Steelmakers See Opportunity in Housing
The people who made the steel in your car now want to make your house too.
As lumber prices rise and timber quality falls, Indiana’s booming steel mills are moving into housing construction, said John Davies, director of the Indiana Building With Steel Alliance.
“They’re very aggressive about new markets, and steel-framed housing is the fastest-growing steel market potentially,” Davies said.
Although steel has long been used for skyscrapers and bridges, only 1% of the nation’s homes are made with it, said Gopal Ahluwalia, research director for the National Assn. of Homebuilders in Washington.
But, Ahluwalia said, spikes in the price of lumber in 1993-94 increased builders’ interest in galvanized steel, which is more durable, stronger, more precisely machined and easier to assemble than wood.
It’s also fireproof and impervious to pests.
“We are predicting that the house of the future will use steel,” said Davies, whose 6-month-old alliance counts among its 13 members northwest Indiana’s five steel mills--Inland, USX, Gary Works, National and Bethlehem.
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Together, the Gary-area mills produce about 22% of the world’s steel, and more than half the steel used by U.S. auto makers, Davies said.
Housing won’t supplant cars as the mills’ chief market, Davies said, but it offers the industry a rich opportunity to grow. National plans to add a new line in Gary for production of steel roofing and framing materials, and steelmakers have 10 more lines on the way--nine in the United States and one in Australia.
The steel alliance also has entered into a partnership with the Housing Futures Institute at Ball State University to build prototypes of affordable homes by 1998.
Funded by a $1-million federal grant, Ball State architects are trying to develop a blueprint for future housing construction, said Stan Mendelsohn, who heads the institute in Muncie.
“We’re looking at steel as a viable alternative to the stick-built house which has been in operation since Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “One of our aims is to influence the building industry.”
Davies said the steel homes of tomorrow won’t resemble the mass-assembled Lustron houses of the 1950s, with their shiny surfaces and steel furniture. Instead, steel studs and screws will be masked by bricks or wood, he said.
“The steel-framed house looks like any other house,” he said. “It’s just the skeleton.”
About 50,000 steel-framed homes have been built in the United States this year, and Davies says the steel industry hopes to capture 25% of the U.S. housing market by the year 2000.
But he concedes that it could be a long time before screws replace nails on many construction sites. Lumber is used in about 94% of homes, while concrete is used in most of the rest, Davies said.
Steel also faces future competition from other metals, lumber made from wood chips and new forms of concrete, Mendelsohn said.
