Suburban Steel: The Magnificent Failure of the Lustron Corporation, 1945-1951 (review)

Critics have long accused the house-building industry of being slow to innovate. Houses, they say, are assembled on site in much the same way as they have always been, inefficiently. Such criticism reached a fever pitch during the 1940s when architects, policymakers, and entrepreneurs promoted factory prefabrication on a mass scale in order to cut costs. Various companies came and went. None was larger, inspired more hope, attracted more federal largesse, or flamed out more spectacularly than Lustron. Its story offers a promise of illuminating the economic and political structures that frame technological change in house building, forces that have rarely been subjected to direct scrutiny. In Suburban Steel, Douglas Knerr has delivered on that promise.

Lustron was the brainchild of Carl Strandlund, an executive of the Chicago Vitreous Enamel Products Company. Encouraged by the postwar housing shortage and the government's willingness to fund unproven technology, in 1946 Strandlund developed the idea of mass-producing steel-frame homes for the middle class. The ranch-style house he helped design used porcelein-enameled steel for exterior and interior walls, window frames, and door jambs, and ceiling panels that imitated Spanish tile. Components were produced in a factory in Columbus, Ohio, and shipped to much of the nation for assembly by crews supervised by local dealers, themselves newly recruited and trained. The scale was to be unprecedented. By 1949 the company's break-even level of output was to be 1,000 units/ month, though actual production lagged, while the projected level was three times greater. At capacity, the twenty-three-acre factory would have consumed more electricity than the city of Columbus. It was a hugely ambitious scheme.

Lustron came tolerably close to success. Strandlund was as adept at putting together the men and machinery that he needed as he was at negotiating the political currents in Washington to secure funding. Like other prefabricators, he knew about technical and production issues; unlike them, he devised ingenious and workable solutions to problems of marketing and consumer finance. He covered the angles.

But Lustron was always controversial. Some critics, especially those associated with conventional residential house building, argued that its technology was unworkable. Many others, including other prefabricators, deplored the firm's position at the public trough: by August 1949 Lustron was responsible for one-tenth of the outstanding industrial and commercial loans of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). Knerr shows how Lustron overcame many obstacles, including the skepticism of some consumers, yet many buyers remained discouraged by the closed technology that prohibited home renovations. The company was also stymied by the myriad of local building regulations that mandated conventional materials. Knerr argues that in time these problems at Lustron could have been overcome—if only its federal creditor had not cut its losses and foreclosed.

This is a fine story well-told. Using company and government records together with contemporary commentary, Knerr weaves a lucid and intriguing narrative that moves easily from politics to production to marketing and back again. His is not the first book on Lustron: recently, Thomas Fetters detailed Lustron's technology and designs and, remarkably, also listed the present location of four-fifths of the dwellings that the company produced. But Suburban Steel is the more scholarly book, with a fuller sense of social, business, and political context.

Knerr persuades me that the Lustron house—so-called because it put a luster on steel—was ahead of its time: steel framing is again being taken seriously for house building. But to be completely convincing his argument would need a fuller analysis of the resilience of on-site production using wood framing, and of the recent successes of mobile homes. The latter comparison underlines the fact that the Lustron house was a kit, not a prefabricated unit. Like the manufacturers of wood-frame kits, Lustron had to ship long distances and offer innovative finance. Unlike them, it could not rely...