The Prefab FadPrefabrication is everywhere in American home-building. But that doesn't mean your next house is going to be a stylish, Modernist box.

Remarks from the Fray:

A great example of mid-century prefab homes are the Lustron houses built (assembled) from 1949-1950. They were made entirely of enameled steel panels inside and out, came in parts on a truck and assembled on site. There were around 2,500 built and around 1,500 remain now. A large number were built as military housing in Quantico, VA and now sadly are being destroyed to make way for more conventional housing. I have owned a Lustron for the past 3 years and love the lack of maintance of a 50+ year old home.

--buckloy

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While I enjoyed the photos and history lesson, some of the statements lead the reader to the absolutely wrong conclusion. For example, while [mobile homes] can be towed away, the vast, overwhelming majority are towed away solely to the dump. I've yet to meet a mobile home owner who has moved his house from one lot to another.

Because the lots are leased, rather than purchased, the home owner is at the mercy of his lot owner, generally a mobile home park. Rents can and are raised and the fact the house will unlikely survive a move, holds the home owner hostage to the increases. Many parks do not allow used homes to be brought in, so even if the house were to survive the move, they are few places to go. Worse, the cost of disassembly and re-connection often exceeds that of a newly purchased home.

The so-called benefit here turns out to be the greatest burden. While the association with the poor doesn't help these homes image, the serious impractical nature of them is the fatal blow. Only under the most desperate of circumstances is this a viable way to own a home.

--MacAdvisor

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The potential of prefabricated housing is in outsourcing. What will be the price per square foot when they are made in China, Africa or South America -- or any other place where monetary exchange rates or the availability of slave labor allows us to buy skilled labor at $1 per hour?

Though the American poor may benefit from cheap houses (at the expense of American construction workers), it won't help the middle class much. The main cost of middle-class housing is not in the structure but rather in the land/location -- and it is the very high price of the location that makes a location desirable.

To be desirable, a location must be safe and must have good schools. To be safe and have good schools, a neighborhood must exclude disadvantaged families whose children often have educational and social problems -- children who are at greatest risk of falling into gangs and street crime. To exclude such families a neighborhood must be priced beyond their reach; it must be priced even beyond the reach of disadvantaged families with Section 8 housing subsidies.

Until small communities are allowed greater control over the sort of people who are permitted to live there (e.g. by expelling single mothers whose children act out), middle class families will have little option but to continue sacrificing child-rearing so that so that both parents can dedicate themselves to lucrative but demanding careers, raising their 1.5 children in expensive, gated communities.

Unfortunately, this response will weaken our country's economic base in the long run, leaving future generations with a much smaller middle-class tax base. The effect will be as if the entire nation suffered from "white flight."

--fsilber

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(8/8)

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