The Solution to America’s Housing Crisis Might Be Built in a Factory

Slate magazine follows our triple-decker on Gilman Street in Somerville, where three floors of housing arrived as 24 pre-fabricated modules and were assembled on-site in four days. It's a concrete example of why this moment is different for modular construction and what it means for housing production at scale.

Construction productivity has declined over the past 50 years, making traditional building increasingly expensive. Interest rates make long construction timelines costly. Supply chain disruptions and labor shortages compound the problem. Where earlier modular companies like Katerra tried to replicate car-factory models with massive 100,000 to 500,000 square foot facilities, we've inverted that approach. Our Andover facility is just 20,000 square feet, flexible, and deployable in 100 days. That size allows us to adapt to local building codes, reduce transportation costs, and get closer to job sites.

“The fundamental way in which factory-built homes have worked as an industry is, you build these massive 100,000-to-500,000-square-foot factories that are trying to build one type of product. We were an extension of the industry building mobile homes, trailer homes. Eventually, that became modular homes, and they brought the same practices, which work well when you’re building a few types of products again and again.” – Vikas Enti, CEO & Co-Founder.

The technical difference matters too. We can reduce construction labor from 150 minutes per square foot to 64 minutes, with a goal of eventually reaching six minutes. At Gilman Street, our triple-decker costs $300 per square foot, or $1.2 million total, less than traditional builders quoted and less than renovating an existing home. For the ground-floor unit housing the owner's aging parents, that's $400,000 in a Boston metro area where median homes cost twice that. Modules arrived on trucks, were lifted by crane into place, our team connected the seams, and the owner's family watched her apartment take shape module by module.