I had wondered why housing construction is such a messed up process, considering the high demand these days for new, affordable housing. This article explains a lot. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to buy a new home and a bit of land for 10k?

This is all about mass production “Levittowns”. Not factory built homes in general. For most of their history, they didn’t make prefabbed home, but instead built every home on site. They merely used the same plan for every home and leveraged economies of scale to make them cheaper. It wasn’t until much later that they got into prefab homes.

Reasons for business failure

• Falling demand
• Land use controls became much stricter and more burdensome
• The U.S. housing market collapsed in 1973
• economies of scale are offset by huge overheads making the enterprise not all that effective
• being acquired for too much money and then mismanaged

Prefabricated homes are still a thing. But not these huge cookie-cutter developments of 15,000 of the same home in one town.