The Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust (BMHT) is the body which is again producing council houses in the city, after many years of a political block imposed on council house building across the country.
The trust's production is modest when compared to the boom years of municipal building in the 1960s, when Birmingham could complete 10,000 houses and flats in a year.
BMHT began building in 2010 and completed its 3,000th house last year.
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For at least a century, critics have been complaining about the antiquated way in which houses are built when compared with the way in which other products such as cars are produced.
Today, cars are built by clever robots in an internal environment rather like a big laboratory.
Yet, houses are still being built by a man standing in mud, patiently placing one brick on top of another in the rain.
The gulf between these different production processes is reflected in popular appreciation of design.
It is common to find someone whose choice of car is the latest and most up-to-date precision engineering product from BMW yet, if indeed he or she chooses to buy a new house at all instead of an old one, will select something that looks like an 18th century farmhouse with data sockets.
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To its credit, BMHT is trying to bring housing up to date and close these gaps, albeit a bit late in the day.
It is planning a programme in which it will build 2,500 factory-made houses in the next five years.
It has designed five house types, ranging from a single-person to a house for a family of four.
Storey-height units, totally finished inside and out, manufactured in a small factory in Coventry, will be transported to the site on a lorry and craned into place.
First the ground floor unit, plugged into underground drainage and services already installed, and then the first floor unit craned on top.
The crane departs and the occupants can move in. Planning permission for a prototype house in Hockley was sought in January.
It was approved by the planning committee but only after the proposal was criticised by a number of councillors.
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The criticism was mostly at the low level of "It looks like X". It was suggested that it had similarities with an office and with a shipping container.
I have seen brilliant buildings imaginatively made from shipping containers.
But I suspect that the underlying concern is not so much about an industrial appearance, which is happily accepted in other types of buildings, but about repetition and standardisation.
The economy of industrial mass-production of houses, as with cars, necessitates the repetition of identical products.
We are happy to drive a car that is identical to thousands of others. But a house is expected to have an identity which is peculiar to itself.
However, there are plenty of precedents for the production of identical houses, albeit designed pre-industrialisation, which provide good and desirable living environments for all sorts of people.
Georgian terraced houses, both grand and modest, were copied all over the country from 18th century pattern books of standard designs.
Victorian and Edwardian byelaw terraces were similarly derived from local building byelaws, similar across the country.
The individuality of the house in these types comes not from the house itself but from the process of its inhabitation by individuals.
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It has to be said, in the councillors' defence, they are understandably nervous about a less admirable precedent, the huge production of prefabricated tower blocks and other dwelling types from the 1950s to the 1970s, many of which have failed both socially and technically, and been demolished.
The generation which created them were driven by misguided principles in which quantity of production drove out considerations of environmental quality and placemaking.
We now know better, having learned from the disaster. In addition, we now have a much better command of technical quality in manufacturing.
Currently, the biggest development of factory-made houses in the 海角视频 is 440 houses in the new town of Northstowe, Cambridgeshire.
The developer is Urban Splash which is also the developer for Port Loop here in Birmingham, now under construction.
In Northstowe, the modular houses will be joined together and assembled into terraces, able to form streets and squares.
It is a weakness of the BMHT prototype houses that they won't be able to do this. They are designed to be detached houses, highly finished in the factory on all four sides.
In this respect, they are like cars and also like the listed 1940s prefabs surviving in Moseley, designed as freestanding objects.
BMHT has a programme for building their factory-made houses in small groups on left-over pieces of land in the city, like disused garage courts on backland behind existing houses.
They have identified 580 pieces of such council-owned land that are suitable.
This is a modest ambition but it is sensible to start modestly and test the products out in varying circumstances before gearing up into large-scale production.
But I look forward to seeing a more ambitious programme of BMHT production in which we can see the 21st century equivalent of Georgian streets being made of terraces of factory-made houses.
Ironically, this may require the houses to be not quite so high-tech and less totally finished in order that they may be made to fit together into different configurations, on sites that are not perfectly flat.
The leader in this field locally is Accord Housing Association, which opened a new house factory in Aldridge last year, capable of producing 1,000 houses a year.
Its houses are timber-framed and can be adapted to be put together in different ways, using a variety of external materials.
Accord has built some very successful residential places from them.
Enough uniformity to achieve economy and make a coherent place, enough variety to create a local identity and character.
That might make a good formula for using industrialisation to meet housing need.
Joe Holyoak is a Birmingham-based architect and urban designer