We have been “debating” housing affordability for years now, but the conversation keeps circling the same drain. There are not enough smaller, attainable homes for first‑time buyers. Nobody disputes that. Everyone agrees it is a problem, most are willing to call it a crisis, and yet, after countless panels, policy papers, incentives, and task forces, the bottleneck is still right where we left it.
If demand for starter housing has been obvious for more than a decade, why does the market still fail to produce it? Is it land costs? Labor shortages? Interest rates? Zoning? Materials? Regulation? Capital? Or is it more uncomfortable than that? Is it possible the way we build homes is fundamentally incompatible with the problem we are trying to solve?
Public officials are rarely short on answers. Accessory dwelling units. Zoning overlays. Density bonuses. Tax abatements. Down payment assistance. Builder incentives. Each proposal sounds reasonable in isolation. Each is politically defensible and well suited to public messaging. None address the core issue: how homes are actually produced. What is striking is not the lack of solutions. It is the lack of the right questions.
Solutions applied to the wrong problem create motion, not progress. Before the Empire State Building was ever started, it was finished on paper. Every constraint was known. Every sequence was engineered. Every dependency was understood. Construction began only after the process was resolved. The result was not improvisation. It was execution.
At one point, the builders erected fourteen and a half floors in ten working days. This was in 1930 and it was done without modern software, without laptops, without smartphones, even before electronic calculators existed. They did not build one 102-story building. They built one floor, 102 times. That distinction matters. Complexity was conquered through repetition. Precision was achieved by design. Speed followed clarity. And yet, nearly a century later, we struggle to deliver attainable starter homes at scale. That’s a problem.
Why can’t we?
Because we have yet to slow the conversation down long enough to redesign the system itself. When that pause does occur, the path forward becomes clearer. Sweden offers a useful example. They did not address housing through slogans or sentiment. They changed how homes were built.
Sweden industrialized homebuilding. Components were standardized. Systems were engineered for repeatability. Labor moved into controlled environments. Variability was reduced. Housing was treated the way other cost-sensitive, high-volume products are treated: as an industrial process rather than a one-off craft.
In Sweden, factory-built housing is not a niche category. It operates within a coordinated ecosystem where panels, cassettes, and modules are not marketing buzzwords. Codes, financing, education, and supply chains align around industrialized delivery. Factories emerged in response to a national housing emergency, and the industrial framework remained, evolved, and became normalized. The lesson is not cultural. It is procedural.
In the United States, we may repeat designs, but we still execute housing as a series of one-off construction projects rather than as a fully industrialized process. The result is predictable variability, cost overruns, and an overreliance on field coordination to solve problems that should have been resolved upstream. Walk through so-called entry-level new construction and the pattern is visible: fragmented labor, site-based coordination, exposure to weather, sequencing conflicts, labor shortages, and quality failures that compound with every handoff. Variability is accepted. Delays are padded. Inefficiency is absorbed. The cost of all of this is passed on to the buyer, and prices move beyond reach.
Consider what other industries would look like if they operated this way. Imagine automobiles assembled outdoors by rotating crews, tolerances adjusted on site, parts arriving out of sequence, and quality control depending on who happened to be present that day. We would never tolerate it in cars, airplanes, or consumer electronics. Yet in housing, this approach is often defended as tradition.
True industrialization works in the opposite direction. It begins upstream, with design engineered for repeatable assembly. Components are standardized not only in size but in interface. Work moves into controlled environments where quality, sequencing, and tolerances are managed deliberately. Coordination is embedded in the system rather than delegated to the field. Variability is reduced by design rather than corrected after the fact. The difference is not philosophical. It is operational.
This is why many affordability proposals function as partial measures. Accessory dwelling units increase density but do not change production. Zoning reform without delivery reform fuels land speculation more than supply. Tax abatements keep projects viable without altering how homes are built. Down payment assistance and interest-rate buydowns increase purchasing power without increasing supply, which raises prices. Modular housing, when treated as a marketing label rather than a manufacturing discipline, can relocate inefficiency from site to factory without addressing process discipline.
These ideas generate headlines. They do not generate scale.
The harder question is whether affordability is less about who pays more and more about who wastes less. Time. Labor. Errors. Rework. Variability. Financing drag. These are not policy problems. They are process problems. And process problems require industrial answers.
Instead of asking what a house should look like, a more useful question is how it should be produced. Instead of optimizing for uniqueness, optimize for repeatability. Instead of relying on site labor to resolve design failures, resolve them upstream through coordinated digital design. Instead of hoping trades coordinate, engineer coordination out of the system entirely.
Frank Gehry, one of the most influential architects of the modern era, passed away in December 2025 at the age of ninety-six. Despite his reputation for expressive form, he was known to begin client meetings with a simple question: why are you doing this project? The question forced intent. It exposed misalignment. It prevented effort from drifting into vanity.
It is also the question the housing industry too often avoids.
Why are we building this? For whom? Under what constraints? With what tolerance for waste? And to what end?
If the honest answer is margin preservation, political optics, or short-term volume, the outcome is predictable. If the answer is access, durability, and repeatability, the system must change.
Many real estate professionals say they love helping home buyers particularly, first time home buyers. The phrase is well intentioned. But what does it mean to help if the product does not exist? What does advocacy look like when the system excludes by design? What does care amount to if it ends at commentary?
For nearly a decade, I have worked inside the real estate system watching this conversation repeat. Over the last two years, I have shifted into execution, working hands-on with a design and manufacturing team focused on addressing the delivery bottleneck itself. Not financing. Not zoning. Delivery.
The work is not about marginally improving the traditional tract model. It applies industrial principles proven in other sectors, using standardized components, engineered assemblies, controlled-environment fabrication, and digitally coordinated design to make durable starter housing viable again. Homes become products with options rather than one-off projects, and land, design, and manufacturing align accordingly.
It is easy to say we support attainable housing. It is harder to redesign how homes are conceived, engineered, manufactured, and delivered so that attainable housing can exist at scale. One requires a microphone. The other requires discipline.
Affordability will not be solved by louder advocacy or better intentions. It will be solved by replacing commentary with execution and slogans with systems.
If we know how to build efficiently, if history has shown what happens when we do, and if demand is undeniable, then the real question is not whether the solution exists.
It is why we continue to delay adopting it.
John Donati
🌐 JohnDonati.com
📧 john.donati@stlre.com
📞 636.669.5050
About the Author:
John Donati serves as Vice President of Brokerage at MORE, REALTORS, and is the founder and CEO of SteelHaven Homes. Based in the St. Louis metropolitan area, he works across real estate brokerage, title, development, and construction, drawing on a background in industrial project and construction management, public relations, and integrated marketing. His work focuses on applying engineered, repeatable design and manufacturing systems to residential housing to expand access, durability, and long-term value.