The Center for Offsite Construction supports the ROAD to Housing Act’s core intent: treat housing supply as urgent national infrastructure, and use federal capacity to clear the bottlenecks that keep homes scarce and expensive.

We’re especially encouraged to see how broadly the bill reaches. Across its many provisions, it signals that Congress understands something the market has been learning the hard way: conventional, bespoke project delivery cannot meet today’s demand curve. The Act’s expanded attention to manufactured and modular production, innovation grants, and pre-reviewed or pattern-based pathways is directionally right. It is Congress leaning toward repeatability, speed, and scale—exactly where the system must go.

But there’s a danger embedded in the bill’s ambition. The ROAD to Housing Act is, in several places, implicitly trying to catalyze a shift toward Configure-to-Order (CTO) housing, without naming the CTO marketplace logic that would make that shift real. When legislation expands “offsite” programs, funds product development, or asks agencies to try new delivery models, it can unintentionally reproduce the same failure pattern we see across the country: every program pushes toward industrialized delivery, yet each one does so in isolation, forcing manufacturers and builders back into project-by-project coordination. The result is a predictable collection of frustrations: slow adoption, limited interoperability, and repeated reinvention.

CTO is a paradigm shift. It is a new market structure. It depends on [i] catalogs of pre-defined, pre-engineered options, and on [ii] a shared “fit system” that allows products from different firms to connect and interoperate without bespoke coordination. In other industries, that fit system is taken for granted (i.e. ports, plugs, protocols, and mechanical interfaces that let competing products snap together reliably). Housing does not yet have that at scale.

If Congress wants the ROAD to Housing Act to unlock the next era of housing delivery, the fix requires a different infrastructure, to suppotr its focus on product pilots. The fix is to deliberately fund the enabling infrastructure of a CTO marketplace:

1. Accelerate ANSI interface standards, not just products. The highest-leverage federal investment is to speed the publication of industry-defined interface standards, developed through ANSI-accredited, balanced stakeholder consensus processes. This is fundamentally an market-defined solution allowing firms to organize around shared connection rules, tolerances, verification methods, and interoperability requirements.
2. Pull those standards through federal projects first. Once standards exist, federal agencies should be incentivized to use conforming products in their own delivery programs, like Defense (barracks), State (embassies), Agriculture (workforce housing), HUD, and others. This creates in initial, dependable demand that allows manufacturers refine catalogs, build QA muscle, and scale production with confidence, while government gets better outcomes and clearer performance data.
3. Then open the marketplace for private builders. With standards proven in public delivery, incentives can help private developers and builders adopt the same catalogs and interfaces—turning early government procurement into a toe-hold for broad market scale.

This is what government should do at its best: create open, durable, public infrastructure (in this case, open interface standards) and then de-risk private participation so innovation can compound inside a pre-organized marketplace. The ROAD to Housing Act is already pointed in this direction. Naming CTO explicitly, and funding the standards-and-adoption pathway that makes CTO possible, would ensure the bill’s many moving parts add up to a coherent market transformation rather than 38 well-intended, disconnected experiments.