Big Steel Tries Prefabrication

The latest stout-heart to brave the business bogey of prefabricated housing is U.S. Steel Corp.'s dynamic, hardheaded president, Ben Fairless. Big Steel, which has never had any direct contact with the ultimate consumer, last week announced the purchase of a controlling interest in the Gunnison Housing Corp. of New Albany, Ind.

With this purchase went: 1) new conveyor-belted production methods which can produce a ready-to-assemble house in 25 minutes and will soon cut that time to 15 minutes; 2) a national dealer's organization; 3) the services of Gunnison Corp.'s kinetic, genial founder-president, Foster Gunnison, 47. A onetime illuminating engineer who lighted Manhattan's Rockefeller Center and Empire State building, Gunnison got into prefabricated housing with the financial backing of a fellow alumnus of St. Lawrence University, Owen D. Young.

The Market. The Fairless-Gunnison team anticipates big postwar sales. The Twentieth Century Fund estimates that the U.S. will need an annual 1,236,000 new homes for ten years after the war. Abroad, enthusiasts declare that prefabrication will be the only answer to the vast problem of replacing war-shattered homes. Winston Churchill has said that Britain will need a half-million prefabricated homes immediately on war's end. At present, the entire U.S. productive capacity is only 30,000 houses a year.

How to Get It. Foster Gunnison believes that success in prefabricated housing, which has baffled many a man before him, can be achieved by:

P: Adopting mass-production methods and "out mass-selling" the mass industries.

P: Facing up to the problem of training personnel for the new industry in a new way. Dealers in prefabricated houses must be not builders but merchants, functioning like automobile dealers.

P: Concentrating sales efforts in communities of 10,000 to 35,000 people, where curbs of building-trades unions and building codes are absent or less onerous.

P: Keeping prices within reach of lower-middle-class pocketbooks (present Gunnison range: $2,800 to $5,000), by allowing 24 years to pay and letting no monthly payment exceed the buyer's weekly pay.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.