Modular Fabrication

Many more U.S. folks live in mobile homes ("manufactured homes" if you want to be snobbish about them) than receive federal housing assistance (e.g. public housing and housing choice...

Truly, deeply affordable housing using traditional building methods is the housing development industry's way of throwing up a 'road closed' sign. Government subsidies would seem to be the preferred...

For the one in a million among you who lies abed before sleeping, mouth tingling from mentholated toothbrushing, and wonders whether the world's housing crisis can be solved by...

Can high-tech imagination-tickling 3-D house-printing out-wrestle factory-based cookie-cutter modular homes and solve international housing affordable housing crises? Straight from the 3-D horse's mouth (a 3-D printing mag), the answer is...

Is there anyone in the world not familiar with what has become known as "flat-pack" technology, thanks to its international masters, IKEA. Build your own day-bed complete with blanket drawers...

Can flexibility added to brutalism be enough to make concrete walls into cozy homes? When the contest is fictional architecture,See: FICTIONAL ARCHITECTURE a real-life answer is not as important...

Imagine: worried housing academics, historians, designers and activists agonizing and shaking their heads over the "new chic" — privately purchased and refurbished social housing apartments — unadorned brick towers...

These days, city governments must work to balance the demands of residents of all stripes, from the comfortable and complacent to the needy and struggling. They are forced to...

As a resident of a solidly-built, flat-roofed 1928 apartment building, a good-news modular housing story from the UK positively sends shivers up my spine. Oh no! We'll no longer be...

"Taking the UK by storm?" Well, we're introducing an industry magazine article today, and it's perhaps understandable that this particular piece of their prose is a little hypersonic, particularly...

P1030355.1 (factory) photo by lkajsdfl is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 So. You have a local or regional need for affordable housing modules? Where should the manufacturing be sited? Let's take...

Believe you can and you're halfway there — Teddy Roosevelt Whatever happened to 'can-do?' A recent UK story raises the issue, one that arguably applies on both sides of the...

Dare we suggest that Google, or at least its sibling, is lumbering? Based on its proposal to revolutionize housing by wiring everything to everyone in a Toronto Smart City...

When it comes to affordable housing crises, there are are some potential benefits to be gained from viewing the crisis from a disaster perspective. This is particularly true where...

On one hand, modular housing offers building techniques that can result in more affordable housing construction. On the other, homebuilders prefer to keep using construction techniques they understand which allow...

What's in a word?  'Modules' (or modular construction) seems to mean pretty much the same thing as 'prefabrication.' Aren't they both ways of describing some element of a building,...

Everyone is happier working with the known, not the unknown, and the housing industry is no exception. For those building houses for the free market, construction know-how includes an...

Okay, so you don't want to live in a maxi-cupboard on a parking space foorprint, a.k.a  a Hong Kong apartment. But on the other hand you don't need a...

Let's take the following media declaration at face value: "4 Out Of 5 Americans say there is a housing affordability crisis." Based on a sample of 20,000 people that's...

This modular housingHouses, or components of houses, that are constructed at an off site factory and transported to their final destination. initiative intrigued and impressed us here at affordablehousingaction.org....

Swedish construction company Skanska, in partnership with well-known furniture retailer Ikea wants to build affordable housing in Worthing, Sussex, UK. 30% of the BloKlok partnership's modular housing project will be set...

Can government or charitable grants and subsidies fuel a housing revolution and overcome today's affordability crisis? If so, it's sure not happening yet, if ever. Alternatives? Turns out they're popping...

The idea of modular housing has been around for a while. World-famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the modular units shown above more than a hundred years ago. More recently...

It seems that modular construction, at least in New York City, has been something of a colicky baby. Consider the following hopeful-trending-hopeless headline and article from CURBED NEW YORK: Modular Construction...

Gaze upwards through the reinforced skylight of your condo high-rise tower, one that has been tipped to the horizontal and is buried under a major airport runway. The sky...

Question for cruise affectionados: where do you get to enjoy the sea air, the company of hundreds if not thousands, guarantee of no waves large enough cause motion sickness,...

A California 'homelessness housing' design competition has announced winners from some 53 developers who entered a Los Angeles County innovation challenge. The winners are expected to use their prizes, which...

The Challenge: More governments, both local and national, are coming to grips with an affordable housing crisis using the fashionable tools of the day. They are finding those tools wanting....

Imagine a home that builds itself. Not only that, when brought to a site as a packed container, it is capable of unpacking itself without any power source, using...

In neighbourly America, homelessness belongs somewhere else, it doesn't matter where. And what about homes to house the homeless? They also belong somewhere else. It also doesn't matter where....

A modular housing factory in rural Quebec province is sending more and more housing units across the Canada/U.S. border to destinations in the Boston, Massachusetts region. Long disparaged by the...

Homes built from sturdy but no longer seaworthy shipping containers have been, among other things, a subset of affordable 'tiny house living' explorations for a few years now. Shipping containers...

The warnings to watch out have been echoing within North America's conventional housing industry. Take the idea expressed in an industry magazine Builder article earlier this year: that successful construction industry...

Builder, a construction industry magazine, predicted in March 2018 in an article — The Real Data On Entry-Level Home Buying Affordability — that if the conventional housing industry doesn't address...

The shoemaker is sticking to his last. For 'shoemaker' read 'the conventional housing construction industry.' Their 'last'? Market rate and luxury housing. Hard to blame them. That's where they're...

In an age of increasing homelessness, the alarm is sounding in civic councils. They are struggling to find constructive, supportive ways to tackle the problem of people with nowhere...

Here's another theme, this one showing up in modular home-building articles we've been reading from around the globe. When it comes to factory-built homes, whether fully completed in-factory, or...

Getting on for 20 years ago, Peel Region (next door to Toronto) contracted with a private business to build an emergency shelter on a municipally owned site using modular...