The purpose of this report, part of the Project Feedback series, is to describe the nine Operation BREAKTHROUGH prototype sites and tell how they were built.

Operation BREAKTHROUGH is this country's first large-scale systematic housing demonstration program, featuring the public demonstration of innovative house designs and site plans. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) initiated BREAKTHROUGH to encourage more use of industrialized methods. It put these advanced ideas on trial, in prototype form, at nine locations. HUD chose the sites from among many nominated by local and state governments to represent a variety of market conditions. Urban, peripheral, suburban, and semi-rural neighborhoods are the settings for nearly 3,000 housing units built between 1971 and 1973. Development was the responsibility of eight Prototype Site Developers (PSDs), who were basically managers with a wide range of tasks, from land acquisition to marketing. Developers brought to this job an unusual array of capabilities; some of the management techniques applied in BREAKTHROUGH were new to the housing industry.

This report is part of the collection of scanned historical documents available to the public.