Opinion Today: How to drag home building into the 20th century

Mass production has lowered the cost of nearly everything. Why not homes?

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story December 20, 2023 By Binyamin Appelbaum Mr. Appelbaum is a member of the editorial board. Habitat for Humanity built its brand on building homes by hand. The nonprofit arms its volunteers with hammers and nails and they build a house for a low-income family. And then they build another one, and another one. Handmade houses constructed one at a time, in the same way houses have been constructed for 125 years. Last week in Eagle, Colo., Habitat for Humanity tried something different: It installed 16 new homes made in a nearby factory. Thirty-two boxes arrived on trucks and were swung into place by cranes, creating two-story homes with 1,216 square feet of living space each. Habitat for Humanity Vail Valley says it was able to build three times as many homes in Eagle this year by using houses purchased from a factory. As I wrote in a recent essay, building houses in factories has the tantalizing potential to help address the nation's housing crisis. Factory-built single-family homes and apartment buildings can be completed up to 50 percent more quickly and up to 20 percent more cheaply than homes built with standard construction techniques. Given those savings, and the fact that pretty much every other aspect of material life is mass-produced in factories, it may seem surprising that last year, only 2 percent of new homes in the United States were built in factories. But there are formidable obstacles to shifting away from handmade housing. One striking example: There are more than 300 different building codes in Colorado, making it impossible to produce a single home model for sale across the entire state. Government housing policy in recent decades has focused on providing financial aid to renters and homeowners. It hasn't worked. Giving people more money without creating more housing is a straightforward recipe for driving up prices. Policymakers need to focus on the supply side. The government could encourage a shift toward factory-built housing by increasing the consistency of building regulations, by requiring the use of factory-built housing in government-subsidized projects and by investing in the development of new techniques for the mass production of housing. As I note in the essay, if any of that seems far-fetched, consider that the government has done all of it, and more, to encourage the adoption of rooftop solar panels. It's time to pay similar attention to the buildings underneath. Read the essay: Binyamin Appelbaum Why Do We Build Houses in the Same Way That We Did 125 Years Ago? Old-fashioned building methods contribute to the high cost of housing. 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