"The house America has been waiting for": The Lustron Experiment in factory-made housing, 1946-1954

This dissertation explores the history of the Lustron Corporation within the context of industrial, political, and urban history. The Lustron Corporation was the largest and most completely industrialized prefabricated housing company in the history of the United States. Beginning in 1947, Lustron manufactured porcelain enameled steel houses in a one million square foot plant on 106 acres of land in Columbus, Ohio. Just one year after its incorporation, Lustron's capital investment exceeded that of the next forty largest prefabricated housing firms. The company planned to produce 100 houses per day, each of them neatly arranged on specially designed tractor-trailers for delivery throughout the nation. Though radical in its use of porcelain enameled steel, the Lustron house--a one-story, gabled-roof ranch with a bay window and side porch--looked much like other postwar-era dwellings. Behind its traditional facade, however, lay hopes and expectations for a new era in American housing. The unprecedented scale and scope of Lustron's operations attracted intense interest and scrutiny from the press, the public, the government, and the prefabricated housing industry. The Lustron "experiment" in mass produced housing represented a major test for prefabrication. Years of interest and anticipation regarding the "industrialization" of the house construction process focused attention on Lustron's strategy, structure, problems, and prospects. At last, the nation would see if a large, highly capitalized firm could usher in a new age of affordable factory made housing. The efficiencies of mass production, integrated manufacturing, and economies of scale promised to lead the American housing industry away from its decentralized, undercapitalized, and inefficient past toward a level of rationalization and organization found in most other sectors of the industrial economy. Once hailed as the best hope for the industrialization of housing, by the early 1950s Lustron collapsed amid foreclosure and bankruptcy proceedings. The company had produced only 2,498 houses. Lustron began with the goal of providing affordable single family dwellings for wage earners, the "mass market" for mass production. But the company was ultimately unable to provide a house which most wage earners could afford. Without access to the market segment which rationalized large scale production, the Lustron experiment made little economic sense.