30 January 2023 — 1020 mst

Is Oregon’s “mass timber” an answer?

Can prefabrication make housing more affordable?

By James Conner

For relatively simple structures, prefabrication in an indoor environment, a technology with which I have some experience, puts together structures faster and more efficiently than stick building them onsite, and permits better quality control.

Unfortunately, most prefabricated buildings are simple, and many look cheap. Examples are sheds and house trailers, the latter marketed as “manufactured homes.”

Trailer houses, of course, have a bad reputation for being cheaply built and looking ugly. Consequently, many neighborhood zoned residential prohibit manufactured homes even if those homes are placed on a permanent foundation.

But there is no reason why all prefabricated homes must be poorly designed, cheaply built, and unsuitable for traditional single family neighborhoods.

Oregon, the Associated Press reports, is experimenting with prefabricating small — 426 to 1,136 square feet — homes using mass timber.

Mass timber, of course, is a material. It is not the only material that can be used for prefabricated home. What’s more important is the design. The AP’s photograph of the prototype mass timber home shows a structure that looks suspiciously like a trailer house. It will of course, be described as a row house or a railroad car house, designed for very narrow lots.

But better, more attractive, designs are possible.

For Montana, I envision prefabbed homes in the 700 to 1,200 square foot range, some rectangular, some L shaped, all designed by architects to be attractive and to be aesthetically compatible with standard subdivisions of modest single family homes. They would be built with quality materials and to tight tolerances, with effective quality control.

Montana prefabs should be superinsulated and all electric, designed to be heated and cooled with heat pumps.

Designing and prefabricating attractive, high quality, affordable homes is the easy part. The hard part is doing it a a cost that puts the finished product in reach of schoolteachers, nurses, bartenders, carpenters, and factory workers.

Prefabrication cuts costs through economies of scale and standardization. But that is not enough. Costs must be limited to wages (pay union scale), materials, and prefabrication facility overhead.

Doing that requires that a government chartered and financed nonprofit housing authority operate the prefabrication factories.

A housing authority that produces affordable housing would free traditional building contractors to concentrate on the highly profitable high end custom home market at which they excel. There’s a shortage of all kinds of housing, so there would be enough work for everyone and no practical undercutting of private enterprise by government.

Money to get started could come out of Montana’s $2 billion budget surplus.

There is plenty of space in the Flathead to accomodate a prefabrication factory, and many raw materials for the homes are produced locally.

Would finding skilled workers for the prefab factories be a problem? I think it would be an ideal opportunity for Ukrainian refugees. Ukrainians are technologically savvy, Christians, and have a strong work ethic. They would fit right in.

Prefabricated homes could make a significant difference in our efforts to provide affordable housing. We should start building them.