Factory-built housing hasnt taken off in California yet, but this year might be different

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As the first home rolled off the factory floor in Kalamazoo, Mich.— “like a boxcar with picture windows,” according to a journalist on the scene — the secretary of Housing and Urban Development proclaimed it “the coming of a real revolution in housing.” For decades engineers, architects, futurists, industrialists, investors and politicians have been pining for a better, faster and cheaper way to build homes.

Now, amid a national housing shortage, the question felt as pressing as ever: What if construction could harness the speed, efficiency, quality control and cost-savings of the assembly line? What if, rather than building homes on-site from the ground up, they were cranked out of factories, one unit after another, shipped to where they were needed and dropped into place? What if the United States could mass-produce its way out of a housing crisis?In Kalamazoo, that vision finally seemed a reality.The HUD chief predicted that within a decade two-thirds of all housing construction across the United States “would be industrialized.”The year was 1971, the HUD secretary was George Romney (father of future Utah senator Mitt), and the prediction was wildly off.Within five years, Operation Breakthrough, the ambitious, but ultimately costly, delay-ridden and politically unpopular federal initiative that had propped up the Kalamazoo factory and eight others like it across the country, ran out of money.

The dream of the factory-built house was dead — not for the first time, nor the last.By some definitions, the first prefabricated house was built, shipped and reassembled in the 1620s.Factory-built homes made of wood and iron were a mainstay of the colonial enterprises of the 19th century.

Housing and construction-worker shortages during the Second World War prompted a wave of (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to mass-produce starter homes in the United States.The mo...