In 1969, the federal government announced that it would hand out millions of dollars in subsidies to companies willing to try something new: building houses in factories.
Then as now, America was in the throes of a housing crisis. There weren’t enough places to live. Mass production provided Americans with abundant and cheap food, clothing, cars and other staples of material life. But houses were still hammered together by hand, on site. The federal initiative, Operation Breakthrough, aimed to drive up the production of housing — and to drive down the cost — by dragging the building industry into the 20th century.
It didn’t work. Big companies, including Alcoa and General Electric, designed new kinds of houses, and roughly 25,000 rolled out of factories over the following decade. But none of the new homebuilders long survived the end of federal subsidies in the mid-1970s.
Last year, only 2 percent of new single-family homes in the United States were built in factories. Two decades into the 21st century, nearly all U.S. homes are still built the old-fashioned way: one at a time, by hand. Completing a house took an average of 8.3 months in 2022, a month longer than it took to build a house of the same size back in 1971.
Federal housing policy in the decades since the failure of Operation Breakthrough has focused myopically on providing financial aid to renters and homeowners. The government needs to return its attention to the supply side. Opening land for development, for example by easing zoning restrictions, is part of the answer, but reducing building costs could be even more constructive. Land accounts for roughly 20 percent of the price of a new house; building costs account for 60 percent. (The price of land is a larger factor in coastal cities like New York, but the vast majority of new housing in the U.S. is built on cheap land outside cities.)
The tantalizing potential of factory-built housing, also known as modular housing, continues to attract investors and entrepreneurs, including a startup called Fading West that opened a factory in 2021 in the Colorado mountain town of Buena Vista. But Fading West, and similar startups in other parts of the country, need government help to drive a significant shift from handmade housing to factories. This time, there is reason to think it could work.
"Factory" - Google News
December 18, 2023 at 05:01PM
https://ift.tt/C92dQBs
Opinion | Why Do We Build Houses in the Same Way That We Did 125 Years Ago? - The New York Times
"Factory" - Google News
https://ift.tt/bBIH1Ax
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Opinion | Why Do We Build Houses in the Same Way That We Did 125 Years Ago? - The New York Times"
Post a Comment