Everyone says we need more affordable housing units. Not just more housing but affordable and that’s the problem. Affordability in major cities may never be a reality with the limited amount of land and services. Add in transportation to that mix and soon you have to live 50-100 miles from a city to find even a chance of buying or renting an affordable place.
What would it take to make Brooklyn affordable for workers who don’t have a college degree, render San Francisco accessible to families with kids and elderly couples on fixed incomes, or allow extended-family members in Boston to buy apartments within a few blocks of one another? We have no policy vision of how to make our biggest, most productive places affordable for all, and no plan to get there.
To keep their housing costs in line with their income, millions of families do not live where they want to or in the kinds of homes they want to or with the people they want to. When the mortgage on a townhouse is too costly, families keep renting their run-down apartments. When a third bedroom costs too much, parents give up on having a third kid.
The problem is large, if not exclusively, the result of the country not permitting enough homes where people want them. Although some communities in the interior of the country, especially in the South, have allowed housing construction to keep up with rapid population growth, the superstar metro areas of the Northeast and West Coast have not.
The track builders and developers have the best chance to fill the housing need but how many living units will have to be added in order to finally make housing affordable? 10,000? 30,000? 100,000 living units per city?
The missing piece to this problem is having modular construction begin to fill the void that tract builders and developers can’t currently fill. We need 5,500,000 additional homes to add enough living units to lower rents and housing costs and at our current resources, it could take a decade or more to add these affordable living units to what we already produce a year.
Most modular factories in the US have a production capacity of 20 modules a week with a few capable of hitting 40 or more. Unfortunately, labor shortages are restricting that capacity today and the future doesn’t look much better.
Lots of developers are wanting to turn to modular housing in the form of single-family, townhouses and apartments as well as dormitories, hotels and other buildings that can be produced in standard repetitive modules. Even if every single modular factory in the country suddenly was able to produce to its total capacity, it wouldn’t begin to make a dent in the amount needed for even one city.
What is needed is a lot more modular factories designed for one purpose, producing repetitive living units as fast as possible for as many hours a week as it can.
This brings up a whole new set of problems if we want modular to solve this situation. First, where will all these factories come from as they don’t grow on trees? Second, it has been estimated we will need to add more than 200 factories within the next 2 years to begin turning out enough modules to begin making a real dent in affordable housing.
Next, where do we find the labor, the investors, the set crews, the finish crews, the land, the infrastructure, etc? How do we get these units through zoning and planning boards for approvals quicker?
None of this can be solved quickly and in fact, I’m not sure it will ever be solved because while we try to solve them, environmentalists are pushing for cleaner, greener construction materials adding thousands of dollars to each unit to help save the planet. The anti-fossil fuel movement will force construction companies to look for higher efficiency heating and cooling which adds more dollars and let’s not forget all those impact fees that are being forced onto every developer.
Not only can’t modular home factories grow on trees, but there also may not be enough trees left for them to grow on.
If you have a suggestion, please let us hear it.
Gary Fleisher is the Editor in Chief of Modular Home Source and Offsite Builder. Email at [email protected]
Gary Fleisher, Editor in Chief of Offsite Construction Magazine
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