles experienced a series of early winter storms. The contractor had already removed Pinky’s roof, and the tarp he used to protect the house failed. “The entire place was just dripping, the hundred-year-old custom ceilings were caving in, the floors were being warped,” Lauren said. “It was heartbreaking—first fire, and now flood.”
The couple was ready to back out, but the contractor promised to repair the damage at no extra cost, and an inspector said that Pinky’s bones were still good. Lauren and David took a deep breath and decided that the alternative was still worse. “We realized that this project is bigger than us,” Lauren said. “We’re trying to do something that is sustainable and scalable for Altadena to come back faster, affordably, and with character—so let’s do it.”
Finally, on a Sunday night in January, Ricky Craig began stringing Christmas lights around the base of a vast, unidentifiable object—half of the storybook cottage formerly known as Pinky. Twenty-five feet wide, fifteen feet tall, and at least sixty feet long, it rested on a handful of steel I-beams, which were in turn perched on three wheeled dollies, tricycle-style. The structure was wrapped in a shiny black tarp, like the Kaaba reimagined by Christo, and passersby began to stop and stare.
By eleven, a crowd of about thirty had gathered. A small crew of fluorescent-jacketed workmen had attached the trike to a semi-tractor and tested the brake hydraulics; a California Highway patrolman had briefed them and a handful of fellow-officers on the route; and the stop sign at the southwest corner of Orlando and Willoughby had been taken down to allow unobstructed passage. At eleven-thirty, the rig rolled slowly off the lot and began its stately procession onto Santa Monica Boulevard, surrounded by an entourage of patrol cars. Drivers honked, pedestrians took photographs, and a flock of Waymos stopped and started repeatedly, their algorithms seemingly flummoxed.
Downtown, unanticipated obstacles narrowed the streets, and Sutton and Craig hopped out to insure that the monolith slid safely between a Verdaderos Crazy Tacos truck and an illegally parked car, an inch to spare on either side. When the structure finally finished its winding, twenty-six-mile journey through the city, rumbling into the empty darkness of west Altadena just after 2 A.M., David Martinez was there to greet it. By dawn, the crew had slotted the house into place on its new site, hovering on timber cribbing. For the first time in nearly a year, a home—or, at least, half of one—stood on the lot. (The other half would make the journey a few days later.) “Doing an all-nighter is not really for me anymore,” David said. “But the lack of sleep was worth it, being able to witness that.”
Watching a house slide through downtown Los Angeles can’t help but feel like a fairy tale. The reality, however, is more tortuous. Even once the rescued house is on site, lowered onto a freshly poured foundation, and ready to be rewired, reconnected, and reroofed, it needs extensive patching. Its new owners need time to heal, too. Caitlin Chambers told me that it was a shock to drive up to her formerly empty lot and see an entire house there again, overnight. “I was approaching it from the park, where you see the house peeking over the wall, and I started crying,” she said. “For a minute, I thought it was my old house that had come back to life.” For Lauren and David Martinez, the hardest part has been that, even with Pinky successfully moved into place, their twin nine-year-olds are not especially excited. “They just want their old home back,” David said. “They want to be able to show it to their baby sister, and we’re working through the fact that’s not going to happen.”
Meanwhile, for more than two hundred people on the waiting list for a transported home of their own, the project’s pace can be frustratingly slow. There are too few house-moving crews left in the state, Jaybush said, and too few contractors willing to figure out how to prepare a house for moving and put it back together again. Still, a year after the Chambers home made its pioneering trek to Altadena, Omgivning has moved three other houses and lined up nine more, and the Martinez family has set Pinky down on her foundation. “She’s looking so pretty,” Lauren said. “Shingles, electrical, plumbing up next.” The sky was blue, and, behind the house, the San Gabriels were golden in the summer sun, the burn scar barely visible. ♦
