Since the 1930s, innovators have tried to apply factory methods to housing, believing it will slash costs. They consistently fail to achieve the promised savings due to fundamental constraints like site-specific requirements and difficulties achieving economies of scale. Katerra was simply the latest in a long line of examples.

The promise of factory efficiency in prefab housing is often erased by new costs. Modules must be over-engineered to survive road transport—a primary design constraint—and then require complex, costly on-site work to connect, negating initial savings.

To solve ill-fitting double-wide mobile homes, Clayton Homes innovated its manufacturing. Instead of building two halves separately and hoping they'd align, they built the entire home as a single unit, then sawed it in half for transport, ensuring a perfect reassembly on site.

Unlike lightweight goods, heavy housing modules are uneconomical to ship more than a day's drive. This physical constraint prevents the creation of massive, centralized factories, forcing a model of smaller, distributed plants that cannot achieve the same economies of scale.

Widespread adoption of construction robotics won't just replace labor; it will necessitate a fundamental redesign of building materials and codes. Similar to "design for manufacturing" in factories, we'll need to change how pipes connect, the chemical makeup of concrete, and how steel is welded to optimize for robotic assembly.

Despite up to 90% of its single-family homes being factory-built, Sweden's housing costs are higher than in the U.S. This real-world case study proves that even at scale, prefabrication does not automatically solve the fundamental cost drivers in construction, serving as a cautionary tale for innovators.

Instead of trucking waste to a central facility, Mothership Materials deploys modular, low-energy processing units in shipping containers directly to the waste source (e.g., a winery). This co-location model deconstructs traditional manufacturing, collapsing the supply chain, reducing costs, and enabling a more agile, regional production system.

Automation in construction can do more than just lower costs for basic structures. Monumental's robots can create complex, artistic brick patterns and designs at the same speed and cost as a standard wall, potentially democratizing access to beautiful and diverse housing aesthetics.

The American Housing Corporation uses a factory-based manufacturing process to create home panels that can be shipped and assembled anywhere. Co-founder Bobby Fijan explains this model allows them to offer a fixed price for the core structure, detaching the cost from wildly variable local construction labor markets in places like San Francisco or Houston.