Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1]

 

For more than seventy years, visionary architects, engineers, entrepreneurs, and public officials have sought the elusive cheaply replicable house:

 

He tried in 1939

He tried in 1947

 

He tried in 1969

 

PORT ARTHUR, Texas — It’s a modest little house, perched atop piers, and its very existence among the neighborhood’s other homes gives no clue it came in a box.

 

It’s not a mobile home and it’s not stick-frame construction. It could be part of the solution to where a veritable army of workers might live during the years it will take to build a variety of industrial projects.

Port Arthur builder Richard J. Daley opens the door to the 900-square-foot house and flips the switch on a wall-size air-conditioning unit. The little appliance, he said, will cool the place in a few minutes.

 

With the evolving modern home, 900 square feet is sub-minimal.  Back in the days of Levittown, 900 square feet was considered a starter house.  Today it’s a market one-bedroom apartment. 

That’s because the walls are panels of 3-inch-thick foam, similar to cold-storage warehouses.
Daley has 62 acres of land on which he’d like to site some of his House in a Box creations.
“The floors fold down. The panels are stacked within it. It’s plumbed and wired.” “

 

House-in-a-box being unfolded.

 

The house is steel-frame construction. The frame outline of the box in which the panels are contained is visible.

The panels already contain conduits for utilities and wiring.  Palibroda said four experienced assemblers need less than a week to create a livable home from the box it comes in.

In effect, this is circuit-board modularity applied to the home — a sound idea.  Building in conduits is critical with house evolution demanding ever-more-sophisticated broadband nervous systems.

 

“There are lots of add-ons you can do,” he said.

 

Personalizing improvement is a psychological benefit of ownership rather than rental; many is the subdivision all of whose houses began life identical but who have over the years sprouted porches, garages, additions, and even second stories.

The interior features two ground-floor bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, sitting area, and spiral staircase to a loft.

 

In an area where older housing were ripped to shreds by Hurricane Rita, an inexpensive, energy-efficient home built to city code — including resistance to 130 m.p.h. winds — could answer a lot of logistical questions about housing for thousands of workers.

 

Emphasis on the conditional.  It’s unproven, and not market-accepted.

Jim Palibroda is the inventor and patent holder of House in a Box and owns the one here.
In a telephone interview, he said he originally had planned to develop the concept in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit.

 

The 900-square-foot-model

 

Construction cost is less than $50 per square foot [$45,000 plus land for the 900-square foot home, a genuine bargain — Ed.], and the price could drop even more if Palibroda is able to create a manufacturing plant.

 

With massive destruction comes massive reconstruction opportunity, and have sudden volume flood could (yes, emphasis on the conditional) be the stimulus to get the manufacturing to scale quickly.

 

 

“Panel housing is being used a lot in Florida,” Palibroda said. “It’s got R-25 insulation factor, it’s reinforced to 130 mph, and it’s coming into its own, particularly for communities that don’t want trailers.”

 

There’s that anti-trailer-park snobbery resurfacing.  Meanwhile, boom town Port Arthur has an urgent need:

Verna Rutherford, president of the Port Arthur Chamber of Commerce, has been in contact with about a half-dozen major contractors who are looking at future industrial projects, trying to figure out where workers would live.

“They’re going to need places to rehab, build or lease,” she said. “One of the larger contractors needs lodging for 3,000 and is starting a year out,” she said.

 

Many’s the town founded by a gold rush:

 

Shingle Springs, Colorado, circa 1890

 

Once the projects are completed, the new homes or the rehabilitated spaces could be available on the real estate market and provide affordable housing, Rutherford said.

“There is a lot of housing development going on in the area anyway,” she said. “But there’s a need for lower-end housing too.”

“This is much greater than one city,” she said. “It’s more massive that that.”

Indeed it is, although we must end with the recollections of one wistful entrepreneurial historian:

 

TechHomes is our little black sheep. Almost 30 years ago I wrote what I thought was a ground-breaking (no pun intended) paper on the subject of modular housing. It was this modular housing in the days of Operation Breakthrough and HUD Secretary George Romney that first introduced me to the joys and angst of real estate.

But try as we might with first one modular manufacturer and then another, we just haven’t found the savings in time and cost to justify the design limits of over-the-road modulars.

Meanwhile, the little modular affordable housing that could, the unassuming mobile home, keeps chugging along, at over a quarter of a million new homes per year, roughly one-sixth of all American production.

 

One-sixth of every new home dollar?

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