Construction wasn’t always playing catch-up. Between the late 1940s and 1970, U.S. homebuilders industrialized the home construction process. At peak production, the Levitt organization was reportedly completing a new house every 16 minutes, according to Edward Berenson, a history professor at New York University, who wrote about it in a 2025 piece for the Yale University Press. This was made possible by a combination of specialized crews, preassembled components, and FHA and GI Bill financing, which effectively guaranteed demand. William Levitt called his company “the General Motors of the housing industry.”
At the time, Berenson noted, the average Levitt worker building a traditional, custom-built home “spends 25 percent of his time figuring out what to do next.” On a Levitt house, that figure was close to zero. Then, around 1970, innovation in the construction industry seemingly stopped.
What happened? Regulation changed. Between 1969 and the mid-1970s, th
