The year was 1975. My buddy and I were walking over to Golden Gate Park, just a few blocks away from the glorious Pacific Ocean, when we passed a For Sale sign with an Open House.

It was a funny little property – a rustic one bedroom bungalow in front and a separate studio in back, all squeezed onto a tiny city lot and completely unlike the wall-to-wall boxy structures typical of what we call “The Sunset District.” I was sizing up whether I could actually live there, when the Real Estate agent volunteered that the main structure had started out as one of the 5,000 Earthquake cottages built after the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

I’d never heard of such a thing, but its outline was clear. The main room was essentially a pitched roof shack, and the next word which popped into my head was “insulation.” How cold would this shack be – just three blocks from the also-very-cold Pacific Ocean – when the fog rolled in?

There are just 23 of the cottages left now, but since they were home to so many, plenty of family stories still survive.

You might think that these shacks came to mind when I visited New Orleans, and witnessed whole blocks of suburban homes with identical white FEMA trailers all parked on their front lawns. But I didn’t.

It was when I saw a picture of a brand-new, pale yellow cottage with white-trimmed windows all around, fitted out with a pitched metal roof and a front porch. Designers Marianne Cusato and Eric Moser call it a “Katrina Cottage,” and they say it can pre-fabricated and delivered for $35,000.

At 300 square feet, it’s smaller than our Earthquake cottages, but not unlike a FEMA trailer. Even better, it’s light and airy and specifically designed to last. Place it in a corner of your lot, and then re-build your main house out front. Your Katrina cottage becomes a guest house. Or set it up at the front and start building out an addition off the back. Or you can place it in the middle and ultimately it could be your Master Bedroom. Maybe its fate is to be a storage shed, as happened to many an Earthquake cottage. Or move it to a whole new place for a whole new function.

As welcome as the FEMA trailers are – as a sign of both life and hope – they will ultimately be discarded. They have no aesthetic qualities which make them natural candidates for inclusion in anyone’s final plans. And the truth is – they were never meant to be.

So why not invest in structures which could go on and serve a useful function in any number of communities in the years to come?

Having unexpectedly come across a World War II vintage Quonset hut the other day, it’s clear to me that temporary housing never understands that it’s temporary.

Living in San Francisco, earthquakes are a reality. It’s not “if” – it’s “when.” And the idea of a sea of FEMA trailers, parked wall-to-wall in the meadows of Golden Gate Park, is not a vision I relish. But somehow I wouldn’t mind an update on the old Earthquake cottages. We’d embrace them, just like we did the originals. And I like that idea – live in it for a while, and then take it home with you. Or dissemble it and ship it up to the Gold Country. Donate it to farm workers, toiling in the hot San Joaquin Valley. Or any number of other great ideas and worthy causes.

If we’re going to spend the money, then let’s make it stick.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.