Bipartisan housing legislation that became law earlier this summer takes steps to encourage factory-built housing at scale.
The terms “expensive” and “housing markets” are practically synonymous these days. While several forces conspire to drive up the costs of both homeownership and renting, the main reason lies with Econ 101: too little supply relative to demand.
Experts and policymakers are increasingly intrigued by the tantalizing promise of factory-built homes to quickly boost the supply of quality housing at more reasonable prices. One ambition of the new federal housing legislation — the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — is to encourage the production of factory-built housing.
Among the companies using mass-production techniques is Christian Lawrence, founder and chief executive officer at RISE Modular. He played with Legos when he was young, and today his company is “involved in sort of life-size Lego pieces, so to speak,” he said.
RISE and its approximately 200 workers build multifamily apartments in a 150,000-square-foot factory in rural Owatonna, Minnesota. That’s about an hour drive south of the Twin Cities. Modular means the buildings are constructed in factories and assembled like Lego blocks on site to local building codes
We’re building a three-dimensional, six-sided module that has all the finishes, kitchens, bathrooms finished, and then stacking these pieces like Legos,” he said. “All the finishes are completed inside the factory before they arrive to the site.”
Inside the factory, workers swarm over a number of large wood-framed containers with spaces cut out for windows and doors — think apartment units at various stages of construction. Standing at one end of the factory, Lawrence points toward a long passageway. “This will be the corridor of the apartment building, and you can see units on either side of the corridor,” he said.
RISE operates primarily in the Midwest, Rocky Mountains, and, increasingly, the West Coast. We stepped inside one of the apartment units near the end of the assembly line. Workers are all around us. “You can see the sink is in. We’re about to install the plumbing fixtures, faucet, backsplash just got grouted,” he said. “Appliances are in.”