Sweden builds houses and apartments like Lego sets. Why don’t we?

Zara Larsson isn’t the only Swedish export America should be obsessed with.

by Marina Bolotnikova

An illustration of a house being built | Lucy Jones for Vox; Getty Images

Sweden has given the world many wonderful gifts. Zara Larsson, obviously. Spotify and social democracy. And Ikea, the company that showed us you can furnish your apartment, stylishly and affordably, with the contents of a few flatpack boxes.

Sweden’s talent for mass-producing clever, easy-to-assemble home fixtures also extends to something much bigger than bookshelves and bed frames: building entire houses and apartments. Ikea has become one of the biggest furniture retailers in the US (and perhaps our top purveyor of vegan meatballs). But those factory-built Swedish homes? Americans can’t have them. Yet.

In factories throughout Sweden, workers assemble modular rooms that will become components of new homes — kitchens and bathrooms, for example, complete with counters, sinks, windows, electric wiring and plumbing, and even dishwashers and washing machines. The modules are then trucked to their final destinations, hoisted up by crane, and arranged into place to form whole single-family or multifamily buildings — like a giant Lego set, as Lindbäcks, one of the country’s top manufacturers of factory-built housing, describes it. One modular development with 114 apartments was assembled on-site from its component parts in about five weeks. (Perhaps it comes as little surprise that Ikea was even a founder of one of Sweden’s prefabricated housing ventures.)

Sweden has earned a reputation as one of the world’s leaders in prefabricated, off-site housing construction. About a year ago, when I asked Joseph Gyourko, one of America’s top housing economists, which underrated housing policy stories he thinks I should write about, he had a ready answer: Look into how Nordic countries have figured out how to efficiently build high-quality homes in factories at far greater rates than the US does. “It’s not trailer parks,” he told me then. “It’s nice housing.”

A multifamily building in Gothenburg, constructed with prefabricated timber modules by the Swedish manufacturer Lindbäcks. Ulf Celander/Lindbäcks Bygg

Estimates vary (in part because “prefabrication” is a fuzzy term to define), but experts on Sweden’s housing industry say a very large share of its homes are built using some form of prefabrication. Susanne Rudenstam, managing director of the Swedish Wood Building Council, told me about 90 percent of the country’s new single-family homes are built with prefabricated timber systems, which is consistent with other estimates. According to Sweden’s national statistics agency, 43 percent of new multifamily apartments are constructed with fully prefabricated structural frames. Another 46 percent are partially prefabricated.

“Why don’t we do this?” Gyourko asked in astonishment. Why, indeed, hasn’t the United States, the land of free markets and capitalist innovation, embraced the Ikea method of home construction?

Now that I’ve been investigating this question, I’ve learned how much more complicated it is than it might seem. The Swedes indeed build homes in ways that make our construction methods — predominantly building homes on-site, one by one, piece by piece — look embarrassingly archaic, as if every washing machine were assembled from different parts inside the consumer’s home. As the US battles an acute housing shortage, Sweden’s success has helped inspire efforts to accelerate factory-built housing here; Oregon, for example, has invested $20 million in modular housing manufacturers.

But several experts I spoke to for this story cautioned that Americans risk learning the wrong lessons from Sweden.