> A lot of house building isn’t amenable to mass manufacture
That's because we keep making houses as these boutique hand crafted items. If we can't mass manufacture basements, then don't make the basement part which we can't mass manufacture. We're able to mass manufacturer cars, which are devilishly complex machines. Houses are simpler, but bigger. We could mass manufacture houses if the right incentives were put in place.
Hilariously, once self driving car technology lets us have self driving RVs, we'll be in a place where we are mass manufacturing homes.
There are absolutely companies that mass manufacture houses and put them on concrete pads. And there's some market for that. But, as other comments mention, custom building costs for that class/size of house are not really the major cost issue in the scheme of things.
When the Lustron came out, The Home Depot was not yet even a startup, and there had never been anything like that. Consumers had never had a fraction of the convenient access to the building materials that's now been expected for decades. And key materials realistically had been mass-produced for a number of decades earlier, before there were considerations to appeal to retail DIY consumers.
When the cost of labor skyrocketed in the 1970's, tens of millions of Americans were rapidly excluded from the new home market for their foreseeable future. Even though they had been on the verge of participating, on the reliable path that had been established for so many millions that had come before, it just floated further out-of-reach. The ground was fertile for The Home Depot to sprout and grow.
If you watch a subdivision of raw land be built into a neighborhood using the typical "ASAP at all costs, but cheap"[0] approach, this is so mature that specialized tools, materials, and workflows have been honed to drastically minimize the hours that actual skilled workers are on each home. They really have been working like an assembly line for quite some time.
So mass production had always been part of the equation, Lustron had a superior technology product that could compete on costs but didn't turn out to be cheaper though. To some extent there might have been an underlying dependency on a hail mary for it to end up so cheap they flew off the shelf. There were a number of reasons that didn't happen, obviously a bonanza is the exception not the rule, but without 20/20 hindsight at the time it's easy for anyone to overlook something that can be pointed to later.
The real problem for them was the (large) capitalist market that they were trying to operate in, when they were grossly under-capitalized for the competition, on terms that were beyond their ability to significantly influence toward overall advantage.
They would have probably been better off circling the wagons and not trying to make waves in a huge established market. Firmly occupying their unique adjacent niche sustainably, and then venturing forward from there in ways that previous progress will not be lost if goals are not fully met.
[0] All costs to be borne by the buyer, so pull out all the stops.
That's because we keep making houses as these boutique hand crafted items. If we can't mass manufacture basements, then don't make the basement part which we can't mass manufacture. We're able to mass manufacturer cars, which are devilishly complex machines. Houses are simpler, but bigger. We could mass manufacture houses if the right incentives were put in place.
Hilariously, once self driving car technology lets us have self driving RVs, we'll be in a place where we are mass manufacturing homes.