More affordable housing could be on the way next year once a new manufactured home factory seeded by a state grant begins operations.

“It will provide some housing for the 2020 wildfire survivors in our area and around the state,” said Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland, who pushed the legislation through the Legislature.

A $15 million state grant to St. Vincent de Paul will help set up a factory in the Eugene area to build manufactured homes.

“They’ve been an incredible leader on this front,” Marsh said of St. Vincent de Paul. “They hope to produce housing in a very short period of time.”

She said the St. Vincent de Paul factory will help with the upstream supply of manufactured homes. In 2020, some 2,500 residences, most of which were manufactured homes, were destroyed in the Almeda Fire.

“We have this terrible housing crisis,” Marsh said.

With the first houses expected next year, it may still not be fast enough for Almeda Fire survivors.

Many are living in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA was scheduled to pull the trailers out of this area Sept. 15, but the state has applied for a six-month extension.

“We told them not to do it three months before Christmas,” Marsh said.

The state was looking for the right nonprofit organization to help build manufactured homes, and St. Vincent de Paul in Lane County already had some expertise.

The organization has operated a mattress recycling program, Marsh said.

St. Vincent has created a separate enterprise known as HOPE Community Corporation — the acronym stands for Housing Options Production Enterprise — that will build the manufactured homes at an 80,000-square-foot facility. An estimated workforce of 112 will work in the former American Steel facility.

The factory is expected to build four units a day during single-wide production and two units during double-wide production.

St. Vincent’s goal is to serve the fire survivors who lost homes, with the greatest need in Jackson County.

Terry McDonald, St. Vincent’s Lane County executive director, said, “We are incredibly excited about what HOPE means for the future of affordable housing in Oregon.”

McDonald said the first priority at the factory will be to ramp up production of two traditional floor plans most in need by low-income buyers. These are two-bedroom, one-bath in an 800-square-foot single-wide, and three-bedroom, two-bath in a 1,300-square-foot double-wide.

The manufactured homes are designed to be energy efficient, fire resistant and offer the ability to deal with climate change and wildfire threats.

Rich Hansen, with St. Vincent de Paul in Medford, said McDonald is a “go-getter and an impressive guy. If anyone call pull this off, Terry can.”

Hansen said the state needs greater production of manufactured homes to help deal with the losses from the fire as well as increasing need for affordable housing.

“If Terry’s going to increase the supply, it’s going to help housing down here,” he said.

Reach freelance writer Damian Mann at dmannnews@gmail.com.