With multiple large industrial projects incoming to the Kemmerer area, a huge housing crunch is looming.
Canyon Road Development, one of the companies looking to build housing in Kemmerer, has estimated that between 3,500 to 6,000 new workers are on their way to the area, along with their families. Kemmerer’s present population is around 2,500.
One solution that’s getting some attention would be modular homes from a Colorado-based company called Fading West, which is working with Canyon Road Development. Fading West has just returned from Maui, where they recently delivered slightly more than 80 new, high-quality, factory-built homes in two months flat.
“These homes were built to the same standards as any stick-built house,” Fading West Chief Business Development Officer Eric Schaefer told Cowboy State Daily. ”In fact, they’re built to an even higher quality, because you have all the trades working together in one place.”
That brings more precision to the project, Schaefer said.
“We’ve set it up almost like a car factory,” he said. “There are between 18 to 20 stations, and then the homes move from station to station every four hours. So we can build an entire home at this point in seven to eight working days.”
Not Your Grandma’s Modular Home
Modular home quality has come up significantly in the world, but many companies that build them have found themselves fighting a stigma, because some of the homes were poorly built in the past. The topic came up during the recent Wyoming Governor’s Business Forum, held in Laramie last month.
University of Wyoming Acting Assistant Director Mike Martin, who is a board member for the Wyoming Community Development Authority (WCDA), said during a panel on affordable housing at the forum that WCDA still has some rules on its books that prohibit financing modular homes — even though the quality of such homes has risen substantially and is now more usually on par with traditional single-family homes.
Panelists Jason Moyes, who is founder and president of Moyes Family Homes, and Ansley Mouw, who is the owner of Elske Architecture, both said they’ve run into all kinds of obstacles when it comes to building modular homes.
Sometimes city ordinances aren’t up to date with modern technology. Moyes, for example, said he knows of a new pipe that’s much better than old-style pipes, but it’s a “non-starter” because it’s too new to be on the list of approved materials.
“If it freezes, (the pipe) doesn’t break,” he told the crowd during the panel. “It expands and then contracts back to size. It can be spliced and fixed … (much) faster and cheaper.”
Standstill In Kemmerer
Sean Coyle is CEO of SNC Investment Partners, one of three partners backing Canyon Road Development, the developer that Fading West is working with. Coyle told Cowboy State Daily the project in Kemmerer is at a “standstill” right now.
“We’ve been trying to move the development projects forward, but keep getting constant pushback,” Coyle said in an email to Cowboy State Daily. “We recently lost a state SRF loan application in October, to perform the utility infrastructure work on one project after the state official referenced that she was allegedly told by city officials that the modular homes were of subpar standards, and that the city didn’t want this development.”
Coyle said he was also told, during the same SRF – or State Revolving Fund -- meeting with state officials. that the loan couldn’t be approved because the developer isn’t installing gas mains. SRF provides low-interest loans to fund infrastructure projects like water treatment plants and wastewater systems.
“(That) does not make sense,” he said. “For context, this new modular home development is going to be for modern, energy-efficient homes that are all 100% all-electric.”
Kemmerer city officials, meanwhile, have told Coyle they said no such thing, but the flap illustrates how modular homes sometimes face hurdles that other, more traditional developers, do not face.
Re-strategizing
The delay caused by the rejected SRF loan has forced Canyon Road to rethink its strategy for the project.
“The commercial loan market isn’t eager to pump tens and tens of millions of dollars into a town with a population of 2,400,” he said. “Banks are traditionally cautious and risk averse. They won’t finance the construction the way the state SRF loan would have, and we are having to severely reduce the size of each phase we wanted to build out.”
In fact, SNC more typically works in communities that have a minimum population starting at 200,000, according to information at SNC’s website.
Reducing the size of each phase will, in turn, change the design of the utility infrastructure, and nullifies some of the contracts for the project, Coyle said.
“We were told (Friday) that it would likely take nine months to get the transformer needed for the development from when the new electrical design is completed, approved and paid for,” Coyle said. “Seeing that we are only starting the redesign of the electrical work now, we are looking at 10 to 11 months for the equipment to arrive, October-November 2025.”
That’s yet another predicament in a dominoes-style chain of them, Coyle added, because Fading West homes were to arrive in August.
“We can’t have (them) sit unacclimated in the harsh frigid conditions until we have power in October or November,” he said. “We were hoping to get maybe 25 homes up … by September 2025, but now we have to see if that even makes sense anymore, and we may have to wait until 2026.”
That could also mean not doing the infrastructure in 2025 as planned — which means an extra, full year of interest on the project before it can realize any return.
Small Start, Big American Dreams
Fading West got its start building modular homes for Buena Vista, a small mountain town in Colorado.
Around 170 people have moved into modular homes built by the company in that town.
“These are not deed-restricted zones,” Schaefer said. “The only restriction we had is you have to be a full-time resident of Buena Vista. We didn’t want people buying them as vacation homes.”
The quality of the Buena Vista homes has attracted other Colorado towns, and Fading West is already building similar projects across Colorado. It’s also looking even wider afield, at other small towns across the Intermountain West, where there are lots of small communities that are having trouble attracting developers to build the homes they need.
Wyoming alone has an overall housing shortage of up to 38,000 homes, according to a housing needs assessment commissioned by the Wyoming Community Development Authority last year. Schaefer said he’s hearing similar things from other states across the Rocky Mountain region.
Working with Habitat for Humanity in Eagle, located near Vail Valley, the company was able to build 16 homes.
“If they had not used modular, they would only have been able to build maybe two or three homes,” Schaefer said. “So off-site building not only allows speed, but it does cut costs.”
And, because construction takes place in a factory, it can be year-round, Schafer added, whereas traditional stick-built homes have a shorter season.
“As you know, in Wyoming and Colorado, it’s cold and the ground is frozen in winter,” he said. “Those kinds of things don’t really impact us, because we’re building them in a controlled environment. As long as we can get the foundations in when the ground is not frozen, then we can set these homes on the foundation and finish them at any time during the year.”
The company has also been tapped to build apartments, such as a project with 56 units for the town of Breckenridge, who acted as the developer.
“They then turned around and rented them to ether city workers or people who run their restaurants and all the things that keep their town afloat,” Schaefer said.
Similar projects have also been undertaken in Craig, Steamboat, Telluride, Norwood, Ridgeway and other Colorado towns.
More About The Home Designs
The homes Fading West would build for Kemmerer range in size from 900 square fee to 2,400.
“They are built to the highest climate zones,” Schaefer said. “Because you don’t want teachers to move in, and then they can’t pay for the electric bill because it’s poorly insulated. So, since we’re working in cold-weather zones, we will actually over-build these with insulation.”
Available home styles range from ranch to two-stories, and the company can also build high-quality duplexes and triplexes,Schaefer said.
“Our homes are built to the International Building Code,” Schaefer said. “And we have a third-party inspector in the factory every day, who inspects every house that comes out of the factory, and then sends all their findings to the state.”
The modular units can be constructed to Kemmerer’s exact building codes, Schaefer added.
“When you walk through our homes, you would not know if it was built on site or in our factory,” Schaefer said. “These are very high-quality homes. One of the sayings we have is affordable doesn’t mean cheap. We want homes that are going to last, that are energy efficient.”
That way, over the course of 10, 20, 30 years, people won’t be paying for poor insulation or other maintenance problems.
The first order Fading West has for Kemmerer is for 54 homes, Schaefer said, which will be available in six different designs, ranging from two to four bedrooms.
Some limited customization is available, but nothing big that changes the footprint of the overall home.
“The exteriors can look different and those sorts of things,” he said. “But the designs of the kitchens and bathrooms, things like that, you can’t change your bathroom by 2 feet, or something like that.”
Schafer said the plan is to make the homes as nice as possible,while still hitting the affordable price points they expect the market to need as Kemmerer grows to accommodate up to 6,000 new, permanent workers plus their families.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
