By james art 
This story, by a member of the American CORPS member, Carly Berlin, was manufactured through a partnership between VTDIGGER and Vermont Public.
Inside the cavernous factory at the end of the road in East Montpellier, the houses are built piece by piece on a mounting line.
Each of the homes starts in one corner of the 100,000 -square -foot shop as a series of modest Lego blocks, as Huntington Homes co -owner Jason Webster put it on a recent tour of the company’s factory floor. At the first stops of the production line, the blocks receive floors, walls and ceilings; They are then picked up, isolated, glued and painted.
Your typical home builder will need to ignite an electrician and plumber and a roof to a construction site, which often leads to a subcontract. But here all these workers shoot with nail pistols and rotate their circular saws under a very large roof.
The rationalization of the construction process thus allows Huntington Homes to build a house in a few days instead of months.
“We can build an entire house in 12 eight-hour shifts, 96 hours,” Webster said.
These “LEGO blocks” are then sent to a truck collected together with a crane and, Voila-to-the untrained eye, the final product looks like any other conventionally built house. The company builds about 70 homes a year like this.
Every assessment you are looking at shows that Vermont is not about to build the number of homes needed to close the state housing difference in housing and to master the rents and prices of the housing. Last year, just over 2000 homes were built throughout the country, according to the data recently drawn up by the Ministry of Housing and Community development – only about a quarter of what civil servants say that Vermont must be built annually to achieve A healthy economy.
The need to increase the slow pace of the construction of homes in Vermont – which has never completely recovered from the catastrophe in the housing market in 2008 – whether the homes are wondering here: Should we start to build more homes on the mounting line?
The promise of mass production
This is the basis of a recent report introduced into a country that looks at how to develop the construction industry outside the Vermont website, a trapping term that includes a housing-such as one-off and dual spouse Construction, a Lego -like building that Huntington Homes uses.
The company is the only main modular builder within the state borders. Other smaller outfits include Wilder Vermode-based, which began to produce energy-efficient homes during the tropical storm Irene, and new frames that sell prefabricated residential units that use natural building materials such as straw insulation. Starting at Brattleboro works on prototypes of modular kitchens and bathrooms to be sold to apartment developers throughout the northeast.
Else places, governments have set large to promote modular construction to accelerate housing, including across the northern border in Quebec. Oregon and Colorado have dedicated state funding to raising home production outside the site in recent years. The construction of homes in factories is already common in European countries, such as Sweden.
The construction of indoor construction carries numerous benefits, said Jeff Lyubel, a housing researcher with headquarters in Norich who helped with the Vermont report. It allows construction to happen year -round through Vermont’s Frigid Winters. The work is less physically demanding than outdoor construction, opening opportunities for a wider spectrum of potential workers -a key attention against the background of labor shortages in the state in construction transactions, he said.
Another major potential advantage is the reduction of construction costs by building many standardized homes at once, Lyubel said.
“If we build a home at some point – a home here, a home there – then it’s the least effective way you can do something, right?” He said.
Mass -produced homes using uniform plans can allow builders to take advantage of “scale savings,” Lyubell said. Companies can save on design costs and receive group deals for materials such as timber and windows. The home buyer may have to accept that their house looks like the rest of the streets on the street, overcoming what Webster sees as a cultural block. In other parts of the world, it is customary to see rows of carbon -house houses, but in America, home buyers are married to customizing their dream house.
But the standardization comes with a basic upward: lower prices of stickers, because ideally the savings made during the construction process will be handed over to the buyer.
In a typical project “You can be able to build two units, four units, 10 units, even 20 units, just on a particular site,” Lyubel said. “But in a factory you can build one hundred units a year. You can build 200 units a year. “
“It comes down to expenses”
The outside site construction report contains several key recommendations from state leaders to achieve this type of scale. One method would be to sign the state government to sign contracts or guarantees to buy a bulk purchase for a certain period of time to ensure that companies are receiving a permanent business.
Some developers-and state agencies are experimenting with purchases of bulk homes embedded outside the site. South Burlington -based Summit Properties, which develops both market and homes at affordable prices, bought 45 duplexes and urban homes from Huntington Homes, which will be sold as part of a new mixed -income home development in Melbury.
“He comes down to costs,” said Zeke Davison, Summit Chief Operations Operations when he was asked why the company decided to go with modular homes for the project. “We have certainly realized the potential of this,” he added. Davison predicts that the summit will save up to 10%for construction costs by choosing modular costs, except for the cost of things such as site preparation, foundation work and installing alleys and utilities.
These homes will begin to assemble at the Factory for East Montpellier this spring. The project is something from leaving for Huntington Homes, which usually did not work with developers. Throughout her story, for four decades, she built mostly single-family homes, about half of them were sent to customers outside the country in places such as Cape Cod and Nantack, Webster said. He hopes to pursue more projects like Middlebury, which goes forward, he added.
The country itself is committed to a bulk purchase of manufactured homes last summer, part of the Mobile Response Home Program created after a catastrophic flood in July 2024. Civil servants can consider supervisory purchases of more bulk purchases like this and then can To hand over these units to non -profit housing agencies, which in turn would be responsible for finding land and potential buyers.
Another major way that the state can jump off the site will be to put public money to start more factories, notes in the report, which is not existing, a home factory in Rutland in the city of Fair Haven.
Bob Richards worked in the factory, watching the final details before the one-time and double-widders to go out the door: “Haircut, carpet, drapes,” he said. He is now chairing the city’s selection. With the help of state grant, Fair Haven is investigating whether the former Skyline building still has the equipment it needs to start pulling the homes again.
“The whole idea of affordable homes – this is what Skyline did and this is a building and that is what it can do best,” Richards said. “The city is absolutely in favor of this.”
“Holding the bag”
Despite all the promises of speed and efficiency, this type of home construction comes with a major catch. Construction outside the site requires a lot of advance investment-for example, to launch a factory, for example, which means that it does not pull out the storms and the bust of the housing market. The conventional housing builder may release some employees during an economic decline, but the recession can doom the whole factory.
It happened with the Fair Haven plant, which closed its doors in 2011. The produced home production was constantly falling in the 2000s, Lyubel said, and the housing market crash in 2008 was probably the “last straw” for the factory S
The modular construction also had a much larger imprint in New England before the big recession. Prior to 2008, there were eight modular factories in the region, according to full -size residential homes, according to Webster. Now there are only three: one right across the Clarmont border, New Hampshire, another in Maine, and the Huntington Home Factory in East Montpellier. A handful of other plants now produce two-dimensional “panels”-as separate walls and floors-which are then delivered and built on the spot.
Huntington Homes still produces only about half the homes a year than in 2007, Webster said. Years after the recession, many builders outside the site have become more cautious about the projects they have undertaken, he said. In the meantime, many workers have left the construction deals, most of them are aging and the younger workers have taken their place. The number of workers in the construction deals dropped to Vermont in the late 2000s and has never completely recovered. The struggle for hiring enough employees continues to have a great impact effect on the number of houses that Huntington Doms is able to build, Webster said.
The threat from another economic decline makes the home Commissioner Alex Farrell to hesitate to put public funding to increase the construction industry outside the site.
“We, the state, have to think about this possible bust cycle,” Farrell said. “We are here to mitigate the risk to the public and then for private developers, but we just don’t want to leave the country holding the bag.”
For now, however, demand for homes in Vermont shows several signs of delay – and Vermont should not miss the opportunity to accelerate home production, Farrell said.
For Lyubel, the housing researcher, the placement of a relatively small amount of state -owned money for construction outside the site, is a low risk compared to the status quo: the observation that housing prices continue to increase.