Two Exhibits, One Question: How Does America Build Housing Faster?
Aug 11, 2026 | Updated September 20, 2026

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development selected the Center for Offsite Construction (CfOC) and the Accreditation Board for Offsite Construction Education (ABOCE) to exhibit at the 2026 Innovative Housing Showcase on the National Mall, September 22 to 24.

Most of what gets shown there is a building or a product. What we are bringing is the connective tissue: the standards, the data, and the workforce that determine whether factory-built housing can scale at all.

CfOC's exhibit: The Handshake and .CTO

America's factories can already build bathroom pods, kitchen pods, and volumetric modules faster and cheaper than site construction. What they cannot do is guarantee that any factory's module connects to any builder's structure. Every pairing of manufacturer and builder is a custom engineering exercise, and that friction is a hidden tax on housing supply.

The centerpiece is a scale model of kitchen, bathroom, and utility room pods and the adjoining building walls, showing how each plugs into the coupler defined by the draft CfOC/ICC 1220 standard. That coupler is the point where structure, plumbing, electrical, and data pass between a factory-built module and the building that receives it.

The comparison we keep coming back to is the electrical outlet. A standard outlet is why any American appliance plugs into any American home. Nobody thinks about it, which is the point. A standard coupler does the same thing for factory-built housing. American builders have always scaled their craft by standardizing it, from dimensional lumber forward, and the module interface is simply the next chapter.

The standard is being developed through CfOC's ANSI-accredited consensus process under an agreement with the International Code Council.

Three boards cover what we call the Digital Keystone. Every product Americans buy carries data: a car's VIN traces its parts, a grocery barcode traces its origin. Housing is the largest purchase most Americans ever make, and it carries almost none. The .CTO (Configure-to-Order) file type describes an entire purchasable unit in one file: geometry, cost, compliance, and chain of custody. Configurator software uses those files to let you assemble a building from products made by different manufacturers, all guaranteed to fit. [A registry, run by CfOC as a neutral non-profit, checks products so any design tool can trust them.]

Complete machine-readable component data is the precondition for automated code compliance, factory quality assurance, and scaled offsite production. It is also what lenders and insurers need to verify what a factory-built unit contains and when value is created. And because the format carries chain-of-custody fields, a .CTO file can document that a housing component is made in America, component by component.

The .CTO and .CIS formats are developed in the open as the Configurator File Type Project, a series of the Joint Development Foundation, alongside Custom Building Configurators, Matechi, and Cascadia Structural.

Who Builds the Next 250 Years?

Every innovation at this Showcase shares one dependency: skilled Americans to design, build, and install it. Research, including HUD's own, consistently identifies the shortage of specialized crews as a leading barrier preventing factory-built housing from scaling across markets.

Factory-built housing needs a workforce trained differently from traditional construction, blending trade skill, manufacturing process, and digital fluency. Today there is no national map of where that training happens and no common benchmark for its quality.

ABOCE, a nonprofit co-founded by CfOC and the Modular Building Institute, is working on both. Its tent shows a national map of more than 100 colleges and universities already teaching parts of offsite construction, a draft Master's of Offsite Design and Delivery that a school can adopt whole or in part, and draft minimum accreditation criteria for offsite construction degrees. The criteria are not final. ABOCE is recruiting people to help decide what a good program looks like. The premise is simple: the same way engineering and nursing programs carry accreditation so employers and students can trust them, offsite construction education is gaining its own national standard.

Come find us

September 22 to 24, on the National Mall between 7th and 10th Streets. The Showcase is free and open to the public. 

If you work in offsite construction, housing policy, building codes, construction education, or housing finance, we would like to see you there.

The Center for Offsite Construction is a research center at New York Tech's School of Architecture and Design.