Millions of families now treat a starter home as a luxury good. They didn’t suddenly forget how to buy houses. We forgot how to build them cheaply.
In 1950, the average new American home cost about 2.2 times median household income. Today it’s 7–12 times in every fast-growing city—nearly 75% of households can’t afford a median-priced new home. Nothing would raise real wages faster than cutting housing costs by a third—yet we effectively outlawed the cheapest, fastest, highest-quality building method ever invented: the factory.
Sweden builds 45% of its homes in factories. Japan builds 40%. America builds just 4%—and most still imagine “manufactured homes” as double-wide trailers on cinder blocks.
Modern factory-built homes shatter that myth. They’re code-compliant, energy-efficient two-story colonials or six-story apartments constructed 70–90% indoors on assembly lines with robotic precision, then craned into place and finished in weeks.
Hard costs: $120–$180 per square foot, not $250–$400. Delivery: 4–8 months, not 12–24. Quality: superior—climate-controlled environments cut defects by up to 76% with consistent standards impossible on rain-exposed sites.
Factory building also solves America’s skilled trades shortage, where vacancies doubled since 2017 and 41% of workers near retirement. Centralized production slashes on-site labor 37% through safer indoor conditions and automation, delivering more homes without chasing scarce carpenters.
American firms like Dvele, Plant Prefab, Guerdon, Boxabl, and Factory OS already prove it—Bay Area mid-rises at half conventional costs.
So why aren’t new neighborhoods built this way? Our laws pretend Henry Ford never existed. Local codes ban modulars exceeding International Building Code standards. Highways cap module widths at 14–15 feet. Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac deem them “exotic.” Zoning blocks apartments and starters on most land—restricting where and how we build.
One clean rule fixes it (state or national): Any home/apartment built to IRC/IBC in a factory equals site-built. Same zoning. Same mortgages. Same appraisals.
Within five years:
- Factory share jumps from 4% to 30–40%.
- Costs fall 30–50%.
- Austin/Phoenix starters drop from ~$450K to $280K–$320K.
- California units from ~$750K to ~$400K.
- +1–1.5M units/year from speed alone.
Sweden, Japan, Texas, even California get it. This isn’t left or right. The factories, workers, and desperate buyers wait. America needs political courage to embrace homes built indoors by precision machines—not 1955 relics.