Home Sweet Factory-Made Home
Is offsite construction a potential solution for the housing crisis?
In the course of reporting my story that ran today, a very nice female Irish investment banker used a phrase which I loved to describe the construction industry: “pale, male, and stale.” She was using it to explain why housing construction has actually gotten less productive over time — it takes almost twice as long to build a house as it did in 1971 — but I thought it was a good way to explain why a lot of industries in America haven’t changed very much in decades. Here’s the story, which is about why it may be time for modular housing to take off in America:
Your Next House Could Be Made in an Assembly Line
(And for more on my rant about the dominance of white, male, CEOs, despite overwhelming evidence that they may lose you billions of dollars, check out my story about trying to shop only at women-owned businesses.)
I got interested in this topic because Andrew and I have been trying to buy a home for the better part of a year, and the prices are still just bonkers. Here in New York, houses that have no insulation and leaky skylights and critters in the roof and 20-year-old windows are going for $700k. When I wrote a story last year about why America is still using wood to build houses, I talked to a man in California who had a modular steel home built in a factory, and he said it was so energy efficient that he was actually making money from the grid. Modular, or offsite, construction, means that pieces of the home like walls or whole rooms are built in a factory and then trucked to the site.
As we saw $$$ house after $$$ house, I started to wonder whether it might actually make more sense to buy a chunk of land and plop down a modular house on it. (The answer to that is that I don’t have the time or energy at the moment.) While it might not make sense for me, the more I read, the more I realized that modular makes sense in a lot of places. Habitat for Humanity, for example, is building modular homes near me in Dutchess County because it needs to build affordable homes quickly. PulteGroup, America’s third-largest homebuilder, is acquiring factories to make modular because they are projecting a giant shortage of construction workers and figure that they can be more productive by building some parts in factories.
Modular housing is different from manufactured housing, which is also built in a factory, because modular is basically the same thing as a site-built house. It has to conform to local building codes and looks pretty much exactly like the homes around it. Manufactured housing just has to conform to HUD codes, and can be set up in a trailer park or somewhere else. (It could also be a solution to the affordable housing crisis but has some regulatory barriers because zoning codes can ban it and financing can be tricky.)
Here’s the story, and below I’ve included some pictures of my visit to the factory. The modules, or pieces, of the home are set on rails, and you can see how the factory moves the module down the rails, starting with a floor and adding walls, paint, wires, windows, siding, and even cabinets. Some of the modular homes have crown moulding and fancy showers and even a gadget that can lift your Cuisinart from the cabinet to the counter without a pale, stale, male to help you.
Your Next House Could Be Made on an Assembly Line
And lastly, here’s a story that ran before Black Friday, about what in our brains makes us shop even though we don’t need new things: