How an American Dream of Housing Became a Reality in Sweden [Video]

As an architect, Ivan Rupnik thinks the solution to America’s affordable housing shortage is obvious: Build more houses. Start today. But the way homes are built in the United States makes speed impossible.

Years ago, Rupnik’s Croatian grandmother, an architect herself, pointed him to an intriguing answer to this conundrum: modular housing projects built in Europe in the 1950s and ’60s. Rupnik was awed. Sure, prefab complexes, and especially Soviet bloc housing, could be ugly and too homogenous, but the process created millions of housing units in a flash.

Hooked, Rupnik started researching modular housing for his doctoral dissertation. In the archives of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, he stumbled upon a reference in an old journal article that took him by surprise: an industrialized housing initiative called Operation Breakthrough that built nearly 3,000 units between 1971 and 1973 — in the United States. How had he never heard about it?

It turned out few people had. Unable …