I sent this article to my dad, who is an engineering and architecture consultant, and works extensively with the construction industry (New York area). He think

I sent this article to my dad, who is an engineering and architecture consultant, and works extensively with the construction industry (New York area). He thinks this can't work in the US, because these houses will end up costing far more here than in Germany. These houses will only be affordable to manufacture as factory-assembled models. Most people in the US have or want fairly customized houses, which fit their specific requirements. Factory-assembled cookie-cutter homes did not take off here, and it seems unlikely that passive houses' special properties will overcome the distaste. Assembling custom passive houses on an individual basis, by hand, will require highly qualified construction labor, which costs a lot of money. Most contractors working on people's homes are woefully incompetent and cannot be trusted to put in a level floor, let alone a hermetic seal. This includes union workers. Contractors who know something about building typically charge huge sums for their work, and often make awful mistakes anyway. (Typical story: an elevator which, at the ground level, stops six inches above the level of the floor because the idiot construction foreman decided not to remove an extraneous beam his workers accidentally put into the foundation where it jutted into the elevator shaft.) So, at the end of the day, a passive house in the US will probably cost two or three times as much to build as a conventional house. Considering that, in my dad's experience, it's hard to convince people to put in the bare minimum of insulation required by building codes ("what, this insulation will cost me an extra 20 thousand dollars?!"), a passive house will probably be a niche curiosity, bought only by wealthy environmentally-conscious consumers.