David Brancaccio

Howdy, neighbor.

You're the Aloe Blacc, aren't you?

Yeah, I'm a singer and a songwriter, entertainer, lucky enough to be part of this beautiful community and help restore it in the way that I can.

A modern, high-quality dwelling.

So five months from contract signing to having something here,

It's near completion.

What's it look like on the inside?

Can we peer in?

It's really nice on the inside.

I'd be happy to show you guys.

Well, this is like Euro.

For more than a century, the U.S.

has turned to factory-built homes in moments of urgency, from Gold Rush-era kit houses shipped west to Sears catalog homes delivered by rail to post-war efforts to house millions of returning GIs.

Again and again, the idea made sense on paper, but a truly national prefab housing system never quite took hold.

To understand why, we need to revisit one of the boldest housing experiments in American history, a federal program called Operation Breakthrough.

That's Ivan Rupnik, an architect and housing historian who uncovered the forgotten story of Operation Breakthrough.

In the late 1960s, Washington was grappling with a housing crunch that feels eerily familiar today.

They very quickly built 4,000 units, but learned that they were facing a different problem than they anticipated.

It was a systems problem.

Operation Breakthrough stopped, not because the idea failed, because the system wasn't ready to support it.