Housing: Low Costs Through Instant Building

HOUSING

Low Costs Through Instant Building

The fleet of trucks rumbled out of National Homes Corp.’s prefabrication plant in Lafayette, Ind., shortly after midnight, laden with six-ton sections of ready-to-live-in housing. Their destination was a Chicago ghetto 125 miles away. Less than 24 hours later, tall cranes had plucked the sections from the trucks and stacked them into eight two-story, four-bedroom homes ready for occupancy.

The instant homes were the first of 200 being built in Chicago ghetto neighborhoods by National Homes and by Guerdon Industries. Equipped with factory-installed kitchen appliances, one-piece glass-fiber bathrooms and even air conditioning, they sell for only $14,500. In high-cost Chicago, similar-sized homes built by time-consuming conventional methods would ordinarily carry price tags of about $25,000. Thanks to such easy terms as $350 down and monthly mortgage payments of $125, National’s module homes will reach families with incomes as low as $6,500 a year.

The Chicago project symbolizes today’s expanding effort by both government and private enterprise to reach the long-elusive goal of providing good low-cost dwellings for the nation’s poor and near poor. Over the past three decades, Washington has poured some $6.5 billion into housing subsidies and urban renewal, committed at least another $13 billion as yet unspent to the same controversial programs. Yet one recent White House report estimated that 8,300,000 Americans still cannot afford a decent place to live.

The attempt to close that gap is part technological, part financial, part political. In big cities, building-trades unions have long been a major obstacle to fully industrialized housing—buildings with huge parts preassembled in a factory instead of handcrafted at the site from myriad bits and pieces. That money-saving process increases the employment of industrial workers but reduces the need for highly paid (up to $7.30 an hour) building craftsmen at the site. When Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley started flexing his political muscles, however, the unions agreed not only to erect factory-fabricated units, which had long been excluded from Chicago, but to hire neighborhood residents (most of them Negroes) as apprentices on such work.

Better in Stacks. Instant-housing projects, often financed through public housing authorities, have also appeared in such cities as Atlanta, Rochester and Detroit. Many of the modules come from mobile-home manufacturers, whose ever-increasing output (up 32% this year) now accounts for a quarter of all single-family homes built in the U.S. Mobile homes ordinarily win few architectural prizes, but lately builders have learned how to stack them in handsome configurations. At Puffton Village in Amherst, Mass., for instance, Magnolia Homes teamed up with a developer to create a striking community of 104 apartments from 12-ft. by 56-ft. sections hauled all the way from its plant at South Hill, Va.

Correctly foreseeing that the U.S. faces a decade of sharply increasing demands for shelter, many big corporations are devising cost-cutting ways to snare a share of the market. Urban Systems Development Corp., a newly formed subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric, is building a project of 100 town houses in Montgomery County, Md. Crane Co. is building whole bathrooms, and Borg-Warner has devised a bathroom-kitch-en module for use in slum rehabilitation. Both United States Gypsum and National Gypsum Co. have experimented with rehabilitation, and U.S.G. branched out earlier this year by investing $1,000,000 in a Memphis firm that aims to build large projects of low-cost new homes.

From Cities to Farms. Much of the current push comes from the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act, which HUD Secretary Robert C. Weaver calls “a new and major national commitment to the problems of cities.” The act gives the nation the optimistic goal of building 26 million housing units in ten years, as against the 14 million actually built in the past decade.

The goal will be difficult to reach. Congress has already proved tightfisted with appropriations. Beyond that, builders correctly fear that any sudden leap toward 2,600,000 homes a year would sharply increase the already serious inflation in construction costs. Land and materials prices have jumped sharply, and a severe shortage of carpenters, plumbers, electricians and bricklayers has led to soaring wage rates in many cities. All kinds of external pressures, from big-lot zoning to archaic building codes (which are often kept restrictive by local labor and political pressures), are making it increasingly difficult to erect low-cost housing.

In rural parts of the U.S., where building codes, union labor and obstructive bureaucrats are scarce, imaginative architects and builders have lately achieved some triumphs. To replace the reeking hovels inhabited by California migrant farm workers, Berkeley Architects Sanford Hirshen and Sim Van der Ryn designed $1,200 shelters of paper and plastic foam that fold up like accordions. So far, 20 communities of these and similar quarters have been built with a combination of funds provided by localities, the Rosenberg Foundation and the Economic Opportunity Act. Kingsberry Homes, a division of Idaho-based Boise Cascade Corp., sells $4,750 prefab packages to Alabama and Louisiana farm laborers under a little-known self-help loan program of the Farmers Home Administration. Kingsberry’s customers pay only $100 down, save money by erecting the homes themselves, and have 33 years to repay the 4% loans. Most of them formerly occupied plantation shacks that lacked even such basic amenities as running water.

A Better Chance. For all its promise, new technology will yield no miracles. Some experts calculate that even a 50% cut in construction costs would save consumers only about 15% in rents because of high operating costs, spiraling land prices, local realty taxes and interest charges. Still, that is a goal worth reaching. The biggest problem is getting well-known new methods used. Despite their cooperative attitude in Chicago, labor unions are widely expected to balk when today’s modular programs grow larger. And some black militants already complain that instant houses are mere “crackerboxes.”

Despite such obstacles, the nation still has a better chance than it has had in decades to break housing’s cost-inflating shackles, if only because rising housing demand may soon make it all but impossible to build any other way.