HOUSING: Factory-Built Solution?

Are prefabricated houses the answer to the nation’s housing shortage? The nation’s prefabricators have answered: maybe. If they can get materials, they have estimated that they can turn out some 150,000 units in 1946, some 30,000 in the next three months. Impressed, CPAdmin-istrator John D. Small last week sat down with prefabricators, worked out a tentative plan to get them the materials.

But material shortages were not the only obstacle. Most of the major companies were not yet ready to produce.

¶ Gunnison Homes. Inc., a U.S. Steel subsidiary, expects to be the biggest U.S. producer of prefabricated houses. President Foster Gunnison plans to have his New Albany, Ind. plant (which made 4,500 houses before the war) in production by March. It will turn out a complete house every 25 minutes. A new $1,200,000 factory will be in production by August. Retail prices: from $3,500 to $8,000 (including cost of erection, plumbing fixtures, electrical refrigerators).

¶ Precision-Built Homes Corp. will offer 40 models priced from $3,700 to $10,000. President F. Vaux Wilson Jr. shuns the word “prefabrication” (as does many another company), proudly points out that Precision-Built will build according to architect’s plans selected by individual customers. Builder Wilson originally founded the company to help sell his Homasote wallboards, built 5,000 houses in 138 days for the U.S. Navy in Portsmouth, Va. Department stores are now taking orders. But Precision’s Milwaukee plant will not be in production until spring.

¶ American Houses, Inc. started in 1932 with an unconventional steel-framed “Motohome,” junked it, when it did not sell, in favor of conventional designs. Now, American’s President John C. Taylor Jr. has his six plants tuned up to make some 7,000 units a year—as soon as materials are available. The houses will be sold only to contractors. Prices: $2,700 to $20,000.

¶ Anchorage Homes, Inc. is now building a $600,000 plant in Westfield, Mass., which will have a capacity of 16 houses a day, 41 different architectural designs. Prices: $3,600 to $7,500. But Anchorage President W. W. Rausch does not think that production will begin till summer.

¶ Brooklyn’s Johnson Quality Homes built some 34,000 temporary housing units during the war, hopes to produce some 5,000 permanent houses this year. Its seven models now in production range from $2,500-to $6,100, less cost of shipping, land, etc. Total cost: about double.

The only house, at present, which could be manufactured chiefly of new materials and on a truly mass-production basis is one prefabricated in the ever-fertile imagination of R. Buckminster (“Dymaxion”) Fuller (TIME, Oct. 11, 1943). With an eye to production by planemakers, the dreamhouse consists of an aluminum and plastic circular shell supported by a central stainless-steel shaft, instead of a conventional foundation. Newly formed Fuller Houses, Inc. (former name: Dymaxion Dwelling Machines, Inc.) hopes to license upwards of 70 manufacturers to produce 185,000 units a year. But the only licensee to date is Wichita’s Beech Aircraft Corp. It has produced only two test models, and price and final design are not yet fixed. Beech expects to be in production this spring.

Even if prefabricators do get into large-scale production soon, they will still have one hurdle to jump, highest of all. Many a U.S. town, spurred by featherbedding unions and building contractors, has building codes which ban prefabricated houses outright or contain tricky regulations which factory-built dwellings cannot meet. And many a buyer will also find that members of A.F. of L.’s building-trades unions will not wire, install plumbing, or assemble a prefabricated house.