The Sears Home Reimagined: A Plan to Deliver 500,000 Affordable, Move-In Ready Starter Homes to Working Families

The Sears Home Reimagined: A Plan to Deliver 500,000 Affordable, Move-In Ready Starter Homes to Working Families

Inspired by America’s original Sears Homes, Groundwork Collaborative introduces a direct-to-consumer approach to affordable, accessible homeownership 

More than a century ago, American families could flip through a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog, pick out a house, and have nearly everything they needed to build it delivered to them at an affordable price. Tens of thousands of Sears homes are still standing today – a testament to an era when a starter home could be both attainable and built to last. Today, as more Americans are priced out of the housing market, Groundwork Collaborative released a new proposal to revive the Sears home model for the 21st century.

The Modern Sears Home: Resurrecting the Affordable American Starter Home for a New Generation, authored by Groundwork’s Noah Ball-Burack, Emily DiVito, and Alex Jacquez, outlines a federal initiative to deliver, over eight years, 500,000 high-quality factory-built homes directly to American families across the country for under $215,000.

Today, the national median home price hovers above $400,000, and the starter home – what used to be the first rung on the ladder to economic security – is all but extinct. In some communities, starter homes can cost $1 million or more, putting homeownership further out of reach for many families.

The Modern Sears Home Program would deploy the federal government’s purchasing power, land access, and ability to finance and site homes at scale to bring the cost of new, high-quality homes within reach. Furthermore, by guaranteeing demand for hundreds of thousands of factory-built homes, the program would also give private manufacturing firms the certainty they need to expand production, lower production costs, and increase housing supply. By bringing affordable homes directly to communities where the private market has fallen short, the Modern Sears Home Program could expand homeownership in rural areas and open the door for families who have historically been shut out of the housing market.

The idea has vast public support. New polling shows that three in four voters support the Modern Sears Home Program and the proposal enjoys broad support across party lines, including 80% of Democrats, 72% of Independents, and 74% of Republicans. Additionally, 69% of voters, including majorities across party lines, say the program would make homeownership feel more attainable.

By some estimates, Sears sold more than 70,000 catalog kit homes during the 20th century, many of which are still standing today in states like Ohio, Illinois, New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Groundwork’s Senior Advisor for Economic Policy, Emily DiVito, shared the following: 

“For too many families, homeownership has gone from a milestone to a mirage. Decades of under-building have left us with an affordable housing shortage that’s pricing people out of their communities. Policymakers must pursue creative, tangible, and lasting solutions that bring homeownership back into reach. The Modern Sears Home program does just that.”

Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of Groundwork, reacted:

“I grew up in a Sears Home, and I know the comfort and stability these houses offer the families who live in them. That’s something far too many families can’t count on anymore, as Wall Street and corporate landlords squeeze every last penny out of homeowners and renters alike. Reviving the promise of a Sears home is a chance to make quality and affordable housing the rule, rather than the exception.”

In the paper, the authors write:

“Sears offered these homes for profit. The federal government – with greater resources, lower borrowing costs, and unmatched power to scale – can do it better…[with] the kind of public ambition that once sent 30,000-piece home kits rattling on rail cars across the country to families who otherwise thought homeownership a distant aspiration…The Modern Sears Home program is that ambition made actionable.”

BACKGROUND

A flexible framework for housing manufacturers with labor standards, environmental protections, and speedy delivery

• Prefabricated housing currently makes up just 10.5% of single-family construction overall, due to overlapping factors stifling production: current financing practices disadvantage prefabricated housing, while land use laws in many localities require custom designs for prefab homes and potential buyers face steep borrowing costs that discourage purchase.
• With flexible procurement authorities already available to the federal government, HUD can execute flexibly designed advance purchase commitments to private manufacturers, direct loans, and loan guarantees, and to directly construct factories or install equipment in existing factories.
• Through excess federal properties, state and local land banks as well as  federally-managed lands, HUD can acquire the 125,000 acres of land needed for a successful Modern Sears Home Program, allowing a prioritization of cost savings, geographic diversity, and markets where housing is unaffordable but denser multi-family development is unlikely.
• Though HUD code previously required homes to be built on a permanent steel chassis (underframe) for transportability, the recently enacted 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act eliminates that requirement, which will lower manufacturing costs and create greater architectural flexibility for manufactured homes.

Built to last, priced to own: High-quality homes designed for affordable homeownership and long-term wealth-building.

• Modern Sears Homes would be sold through an adapted community land trust (CLT) model that pairs permanent affordability with private wealth-building. Buyers would own their homes, while the federal government retains ownership of the underlying land, allowing families to build equity while keeping the homes affordable for future buyers. This ensures that the benefits of the Modern Sears Home Program are felt for generations to come – rather than captured by the first wave of buyers – while expanding access to high-quality homeownership for families too often priced out of it.
  • Nearly 70% of voters support reinvesting proceeds from the Modern Sears Home Program to create more affordable homes over time.
• 69% of voters say the Modern Sears Home Program would make homeownership feel more attainable – including 63% of renters and 73% of homeowners.