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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
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March 2025 #17308 Page #10
Homebuilding Technology, Part III: Overcoming the Prefab Stigma
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ven though 500,000 prefab homes were built for World War II, builders were not committed to the prefabrication approach. But why not? These homes should have served as an entré to the future use of components by the hundreds of builders who constructed government housing in hundreds of communities. But the results of a 1943 survey showed that less than one-quarter of builders planned to use shopfabricated parts after the war. Many believed that wartime housing was of poor quality, regardless of the actual quality of any trusses used in them. There was opposition to ongoing governmental involvement in housing after the war, which builders felt was usurping their opportunities. And finally, those who built these half-million homes had to fabricate trusses under challenging jobsite conditions, which also discouraged the continuation of these practices.
By Joe Kannapell
Many of prefab’s quality issues arose from the type of housing that was constructed, which was designated to be temporary or demountable, intended to be disassembled after the war. While most of these housing units were fully componentized, the parts were mostly fabricated onsite, in all types of weather, at an extremely demanding pace. The panels were bolted together, and the trusses were set 4’ on-center, which deviated from standard framing practices and implied substandard quality. Few of the amenities associated with permanent structures were provided, further diminishing the overall quality. Thus, traditional builders generalized from that experience and cast dispersions toward all prefabrication. One survey of 40,000 dwellings being built in Los Angeles in 1946 found that “an overwhelming percentage were conventional in type and were being built by the same builders who had been erecting homes there before the war. Some of the prefab outfits, who turned out shoddy houses a year or so ago, are finding the going tough now that the conventional builders are underway.” Traditional builders’ animosity was surely compounded by the fact that their resistance to the use of components during the war years had severely restricted their opportunities during that time. Thus, this resistance plus the stigma of “poor quality” continued to taint prefabrication long into the future. The government’s apparent preference for this “shoddy” type of housing even after the War also frustrated homebuilders. In an effort to alleviate the severe shortage of housing, President Truman signed legislation to expedite housing construction. However, a bureaucrat named Wilson Wyatt determined that up to 850,000 prefabricated units needed to be built by 1947. This caused a huge outcry by the National Association of Homebuilders and its local homebuilder affiliates, who already faced material shortages and were slowly recovering after the war years. Continued next page
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