Putting Components on a National Stage

SBCA’s Big Green House Showed What the Industry Can Do

INNOVATION CAN BE DIFFICULT to appreciate as an abstract concept. Whether it’s greater efficiency, shorter cycle times, reduced waste, or better use of labor, it’s sometimes much more effective to explain an idea by showing the idea for everyone to see and touch. That is exactly what SBCA did on the National Mall in September with its Big Green House.

For the fifth year, the SBCA participated as an exhibitor in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Innovative Housing Showcase (IHS), marking its third year as an event sponsor. The sixth annual event, held September 22–24, 2026, in Washington, D.C., brought together manufacturers, builders, policymakers, housing professionals, students, media, and the public to explore approaches that could help address the nation’s housing challenges. The 2026 theme, “Made in America,” placed particular emphasis on American manufacturing and ingenuity. For SBCA, there may have been no better setting—or theme—to tell the story of structural building components.

Making Innovation Visible

At the center of SBCA’s involvement was the return of the Big Green House, a 3,000 square foot two-story duplex framed with roof trusses, floor trusses, and wall panels. Rather than describing componentized construction through brochures, presentations, or statistics, the exhibit allowed thousands of people to walk through a full-scale structure and see the system for themselves. This in-person approach matters.

Structural building components (components) are not a new technology waiting for the construction industry to discover them. They are manufactured every day at more than 1,350 component manufacturing locations across the United States and are used in everything from single-family homes to large multi-family projects. The manufacturing and distribution infrastructure already exists at scale, and that established network is an important part of the story. With component manufacturing already established across the country, the industry is positioned to support housing construction at scale without having to wait for an entirely new building system to emerge.

What continues to change is the environment in which components are being considered. Housing affordability, workforce availability, construction schedules, material costs, and waste have become increasingly important concerns. Those challenges are forcing builders, designers, policymakers, and others to reconsider not simply what is built, but how it is built. That is where SBCA’s Big Green House made a particularly strong impression.

For many policymakers, housing professionals, and members of the public, the framing package is largely invisible once a building is complete. That makes opportunities like IHS especially valuable, because they allow SBCA to explain not only what components are, but how they can influence labor, schedules, material use, and the overall building process.

The structure demonstrated how moving more of the framing process into a controlled manufacturing environment can improve the use of labor, materials, and time. Previous Big Green House builds have shown that the structure itself can be framed in roughly eight to twelve hours, depending on project and jobsite conditions and specifications. Components arrive at the jobsite designed and manufactured for a specific structure, reducing the amount of measuring, cutting, and assembly that otherwise has to occur in the field. The result is not innovation for innovation’s sake, but a different way of organizing construction around some of the industry’s most persistent constraints.

The Right Audience at the Right Time

The value of the Innovative Housing Showcase is not simply the number of people who walk through the Big Green House, but also the opportunity to put structural building components into conversations in which housing policy, construction methods, workforce challenges, and future building practices are being discussed.

Presenting that demonstration on the National Mall, in the heart of this nation’s capital, provided an opportunity to reach an audience that would be difficult to replicate anywhere else. HUD reported that more than 7,500 people attended the 2026 Showcase. Visitors included Second Lady Usha Vance; HUD Secretary Scott Turner; Education Secretary Linda McMahon; Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler; Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling; former HUD Secretary Ben Carson; HUD Deputy Secretary Andrew Hughes; two U.S. senators and 14 U.S. representatives; congressional and federal agency staff; industry leaders; media; students; and members of the public.

The Big Green House became part of that broader conversation. HUD Secretary Turner conducted an on-camera Fox Business interview inside SBCA’s exhibit during the Showcase. That kind of exposure is important because those who influence housing policy or construction decisions may have little reason to think about how the framing package for a building is produced. A completed house hides much of the innovation that went into constructing it. By leaving the framing visible, the Big Green House turned the building itself into an educational tool.

Visitors could see the trusses, and the wall panels firsthand and understand how the components fit together as a complete system. Most importantly, they could have conversations with people from the industry about why that matters.

The Showcase also included expert discussions on housing supply, technology, financing, and modernizing construction. SBCA participated directly in those conversations as well, including taking part in a program alongside NAHB Chairman Bill Owens focused on expanding housing supply (pictured on page 24). Being part of those conversations also gives SBCA an opportunity to ensure structural building components are represented when policymakers, housing organizations, builders, researchers, and other stakeholders are considering how homes will be built in the future.

Labor, Time, Material, and Waste

The value proposition demonstrated by the Big Green House is particularly clear when viewed through the four main challenges confronting housing construction: labor, cycle time, material efficiency, and waste. Component manufacturing cannot eliminate the industry’s workforce challenge, but it can change how available labor is used. Roof trusses, floor trusses, and wall panels shift a portion of construction from the jobsite into manufacturing facilities, where specialized equipment, software, established processes, and repeatable production methods can improve productivity.

The Big Green House illustrates how that same process can compress construction schedules. Instead of the entire structural system being fabricated piece by piece in the field, significant portions of that work have already been done before the truck reaches the jobsite.

Material efficiency follows much the same logic. Manufacturing structural building components in a controlled environment creates opportunities to optimize material use before production begins, rather than relying primarily on field cutting and assembly. Less unnecessary cutting can also mean less jobsite waste that needs to be collected, hauled away, and disposed of.

None of these advantages alone solves America’s housing challenges. The importance of the IHS event is that it rejects the idea that there is a single solution. The event brought manufactured housing, modular construction, 3D printing, building products, new technologies, structural building components, and other approaches together in one place. HUD intentionally wants the showcase to be an opportunity to highlight many of the innovations and solutions capable of expanding housing supply and lowering construction costs.

The Big Green House proves that components belong prominently in that conversation because they are not merely a theoretical or prototype solution. They are already an established part of the way most of America builds.

Innovation Built on Experience

There is also something fitting about showcasing structural building components at an event devoted to innovation. The component manufacturing industry itself is the product of decades of change. It grew because people found better ways to engineer structures, connect wood members, manufacture assemblies, automate production, use software, improve quality, and transfer work from unpredictable jobsites into controlled manufacturing environments. Today’s highly sophisticated component plant is the cumulative result of countless improvements made over generations.

The Big Green House makes that history visible, not because the components inside it are new, but because the housing industry is increasingly looking for solutions to problems component manufacturers have been addressing for decades that can be scaled to meet today’s needs.

HUD’s first-ever Trades Day reinforced the connection between past and future. More than 75 high school and trade school students attended, receiving hands-on exposure to careers and technologies in construction. SBCA was among the exhibitors highlighting career opportunities within the industry. That educational role also extends to the next generation of the workforce. Trades Day gave students an opportunity to see that modern construction includes not only traditional jobsite work, but also design, engineering, manufacturing, automation, technology, and other careers connected to offsite construction.

For those students, policymakers, housing professionals, and members of the public, the Big Green House offered a simple message: there are better ways to build, and many of them are already available through today’s component manufacturers.

That may ultimately be the greatest value of putting a 3,000 square foot framed duplex in the middle of the National Mall. SBCA did more than tell people that structural building components can help address labor constraints, reduce framing time, use materials more efficiently, and minimize waste. It literally gave them an opportunity to walk inside the solution.

In an industry where meaningful change often happens incrementally, sometimes the best way to move an idea forward is to make it impossible to overlook. For three days in Washington,D.C., SBCA’s Big Green House did exactly that.