MOREHEAD — In a warehouse in Rowan County sits an experiment that Tom Manning-Beavin and his nonprofit have been brainstorming for years — a wooden rectangular frame he calls one of their “boxes.”
When the Frontier Housing CEO explains the concept, he hearkens back to when he played with Lego bricks growing up. Just like a Lego toy set, the boxes are put together to make the “building blocks of a house.”
“I remember when you got a box of Legos and there wasn’t a prescribed thing to build, and my brother and I would build stuff,” Manning-Beavin said.
What Manning-Beavin is hoping to tackle now is the stark shortfall of affordable housing in Eastern Kentucky by reinventing the way the nonprofit has been building homes for 51 years.
Instead of constructing a house on site from the ground up, he and his colleagues want to manufacture their component “boxes” in a factory and transport them to the site, where they could become a finished house much more quickly and at lower cost, while still maintaining the sturdiness and quality of traditionally built homes.
That would be in contrast to the vast majority of single-family homes across the country that are “site-built,” meaning all the materials are brought to a site where workers turn them into a house.
A world of ‘boxes’
In the warehouse, Manning-Beavin points out a “wet box” where water is hooked up for a bathroom, laundry space and kitchen. From there, a “suite box” with a master bedroom could be added onto the “wet box.” A “kids box” could be added with two small bedrooms for children. The “boxes” could be mixed and matched depending on homebuyers’ needs, ranging from 576 square feet with two boxes to over 1,400 square feet.with five boxes.
The factory-made boxes would be built with the same materials, same tools and to the same code as traditional “stick-built” homes, he said.
“It is like building a car on an assembly line,” Manning-Beavin said. “I think what this does is it creates a lot of flexibility for the buyer, creates choice. It also creates simplicity and replicability in the factory.”
The Morehead nonprofit is adopting the modular housing concept, called a DreamBuild, from a Texas nonprofit builder. Come Build, Come Dream in Texas launched its version of DreamBuild homes to offer families more choice in the design of affordable housing. It’s a level of buyers’ choice that Manning-Beavin hopes to bring to Eastern Kentucky and that is largely unavailable in other types of factory-built housing.
Manning-Beavin said Frontier Housing’s board agreed to take on the concept in the summer of 2023, and the nonprofit received funding from the James Graham Brown Foundation last year to continue to build prototypes.
The housing shortage in Eastern Kentucky has been exacerbated by catastrophic flooding in recent years. Fahe, a network of more than 50 nonprofits across Appalachia including Frontier Housing, has set an ambitious goal of rehabilitating or building 60,000 homes through 2030 — double its normal pace.
Meanwhile, the rising cost to build a house also is driving the region’s housing shortage, says Manning-Beavin.
After the 2022 flooding, Manning-Beavin started to see DreamBuild as “part of the solution for providing homes at a pace that was needed.”
“Lots of people just in Rowan County … are frustrated because they want to own a house, there’s nothing to buy, and we can’t afford to build a house at a price point that they can afford,” Manning-Beavin said. “Our hope is that we start to change that equation, not just in Rowan County but across Eastern Kentucky, and perhaps parts of West Virginia, parts of Virginia, parts of Ohio.”
Housing costs — and a ‘dream’ to lower them
Generally, he said, the costs to construct traditionally built homes exceed the home’s value, even though traditional financing offers a loan covering only the value of a home. It’s a trend seen nationwide for a number of reasons ranging from the costs of regulation to rising land values to the costs of materials, effectively disincentivizing the construction of affordable homes because developers know they will lose money on them.
Manning-Beavin said the Kentucky Housing Corporation, a quasi-governmental corporation that distributes federal housing monies, has offered Frontier Housing subsidies to cover the gap between the cost of building a home and its value.
The hope is that DreamBuild homes can be made efficiently and quickly enough to cut down construction costs by about 10% to 15%. Then, Frontier Housing could break even on building a home without subsidies and open up access to more traditional house financing such as through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Manning-Beavin is confident they can get there, pointing to experience of fine-tuning the construction of energy-efficient homes in Whitley County with the Kentucky Highlands Investment Corp.
But plenty of growing pains await the nonprofit as they perfect their model.
“It’s going to be one of the things that’s going to ramp up,” said Tod Barhorst, the director of construction at the nonprofit. “We’ve kind of been really baby-crawling right now.”
The nonprofit has had to build prototypes of the various “box” types, dismantle the boxes and rebuild again to see what works and what doesn’t. One challenge is getting state code enforcement approval for designs without having to get approval for each different version of box types being put together.
Another challenge: how to effectively transport the boxes, especially with Kentucky’s lower height limit for vehicle loads compared to Texas, where the DreamBuild concept started.
Barhorst said the nonprofit also wants to distinguish its product from other manufactured housing, emphasizing the DreamBuild homes’ “stick-built” quality.
“A lot of questions to answer, a lot of things to work out,” Barhorst said.
Painting the final touches
The project has the potential to significantly increase the number of homes it can build if the project succeeds. The nonprofit is aiming to build 12 traditional “stick-built” homes this year. In contrast, the nonprofit believes it could produce around 60 DreamBuild homes or more every year.
Frontier Housing has leased a 55,000 square foot building in Martin County to ramp up production of DreamBuild housing, including duplexes for a 50-unit apartment complex in Maysville. Manning-Beavin said the Maysville project will use 152 boxes. He also hopes to build and send DreamBuild homes to the Skyview higher ground community in Perry County.
For now, a glimpse of what’s possible can be found along Redbud Circle near the Bath County line. Inside one of two prototype homes, there are windows with lots of light pouring in. A master bedroom with a full bathroom. A kitchen with new appliances. A large porch with a gravel driveway.
It’s not until Hunter Plank points out small, nearly unnoticeable details along the walls that where the “boxes” were put together become visible.
Plank, who went from building more traditional homes for Frontier Housing to building these DreamBuild homes, said the home is “double built” in some ways, especially around where two boxes come together. The prototype homes are planned to be energy efficient; the first finished DreamBuild home is roughly 50% more energy efficient than an average home, according to one rating system.
“There’s no corners cut,” Plank said.
On an afternoon in August, Plank and his co-workers were busy painting the place.
“The idea isn’t for you to think about how it was built. That’s our problem. You’re just getting a home,” Plank said.
This article is republished under a Creative Commons license from Kentucky Lantern, which is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and Twitter.
Liam Niemeyer covers government and policy in Kentucky and its impacts throughout the Commonwealth for the Kentucky Lantern. He most recently spent four years reporting award-winning stories for WKMS Public Radio in Murray.
