Purdue Expert: Factory-Built Housing

Media is welcome to use this video for TV, radio or podcasts or pull quotes for print articles. #purdue #purdueuniversity #purduenews
James Braun is the Herrick Professor of Engineering and the director of the Center for High Performance Buildings at Purdue University. In this video, he explains how factory built housing can help address affordable housing shortages. The U.S. housing market is currently experiencing a shortage in affordable homes and the labor needed to produce them. NextHouse is an initiative at Purdue with the goal of developing the next generation of factory built housing to address this problem. Factory built housing can lead to lower costs, higher quality and more affordability for consumers. Braun envisions a future where someone interested in a single family home could go to a website and customize a house that meets all their needs. That house would then be built in a factory and then delivered to a site instead of being built there from the ground up. Factory built housing could be completed very quickly, in as little as two days. Braun says building houses in a factory setting would also enable manufacturers to put in more high performance and energy efficient features in housing that would further drive down cost, increase quality and benefit the consumer.