The New York Times, June 8, 2024, How An American Dream Of Housing Became A Reality In Sweden
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.
