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Workers install roofing material in houses Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg. The mid-Willamette Valley home manufacturer opened in March 1995 and built its 15,000th home in May.
Shane Pew, left, and Delfino Cervántes strategize the layout for cabinetry in a manufactured house Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg.
Workers finish trim work on manufactured houses Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg.
Kalynn Smith, of Albany, cleans a window in a manufactured house Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg. The factory produces about two homes each day and workers in the final finish area are the first to clean each structure. Smith tried to add up the hours required to clean 15,000 houses. "It feels like it takes forever," she said.
Kiaira Thompson finishes cleaning a manufactured house Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg. The factory opened in March of 1995 and completed its 15,000th home in May. "That's a lot of homes," Thompson said.
Shane Pew stands for a portrait Wednesday, May 25, 2022. He is the second lead worker at Palm Harbor Homes' wall set department in Millersburg. Pew said he's with the sub-structure for the inception of each home, about 2,000 of the factory's 15,000. He said promise of advancement in the company and steady income kept him in his factory job. "I showed up, I did everything and I moved up — boom, boom, boom, boom," Pew said.
Delfino Cervántes is a countertop builder in the company's cabinetry department in Millersburg. Cervántes is the second- longest serving worker in the factory, starting in Millersburg with the Palm Harbor plant's opening in 1995. He estimates he's quite literally had a part in almost every one of the more than 15,000 homes produced at Palm Harbor. "How many homes have we built for people? That amazes me to know I had a part in that," Cervántes said.
Alex Ramirez, a prepper-caulker, uses sealant to fill nail holes and other construction artifacts in a house before it moves to exterior painting Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg.
Sales manager Ben Roche checks messages on a phone Wednesday, May 25, 2022 in the 15,000th house manufactured by Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg. The factory opened March 1995 and finished the milestone home No. 15,000 in May.
Sales manager Ben Roche removes a sign Wednesday, May 25, 2022 from the trailer hitch of the 15,000th house manufactured by Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg. The factory opened March 1995 and finished the milestone home No. 15,000 in May.
Every day, Donny White has to drive 40 miles through everything that burned.
The Oregon Department of Transportation maintenance worker commutes from his rental in Mill City alongside the Santiam River, past the property where his family’s home stood, along the scorched hillsides and burned-out foundations of forests and towns razed in the 2020 Labor Day fires.
He and wife Tracy Stevens-White are set to replace the house destroyed by fire in one of the most destructive summers in Oregon history. It’s a chance to re-center their family.
“It sucks to lose your house, but we’re getting a new house, so that’s awesome,” White said.
It’s also the 15,000th house manufactured by the Millersburg Palm Harbor Homes factory at a time when demand for housing and a loosening of supply line restrictions are turning around a pandemic slowdown that had threatened the company’s presence in the Northwest.
Palm Harbor reached out to the couple to let them know theirs was a milestone in the manufacturer’s 27-year history in the mid-Willamette Valley, division President Forrest Barnes said.
“It’s a point of pride — 15,000 homes is a small city,” Barnes said.
When the state closed the highway Sept. 7, 2020, White knew it was time to flee.
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“You don’t shut down a highway unless something big is going on,” White said.
White had worked all day to clear trees from Highway 22, hacking and dragging wind-felled timber with a coworker from the stretch of road where it leaves Gates, squeezed into a canyon before rounding Detroit Lake to the east.
Gates was choked with stinging, evergreen-scented smoke as White left the house built by Stevens-White’s family on the outskirts of town for the start of his shift in Detroit.
Forecasters had feared the holiday weekend's dry, hot winds would fan large fires burning in the Cascade foothills, so ODOT tasked the crew with keeping the roadway driveable.
Strong gusts became gale-force winds; ash fell on the river valley. The sky turned pale orange, reflecting light from the Beachie Creek and Lionshead fires merging just miles away to the north and east.
State officials christened the blaze Santiam as it combined with the P-515 Fire and grew more than 750-fold from a few hundred acres in just a few days. The fire would claim more than 400,000 acres of woodlands and 1,500 structures over the next half-month. Five died when they couldn’t evacuate from the river canyon where they lived.
White said his supervisor texted him from Gates and told him it was time to get off the roadways.
The two-man crew decided to trade their pickup and chainsaws for a front-end loader at the compound to help them push logs off the highway.
White grabbed his phone, hoping to contact his wife, Stevens-White.
“I got cell service for just a second, and I told her she needs to get the kids and leave,” he said. “No time to explain why.”
White said he feels fortunate, really, that the fire didn’t affect him more.
He didn’t lose any friends or family to the flames. His parents in Salem took his family in for a couple of weeks, then his brother in Albany for another couple of weeks, he said. White said his family found rentals in Keizer, then Mill City.
But Labor Day weekend was the last time White was in his family’s home.
He remembers joining the lines of cars streaming downriver, expecting the small incorporated city to vanish into the smoke and ash.
“In my mind, I think my hometown is burning down,” White said, “my entire community.
But months later, wildland fire crews finished mopping up the last hot spots, and residents began looking for the funding and permitting and contractors to build new homes and fill in around the structures left over.
“To come back and see stuff still standing, that was pretty heartwarming,” White said.
Stevens-White and White couldn’t tell their children at first that their house was gone, he said.
“We just did what we have to,” White said. “Just trying to keep their lives normal — as normal as they can be.”
He said a manufactured home would be the absolute fastest option.
Their daughter is now 9, he said, and their son 5. They keep asking about the new house.
“Going through that stuff, and then two years of COVID, (it was) a pretty crappy two years for kids, for sure,” White said.
That house is waiting to be trucked upriver. It worked its way through the Millersburg Palm Harbor plant, rolling off the production line in March where workers are manufacturing 15 homes at any time.
Barnes said the factory completes a home in 10 business days.
He compared the process to an automobile assembly line and believes that building a home from components as they roll along steel tracks makes the company more efficient, and therefore more cost-effective than what he called “stick-built” housing.
“It’s like if Ford dumped all those parts in your driveway,” he said. “If some contractor built that car, how much would that car cost?”
The market has helped shape that process, Barnes said.
Buildable land dried up in mobile home parks, the traditional domain of manufactured housing, making home purchasers choosier. Site-built houses saturated the market, driving down prices, then the 2008 financial collapse halted interest in new homes.
Palm Habor’s output dropped by about 80% compared to its 1995 opening in just a few years, Barnes said.
In that time, manufacturers shuttered in the Northwest, including a half-dozen in Oregon. There are just five mobile home manufacturers left in Oregon, Barnes said, and one in Washington.
Then pandemic-related shutdowns and restrictions threatened to close more factories, Barnes said, when potential buyers were unable to get into the homebuying process.
“All the offices feeding demand, whether that’s a mortgage lender or a permitting office at a county, that stopped,” he said.
The Millersburg plant made 600 houses last year, Sales Manager Ben Roche said. And he sees the factory getting closer to that capacity this year.
Houses in the market are quickly purchased, new home constructions aren’t keeping up with demand for the nearly 140,000 homes Oregon estimates it would need to satisfy homebuyers.
A package of housing bills that passed in the 2016 Oregon designed to increase the number of affordable homes may help by expanding urban growth boundaries and making allowances for housing on land zoned for light industrial use.
Some trade publications estimate nearly one in 10 new homes will be a manufactured home in 2022.
That demand will drive more people into factory outlets to look at homes, Barnes said. Once they they see inside, they’ll get over any notions that manufactured homes are less-than houses.
He credits a residential feel with Palm Harbor’s continued success, Barnes said.
“People have always tried to slap a stigma on manufactured housing,” he said. “People will look into them and say, 'Wow, I can live in this.'”
Alex Powers (he/him) covers business, environment and healthcare for Mid-Valley Media. Call 541-812-6116 or email Alex.Powers@lee.net.
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Workers install roofing material in houses Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg. The mid-Willamette Valley home manufacturer opened in March 1995 and built its 15,000th home in May.
Shane Pew, left, and Delfino Cervántes strategize the layout for cabinetry in a manufactured house Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg.
Workers finish trim work on manufactured houses Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg.
Kalynn Smith, of Albany, cleans a window in a manufactured house Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg. The factory produces about two homes each day and workers in the final finish area are the first to clean each structure. Smith tried to add up the hours required to clean 15,000 houses. "It feels like it takes forever," she said.
Kiaira Thompson finishes cleaning a manufactured house Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg. The factory opened in March of 1995 and completed its 15,000th home in May. "That's a lot of homes," Thompson said.
Shane Pew stands for a portrait Wednesday, May 25, 2022. He is the second lead worker at Palm Harbor Homes' wall set department in Millersburg. Pew said he's with the sub-structure for the inception of each home, about 2,000 of the factory's 15,000. He said promise of advancement in the company and steady income kept him in his factory job. "I showed up, I did everything and I moved up — boom, boom, boom, boom," Pew said.
Delfino Cervántes is a countertop builder in the company's cabinetry department in Millersburg. Cervántes is the second- longest serving worker in the factory, starting in Millersburg with the Palm Harbor plant's opening in 1995. He estimates he's quite literally had a part in almost every one of the more than 15,000 homes produced at Palm Harbor. "How many homes have we built for people? That amazes me to know I had a part in that," Cervántes said.
Alex Ramirez, a prepper-caulker, uses sealant to fill nail holes and other construction artifacts in a house before it moves to exterior painting Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg.
Sales manager Ben Roche checks messages on a phone Wednesday, May 25, 2022 in the 15,000th house manufactured by Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg. The factory opened March 1995 and finished the milestone home No. 15,000 in May.
Sales manager Ben Roche removes a sign Wednesday, May 25, 2022 from the trailer hitch of the 15,000th house manufactured by Palm Harbor Homes in Millersburg. The factory opened March 1995 and finished the milestone home No. 15,000 in May.
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