The cookie-cutter house: Part 1, the history
If as a society we are to have affordable home ownership, should we not begin by lowering the cost to create new housing?
Every other aspect of modern society has been transformed by mass production, starting with machine tooling, through the assembly-line automobile, and to today’s we-built-it-for-you personal computers.
Now all we need are robots to buy the houses …
Imagine a Monty Python sketch where long-suffering Arthur Pewty enters an auto dealership and is told, “Fine. Now, for the next several months workmen will come to your land, bring all the car parts to your driveway, and assemble them then and there.”
“And you and your family will have to live in a hotel the entire time!”
“We’ll have to barricade the entire street, and of course if it rains we’ll have to stop work indefinitely.” Yet such is the production model we tolerate for home building.
For over seventy years, pioneering entrepreneurs have sought to become the Henry Ford of housing. It’s become something of a Fountain of Youth: many tried, none have succeeded. We have had:
- The 1916 Sears House Kit
Sears kit house in Carlinville, Illinois
- Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1939 Usonian house (Wright’s neologism, a conflation of
A scale model Usonian house.
The Pope Leighey House in
- The 1947 Lustron house, introduced to great fanfare in
At last, the nation would see if a large, highly capitalized firm could usher in a new age of affordable factory-made housing. The efficiencies of mass production, integrated manufacturing, and economies of scale promised to lead the American housing industry away from its decentralized, undercapitalized, and inefficient past toward a level of rationalization and organization already found in most other sectors of industrial economy. As Senator Ralph
A Lustron model home constructed in
Unfortunately, Lustron never did work economically:
Once hailed as the best hope for the industrialization of housing, by the early 1950s Lustron collapsed amid foreclosure and bankruptcy proceedings. The company had produced only 2,498 houses. Founded with the goal of providing affordable single family dwellings for wage earners, the “mass market” for mass production, the company ultimately was unable to provide a house which most wage earners could afford. Without access to the market segment which rationalized large-scale production, the Lustron experiment made little economic sense. Lustron’s failure marked a watershed in the history of the American prefabricated housing industry. Although people did not “quit talking” about factory-made housing, enthusiasm for its role in the transformation of the housing industry at large markedly waned.
HUD Secretary (and former auto executive) George Romney’s 1969 Operation Breakthrough modular housing
Romney, Nixon’s HUD secretary, was convinced that integrating the suburbs, both economically and racially, was necessary to end poverty and resolve racial conflict. With the assistance of key HUD staff members, he initiated two extensive programs: Operation Breakthrough and Open Communities. Operation Breakthrough was designed primarily to build a substantial amount of federally-assisted low- and moderate-income housing in both urban and suburban areas. As HUD’s general policy moved toward housing desegregation, however, “Breakthrough soon came to represent more than a large-scale attempt to build low-cost housing; it was used to help spearhead desegregation” (p.63). Not surprisingly, the program provoked hostile reactions from many of the communities targeted as demonstration sites, especially the suburbs. Despite guarantees that communities which accepted the new low-cost housing would receive top priority for funding from other HUD programs, local officials mounted heavy opposition to the program.
None of these ever caught on in
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same,
Inspired by Daly City,
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
Pete, the people of Daly City,
And there’s doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
Now, via a Chicago Tribune story (free registration required), comes the most recent effort:
[Part 2 concludes tomorrow.]
