On University Hill in Boulder, you happen upon this Craftsman style bungalow in what looks like its originally intended form. There's a welcome absence of those awkward second-story additions that real estate agents have taken to calling "pop-ups", as though all old houses are somehow yearning to release their inner Clashing Additions, like English muffins springing out of a toaster...
Intrigued, you walk around the place. It's well-maintained, with an array of photovoltaic panels on the roof that shows the owners' concern for their carbon footprint. Another thing that would keep the carbon footprint down is the actual footprint; the house is modestly sized. In a country where the average new single family house in 2021 was just under 2,500 square feet, this one appears well under the average. If you're a follower of historic residential architecture, though, there is something vaguely familiar about this house, so you take some pictures before you move on...
From 1908 until 1940, Sears, Roebuck & Co. offered kit houses as part of their Modern Homes catalog. Over 70,000 of these kit houses were sold in a variety of styles (around 370) and sizes, before sales wound down during 1942. These houses were shipped to buyers in boxes containing wood framing elements, doors, windows, siding and trim, all marked for location. Think of that IKEA bookcase you may have bought, only even more of a pain to assemble. It turns out, though, that buyers saved plenty of money by ordering the components this way, compared with paying a contractor to source them. Also, as the houses were already designed, there was no architect's fee (hmm...sorry, fellow architects), though there was the cost of engineering and building the foundation, which needed to relate to various soil conditions, sloping vs. flat sites, etc. Our University Hill example happens to be a Sears Oakdale...
In the mid-Twenties, when the Oakdale was still offered in this friendly-looking Craftsman style, the kit price was just under $1,800. For comparison, in 1925 a new Ford Model T was yours for $260, in factory-fresh black. By the Thirties, Sears had restyled the Oakdale, removing some of its homey charm. But it was still a bargain...
This version of the Oakdale turns out to have an enclosed back porch in compatible style, and a garage that is not of Sears origin. The overall condition of the house is evidence of the likelihood that people still feel at home here...
This might be a good moment to point out that after World War II, shortly after Sears got out of the kit house business, there was a revival of interest in manufactured housing in the USA, in order to meet the demand for housing created by legions of young people leaving the military and starting families. One effort launched in Chicago was Lustron Homes, prefabricated in steel using manufacturing techniques employed in the car industry, and with enameled steel exterior panels. Unlike the kit houses, the components on these prefabricated houses were combined into subassemblies for speedier results. Opposition to these prefab designs came from construction unions, who saw them as a threat, and from various building and zoning departments, whose expertise was based on traditional construction techniques and whose codes failed to allow for new methods. Lustron folded after 1950. Most of the suburban sprawl that accommodated the postwar housing boom was achieved using conventional on-site construction.
How much of it was conventional? Well, according to eyeonhousing.org, the total US market share of non site-built single-family houses (that is, modular or panelized) was only 2% in 2021. According to Dwell Magazine, the prefabricated share of the new single-family housing market in Scandinavia that year was 80%. By the late Fifties, Scandinavian firms were pioneering prefabricated, modular and panelized designs. Their design, detailing and provisions for energy efficiency in these have kept up with technical advances. Equally important, zoning codes throughout Scandinavia encourage these houses, and building codes address the technical aspects. By contrast, when we designed a house addition based upon modifying steel shipping containers in Denver in 2014, the building department was uncertain about whether this constituted a prefabricated house, and delayed approval while searching for a category under which it could be evaluated. Manufacturers like Pluspuu in Finland offer a variety of configurations emphasizing energy efficiency, in sizes that have increasingly vanished from American cities and suburbs owing to land costs. The logic seems to dictate that with land prices high, one needs to build as big as zoning allows to maximize profit. As a result, the late 70s was the peak period for small home builds (averaging 1,400 sq. ft.), averaging over 450,000 per year, but that number is now around 60,000 in the US.
Allowing accessory dwellings on standard lots would help provide more affordable housing, at the small cost of rewriting some low-density single-family zoning. Adapting zoning to allow more multi-unit housing and allowing modular construction for that would also offer a path out of the housing crunch. A coordinated approach encouraging multi-use zoning and adaptive re-use of often-abandoned but sound buildings in rural downtowns could also provide housing, especially for those who can now work at home, and don't need to be near a large urban center...
It's all enough to make you wonder if Scandinavians know something we Americans don't know. As potential first-time buyers are confronted with an impenetrable housing market offering oversized, wasteful, uninspired choices, it's probably time for zoning changes that allow greater density, and for building code changes that allow for more prefabrication, including kit and modular houses, and for architects and designers to offer something more connected to the way a whole new generation of housing consumers wants to live.
*Footnote: For Part 2 of this long-interrupted series on mobile, modular, prefabricated and kit houses, please see "Mobile vs. Prefab: If It Can't Go Anywhere Can It At Least Look Like Home?", in our archives for August 3, 2017. In that post, we visited modular and prefab housing exhibits in Chicago and New York, reported on an innovative reconfiguring of a mobile home by CU students here in Boulder, and also showed a factory-built house in Finland.
Photo Credits
Color shots of the Sears Oakdale house in Boulder are by the author. The monochrome shot of the Oakdale with plan is from the Sears Roebuck Modern Homes Division, while the perspective of the Craftsman style version above it is from searshouseseeker.com. The color shots of the Pluspuu houses are from pluspuu.fi. The bottom shot of the Norwegian kit structures is from katus.eu.
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