Writing endless checks, and what would end it

Philanthropy has paid the gap for years. It funds the space between what a home costs to build and what a working family can pay. The work is good. It keeps a family housed.

And yet the work has no end. Each subsidy saves a single project. It does not move the cause an inch.

The gap is a symptom. The building industry has no shared, open infrastructure. Nearly every affordable project is designed, engineered, and priced as a custom one-off. Each one is then closed by a check, one project at a time. The cost is not the fault of any single project. It is the nature of a system that cannot fix itself.

Repairing that system is the work philanthropy exists to do. No single company will.

The shift already underway

Building is beginning to move the way other industries moved a century ago. It is shifting from one-off custom projects toward catalogs of pre-designed, pre-engineered, repeatable products. That shift takes cost out of housing for good, not one project at a time.

It works on a single condition. The pieces that let factories, designers, and builders interoperate must be open and shared. Those pieces do not exist today.

No single firm will build them. A common standard benefits a firm’s competitors as much as the firm itself. The market underinvests for exactly that reason. This is the definition of a public good. It is the classic case for philanthropic capital.

What the Center for Offsite Construction does

CfOC builds that shared infrastructure as an open commons. The commons belongs to no one and lowers cost for everyone. The work proceeds in four steps.

1. Name the shift. CfOC’s published philosophy makes the case that this is a paradigm change rather than a passing trend.
2. Map what it requires. The Models of Delivery map lays out every industry-level change the shift demands. It makes the work finite and legible rather than open-ended.
3. Ship the open-source pieces. CfOC develops the standards, agreements, and file formats the field needs through an ANSI-accredited consensus process. Anyone may use them for free.
4. Help early adopters apply them. CfOC supports real pilot projects so the commons proves itself in the built world rather than only on paper.

Already producing

The CfOC has the partners and the tools to get started without large checks. We’re on our way.

• The published philosophy and Models of Delivery map give the field a shared language and a finite plan of work.
• CfOC holds ANSI-accredited standards-development status and develops in partnership with the Internation Code Council. The first open connectivity standard is now in active development.
• Government continues to seek CfOC’s expertise directly. Recently, CfOC staff have advised on pre-approved housing plans for several states, served as and expert evaluator on award committees for Modular Construction Strategic Plans, and advised the Pew Research Center on its initiatives.
• A Senior Research Fellows program and an inaugural symposium already convene the field’s leading practitioners in partnership with the Modular Building Institute, JDF, and others.

CfOC offers no headline figure for the eventual savings. None can be defended honestly, yet. The work is too important to oversell. Sizing the prize is one of the roadmap’s own deliverables. The waste is systemic. A dollar aimed at a systemic fault travels farthest of all.

Two ways to begin

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The Philosophy essays on this site detail the deeper case. They show why the ‘way we build’ is changing and what it means.