As California continues to grapple with a deepening housing affordability crisis and escalating climate disasters, one company is working to offer a scalable, budget-friendly solution — and it’s building it one backyard at a time.
Samara, a Bay Area-based manufacturer of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) is helping to shelter wildfire victims in the Los Angeles area by providing quickly deployable, factory-built homes.
Founded in 2022 as a spinoff from Airbnb, Samara has broader goals to revolutionize housing construction with a streamlined, cost-efficient model — one that founder and CEO Mike McNamara believes could be a meaningful piece of a much larger national puzzle.
“We’re not going to solve the housing shortage by ourselves,” McNamara said in an interview with HousingWire. “But we’d like to do our part — and we think building smarter and more efficiently can get us closer.
“We started by imagining how people might live in the future. That thinking evolved into action when we saw how ADUs could solve a pressing problem in places like California.”
Rapid relief for wildfire victims
Samara is partnering with Steadfast LA — a nonprofit founded by developer Rick Caruso — to provide free prefabricated homes to Los Angeles County residents who lost their houses in the January 2025 wildfires and lack the resources to rebuild.
Homes will be built and installed at no cost to recipients and Samara will not earn a profit from the project. Those interested in applying for the program can do so here.
Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia is contributing $15 million to the effort, including an initial $5 million donation and a pledge to match an additional $10 million in major gifts. The Caruso Family Foundation is also providing early funding.
“This initiative is about keeping communities intact,” Caruso said. “Many of the people struggling the most right now are those who have lived in these neighborhoods for decades. They’re underinsured or lack insurance, and now they have lost everything.”
Samara’s two-bedroom, two-bathroom units will be used as primary residences. The homes are built in about five to six months at a factory and can be installed in a matter of weeks, depending on permitting and site readiness.
Samara will oversee the installation process, and Steadfast LA plans to coordinate with local and state officials to expedite approvals.
“We’re giving these victims a realistic way to stay on their properties and quickly return to their lives at a time when the deck is stacked against them,” Caruso said.
“So many people are faced with unbelievable circumstances. We want to help them get back home,” Gebbia added.
McNamara further illustrated the scope of wildfire damage and the effort it will take to get those affected back on their feet.
“These are people who have been completely destroyed, like financially upside down and literally can’t recover,” he said. “We’re actually taking our 950 (square-foot) units. Because they’re such high-quality units, we’re actually going to put them in as the front home.
“In the LA fires, there’s one region in particular where there were 600,000 square feet of houses, more or less, that got burned down. So we’re going into those sites to help people who maybe didn’t have insurance or are financially disabled. We’re going to give them an entire house for free. So it’s not only a house but a home.”
California’s ‘fertile ground’
Samara currently operates only within California, which McNamara calls “fertile ground” due to pro-ADU legislation and a desperate need for affordable housing.
Its ADUs are constructed entirely off-site in a factory environment. This manufactured housing-style approach allows the company to bypass many inefficiencies of traditional construction — such as project-based labor, unpredictable delays and rising costs for building materials, McNamara said.
“Instead of cobbling together those resources from a whole bunch of companies that don’t work for you, you instead build it in a manufacturing environment, which means all those resources are our resource,” he said.
By centralizing the construction process, Samara benefits from bulk material purchases, tighter quality control and repeatable engineering. McNamara said these efficiencies result in faster permitting, faster builds and, ultimately, lower costs for homebuyers.
The company offers a range of ADU models from 420 to 950 square feet. All of them are preapproved by the state to streamline the permitting process. Unit prices range from $152,000 to $277,000 — plus installation expenses.
And unlike most conventional builders, Samara doesn’t just ship the units — it’s a licensed mortgage broker that offers financing support to clients navigating the complexities of homeownership.
“We create our own finance product,” McNamara said. “If the mortgage rates in the country are 6.5%, we pretty much give a loan for 6.5%. So it’s entirely unique. If you were going to do a (home equity line of credit) or a second mortgage, you’d probably be 9% to 10% today.”
Scalability in urban areas
While ADUs have historically been viewed as suburban tools, McNamara argues that Samara’s model is highly scalable in urban areas too. In cities like Los Angeles, small lot sizes and zoning restrictions make new large-scale developments difficult.
McNamara said that the average Californian stays in their home for 17 years and are often locked in by mortgage rates and soaring prices. ADUs offer a way to grow while keeping the property they already own — whether to house relatives, earn rental income or simply create more living space.
“The adoption rate in California is high,” McNamara said. “It’s driven by the high cost of housing and your lack of ability to move from that 1,500-square-foot first house to a 2,500-square-foot next house.”
Despite growing interest from other states, Samara has no immediate plans to expand outside California. McNamara said the reason is simple: The Golden State is large, heavily regulated and facing an urgent housing crisis.
“California is 1/10th of the country in terms of GDP. It’s basically the fourth-largest economy in the world,” he said. “There’s big problems and there’s a severe housing shortage, and all the economics that I talked about make it more challenging for you to undergo a housing project and put up more capacity. We have so much opportunity in California to help where it’s most needed.”
McNamara credited California’s ADU legislation as a model for other states, calling it “way ahead” of the curve and advising other governments to ease zoning restrictions and fast-track approvals.
The bigger picture
Ultimately, McNamara views Samara not as a builder but as a systems innovator — one that applies industrial engineering principles to real estate.
“In industrial America, the construction industry usually has cost-ups,” he said. “Usually, because of the way you build to a project base, you get higher cost of materials and higher cost of labor, which are typically indexed to the cost of inflation. So in a factory, with a manufacturing arm, you could drive those down.”
As wildfires, housing shortages and affordability challenges continue to rise across the U.S., Samara’s model may offer a glimpse into a more resilient, scalable future.
“We’re not the whole solution,” McNamara said. “But if we can build smarter, faster and help even a fraction of the people who need housing, that’s worth doing.”
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