Last summer, the State of Vermont reached out as it began shaping Homes for All (H4A) Phase 3*, a new effort to expand access to pre-approved home designs and make it easier to build affordable housing faster.

At first, the conversation was familiar: how to commission strong, code-ready plan sets that communities could permit and build with confidence. But as the Center for Offsite Construction (CfOC) and its Senior Research Fellows engaged in a back-and-forth with state leaders, another possibility came into focus. What if a state plan catalog didn’t only publish “traditional” construction documents, but also made room for offsite construction methods: pods, panels, and other factory-enabled approaches that can reduce labor pressure, shorten schedules, and improve repeatability?

By July, Vermont’s team had absorbed that feedback and expressed it in their own words. They issued this RFP that signaled something rare in public procurement: an intent to treat offsite methods not as a niche alternative, but as a first-class pathway within a statewide pre-approved plan program. (See Section 2.10)

That Vermont work became a key reference point in December, when CfOC Executive Director Jason Van Nest first met with Alex Horowitz at The Pew Charitable Trusts to share ideas about driving down housing costs nationwide. In that meeting, Jason pointed to Vermont’s H4A Phase 3 RFP as meaningful progress. It was exciting to point to it as an early example of a state using its purchasing and policy power to invite factory-enabled delivery into mainstream housing strategy.

Last week, Jason met again with Alex. They gathered partly to compare notes on broader affordability strategies, and partly to explore how Vermont’s model could be strengthened and translated into more portable legislative language for other states. The goal: help more jurisdictions move beyond pre-approved plans as static drawings, and toward plan programs that begin to unlock the speed, learning curves, and demand aggregation that only repeatable systems can deliver. More on those ideas in the next post.

This is the kind of quiet work that precedes visible change: drafting, refining, translating, and sharing—so that what works in one place can become easier everywhere. Others should feel welcome to reach out and join this work!

If the housing crisis is a national emergency, then state plan programs are a lever hiding in plain sight. Vermont pulled it. Now the question is how many others will follow—with sharper tools in hand.

*Recently, Vermont has re-branded Phase 3 as "802 Homes"