Dream houses
The Hoopa Valley Tribe is building its future inside a big metal factory

story & photos by HEIDI WALTERS

TO GET TO THE HOOPA VALLEY RESERVATION off Highway 299, you turn north at Willow Creek onto the Bigfoot National Scenic Byway (Hwy 96) and follow the Trinity River about a dozen miles. The road's a winding affair, with a couple of tight turns that might make Bigfoot himself duck and shimmy a little to swing his big self through the bends. Imagine, then, that you're a big house trying to negotiate those curves back out to Hwy 299.

Plenty of new houses -- or halves of houses -- will be making that twisty trip soon, from the Hoopa Modular Building Enterprise's new, 65,000 square-foot white-and-green metal factory to awaiting foundations in cities, towns and reservations in California and neighboring states. The extra-sturdy structures, ranging from two to four bedrooms and one to two levels, will be Uniform Building Code-compliant, personalized, many-windowed homes worthy of any nice stick-house neighborhood. And they won't have steel chassis, like mobile homes.

At full production in a few years, five trucks (hauling five modules equaling two-and-a-half houses) will travel Highway 96 per day, five days a week. Other trucks will come in daily with wholesale-purchased building supplies. Bill Bobbitt, a modular housing consultant hired by the tribe to start and run the new enterprise, said he had his doubts at first.

"When I did the feasibility study, the first thing I did was look at that road and say, `Boy, I hope we can deliver these things,'" Bobbitt said. After talking with CalTrans, they designed a special transporter and decided to keep the house modules around 16-by-70 feet or less, with folding roofs, in order to squeeze them down the road cost-effectively.

No bent road was going to stop the Hoopa Valley Tribe's dreams of pulling out of a jobs-poor, housing-scarce slump. "We've been dormant too long," said tribal chairman Clifford Lyle Marshall, sitting in his office Monday talking over a small stick model of a traditional Hoopa home, or "xhonta," on the table. In the old days, he said, the tribe came together to build a house. It's like that now, only the factory-built houses are not only being sold to tribal members, but to homeowners off-rez as far south as San Diego and north to Vancouver, Wash. The houses will be sold on a three-tiered pricing schedule, with Hoopa tribal members getting the best deal and other tribes the next best deal.

"One of the things people need is affordable housing," Marshall said. He rattled off a list of social ills in Hoopa Valley: domestic violence, drug abuse, truancy. "The remedy for all of them is a stable economy, and a good job where you can buy a home and feed a family." He said the tribe suffers 50 percent unemployment. Timber revenues (the tribe's main income) have declined under the tribe's sustainable harvest rules. So the tribe invested nearly $7 million in the new modular housing factory, which employs almost 50 people, mostly tribal members. That number could rise above 100.

Inside the factory Monday morning, several newly trained workers heaved their first house's first wall, already insulated, onto its edge. Next to it was the first floor, plumbed and wired. Overhead pulleys waited to pull materials to stations outfitted with bright yellow scaffolding. There was a happy, whistle-while-you work industrious feeling in the air. Open doors let in sunlight and a cool breeze. "This is a positive thing for the reservation, because it's supporting tribal members and kids and other Indians," said employee and tribal member Robert Hodge, Jr. He fought fires before this job. Another tribal member and factory employee, Randy Cook, also once relied on seasonal jobs. He hopes to buy a house next year. "That's incentive to come to work," he said.

At the corporate office across the river, Hoopa Modular sales coordinator Hayley Hutt talked about her "dream come true." Hutt worked in Arizona in real estate and spent much of her life outside of the valley. She came home to have her baby girl, now 14 months old, got the job, and plans to buy a modular home next year.

"I live with my mom in a HUD home," she says. She could get her own HUD home from the government housing program, which is expensive and restrictive. "My only other option is to get a builder out here, which is too expensive, or a mobile home. So, yeah, to come home and have this job opportunity and be able to buy a home and raise my daughter here -- it's unbelievable."

CEO Bobbitt said the modular enterprise could bring in up to $27 million in gross business volume per year. Chairman Marshall anticipates positive ripples from the factory for hundreds of miles: work for truckers, on-site assemblers, support businesses. "The deli [in town] is already going down to the plant and taking orders," Marshall said. "Forty-five people are buying gas to go to work. So there's money already coming in."

The high school even has a new construction vocational program. Maybe that, and the hope of a job and a house, will change how some high school grads, once they turn 18, spend their newly acquired tribal minors' trust money, said Marshall. "Per capita, the ones turning 18 now are looking at $30,000," he said. "We're trying to convince kids not to go buy a car, total it out, and end up walking down the road. Buy a house, and they'll have a home for life."

New houses could start winding down the road in July. You can take a tour of the new Hoopa modular plant at an open house this Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Monday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

PHOTOS: Tribal members Randy Clark, left, and Robert Hodge, Jr., have learned new skills and risen to supervisory position at the new modular plant.