This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
Inside a cavernous factory at the end of a road in East Montpelier, houses get built piece by piece on an assembly line.
Each of the homes starts off in one corner of the 100,000-square-foot shop as a series of humble “Lego blocks,” as Huntington Homes co-owner Jason Webster put it on a recent tour of the company’s humming factory floor. At the first stops on the production line, the blocks get floors, walls, and ceilings; then they get wired, insulated, taped, and painted.
Your typical home builder would have to wrangle an electrician and a plumber and a roofer to a building site, often resulting in a drawn-out subcontractor scheduling snarl. But here, all of those workers are firing their nail guns and spinning their circular saws under one very large roof.
Streamlining the building process in this way allows Huntington Homes to construct a house in a matter of days, instead of months.
“We can build a whole house in 12 eight-hour shifts — so, 96 hours,” Webster said.
These “Lego blocks” are then shipped out on a truck, pieced together by a crane, and, voila — to the untrained eye, the final-product looks like any other conventionally-built house. The company constructs about 70 homes a year like this.
Any estimate you look at indicates that Vermont is not on track to build the number of homes needed to close the state’s stark housing gap and rein in rents and home prices. Last year, a little over 2,000 homes were built across the state, according to data recently compiled by the Department of Housing and Community Development — only about a quarter of what state officials say Vermont needs to build annually to achieve a healthy economy.
The need to ramp up Vermont’s sluggish rate of home construction — which has never fully rebounded from the 2008 housing market crash — has housing wonks here wondering: should we start building more homes on the assembly line?
The promise of mass production
That’s the question at the heart of a recent state-commissioned report that looks at how to grow Vermont’s off-site construction industry, a catch-all term that includes manufactured housing — like single-wides and double-wides often located in self-contained parks — and modular construction, the Lego-like building method that Huntington Homes uses.
The company is the one major modular builder within state borders. Other smaller outfits include the Wilder-based VerMod, which began producing energy-efficient homes during the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene, and New Frameworks, which sells prefabricated accessory dwelling units that use natural building materials, like insulation made from straw. A startup in Brattleboro is working on prototypes of modular kitchens and bathrooms to sell to apartment developers across the Northeast.
Elsewhere, governments have bet big on encouraging modular construction to accelerate homebuilding, including across the northern border in Quebec. Oregon and Colorado have dedicated state funding to boost off-site home production in recent years. Building homes in factories is already commonplace in European countries, like Sweden.
Taking construction indoors brings a host of benefits, said Jeff Lubell, a housing researcher based in Norwich who helped put together the Vermont report. It allows building to happen year-round, through Vermont’s frigid winters. The work is less physically demanding than outdoor construction, opening up opportunities for a wider range of potential workers — a key consideration amid the state’s workforce shortage in the building trades, he said.
Another major potential advantage is bringing down construction costs by building many standardized homes at once, Lubell said.
“If we build one home at a time — a home here, a home there — then, it’s about the least efficient way that you can do anything, right?” he said.
Mass-producing homes using uniform plans can let builders take advantage of “economies of scale,” Lubell said. Companies can save on design costs and get bulk deals on materials like lumber and windows. A homebuyer may have to accept that their house looks like the rest of the homes on the street, overcoming what Webster sees as a cultural block. In other parts of the world, it’s common to see rows of carbon-copy houses, but in America, homebuyers are wedded to customizing their dream house.
But standardization comes with a major upside: lower sticker prices, because, ideally, savings made during the building process would be passed on to the buyer.
In a typical project, “you might be able to build two units, four units, 10 units, even 20 units, right on a particular site,” Lubell said. “But in a factory, you can build a hundred units a year. You can build 200 units a year.”
‘It boils down to cost’
The off-site construction report contains a few key recommendations to state leaders for achieving that kind of scale. One method would be for state government to sign bulk purchase agreements or guarantees over a set period of time to ensure companies get consistent business.
Some developers — and state agencies — are already experimenting with bulk purchases of homes built off-site. South Burlington-based Summit Properties, which develops both market-rate and affordable housing, bought 45 duplexes and townhomes from Huntington Homes that will be sold as part of a new mixed-income housing development in Middlebury.
“It boils down to cost,” said Zeke Davisson, Summit’s chief operating officer, when asked why the company decided to go with modular homes for the project. “We’ve certainly realized the potential of it,” he added. Davisson projected that Summit would save “up to 10%” on construction costs by choosing modular, excluding expenses for things like site prep, foundation work, and installing driveways and utilities.
Those homes will start to get assembled at the East Montpelier factory this spring. The project is something of a departure for Huntington Homes, which hasn’t typically worked with developers. Over its four-decade history, it has mostly built single family homes, about half of them shipped to out-of-state clients in places like Cape Cod and Nantucket, Webster said. He hopes to pursue more projects like the Middlebury one going forward, he added.
The state itself committed to a bulk purchase of manufactured homes this past summer, part of the Rapid Response Mobile Home Infill Program created in the aftermath of catastrophic flooding in July of 2024. State officials could consider overseeing more bulk purchases like that one, Lubell said, and could then hand off those units to nonprofit housing agencies who in turn would be responsible for finding land and potential buyers.
The other major way the state could jumpstart off-site construction would be to put public money toward getting more factories running, the report notes — including a defunct manufactured home plant in the Rutland County town of Fair Haven.
Bob Richards used to work at the factory, overseeing the final details before the single-wides and double-wides got out the door: “the trim, the carpet, the draperies,” he said. He now chairs the town’s select board. With the aid of a state grant, Fair Haven is investigating whether the former Skyline company building still has the equipment it needs to start churning out homes again.
“The whole idea of affordable housing — that’s what Skyline did, and that’s what that building was built for, and that’s what it could do best,” Richards said. “The town is absolutely in favor of that.”
‘Holding the bag’
Despite all of the promises of speed and efficiency, this type of homebuilding comes with a major catch. Off-site construction requires a lot of upfront investment — to get a factory up and running, for instance — which means it doesn’t weather the booms and busts in the housing market nimbly. A conventional home builder can lay off some employees during an economic downturn, but a recession can doom a whole factory.
That’s what happened to the Fair Haven plant, which closed its doors in 2011. Manufactured home production had fallen steadily during the 2000s, Lubell said, and the 2008 housing market crash was likely “the last straw” for the factory.
Modular construction also had a much larger footprint in New England before the Great Recession. Pre-2008, there were eight modular factories building full-sized residential homes in the region, according to Webster. Now, there are only three: one just across the border in Claremont, New Hampshire, another in Maine, and Huntington Homes’ factory in East Montpelier. A handful of other plants now produce two-dimensional “panels” – like, individual walls and floors – that then get shipped and built onsite.
Huntington Homes is still only producing about half as many homes a year as it was in 2007, Webster said. For years post-recession, many off-site builders became more cautious about the projects they took on, he said. Meanwhile, many workers left the construction trades, a large portion of them aging out, and not enough younger workers have taken their place. The number of workers in the building trades plummeted in Vermont during the late-2000s and has never fully recovered. The struggle to hire enough employees continues to put a major dampening effect on the number of houses Huntington Homes is able to build, Webster said.
The threat of another economic downturn makes Housing Commissioner Alex Farrell hesitate about putting public funding toward boosting the off-site construction industry.
“We, the state, need to be thinking about that eventual bust cycle,” Farrell said. “We’re here to mitigate risk for the public and then for private developers, but we just don’t want to leave the state holding the bag.”
For now, though, the demand for homes in Vermont shows few signs of slowing — and Vermont shouldn’t miss out on an opportunity to speed up home production, Farrell said.
To Lubell, the housing researcher, putting a relatively small amount of state money toward off-site construction poses a low risk compared to the status quo: watching as housing prices continue to rise.
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