How an American Dream of (modular construction) Housing Became a Reality in Sweden

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building houses like a Volvo

paywall free link. LOOOONG article

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/headway/how-an-american-dream-of-housing-became-a-reality-in-sweden.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yk0.BZS-.vMAdDrTbopjp&smid=url-share



How an American Dream of Housing Became a Reality in Sweden
The U.S. once looked to modular construction as an efficient way to build lots of housing at scale, but Sweden picked up the idea and put it into practice

As an architect, Ivan Rupnik thinks the solution to America’s affordable housing shortage is obvious: Build more houses. Start today. But the way homes are built in the United States makes speed impossible.

Years ago, Rupnik’s Croatian grandmother, an architect herself, pointed him to an intriguing answer to this conundrum: modular housing projects built in Europe in the 1950s and ’60s. Rupnik was awed. Sure, prefab complexes, and especially Soviet bloc housing, could be ugly and too homogenous, but the process created millions of housing units in a flash.

Hooked, Rupnik started researching modular housing for his doctoral dissertation. In the archives of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, he stumbled upon a reference in an old journal article that took him by surprise: an industrialized housing initiative called Operation Breakthrough that built nearly 3,000 units between 1971 and 1973 — in the United States. How had he never heard about it?

It turned out few people had. Unable to find much more information, Rupnik turned to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which created the program. In 1969, when Operation Breakthrough was announced, HUD was less than four years old and affordable housing was still a bipartisan issue. The plan’s visionary, HUD Secretary George Romney, a former Republican governor and Nixon appointee (and, yes, Mitt’s father) pitched it as Economics 101: If you quickly increase the supply of housing, you drive down the price for all.

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In June 2023, I joined one of the firm’s research trips. The team wanted to see what housing in the United States might be like if Congress hadn’t canceled Operation Breakthrough. We flew to Sweden to find out.