How an American Dream of Housing Became a Reality in Sweden – The New York Times

As an architect, Ivan Rupnik thinks the solution to Americas 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, Rupniks 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 plans visionary, HUD Secretary George Romney, a former Republican governor and Nixon appointee (and, yes, Mitts father) pitched it as Economics 101: If you quickly increase the supply of housing, you drive down the price for all.

Romney said the country needed to build 26 million houses in 10 years, almost three times as many as had been built in the previous 10. Industrializing construction, he argued, was the only way to do it.

While nearly every other industry has become more productive since 1968, productivity in home-building the amount of work done by one worker in one hour, essentially has declined by half. The country is barely building enough to maintain the status quo, which is some four million units short of need, according to Freddie Mac. In the coming years, with population growth, climate change and the natural deterioration of housing stock, well only need more.

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How an American Dream of Housing Became a Reality in Sweden - The New York Times