Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, it's Jacob. Just a quick note that today's
Speaker 1: show is a collaboration with my old friends at Planet Money.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a follow up to last week's episode
Speaker 1: of What's Your Problem. It's about the century long quest
Speaker 1: to mass produce houses in a factory, so it does
Speaker 1: hit on that core What's Your Problem theme using technology
Speaker 1: to try to make things cheaper. I hope you'll like it.
Speaker 1: If you're a new listener who found What's Your Problem
Speaker 1: because of the Planet Money episode, let me say welcome.
Speaker 1: I'm delighted that you're here, and I hope you stick around.
Speaker 1: You can check out our back catalog, which has dozens
Speaker 1: of shows in it, and we'll be back next week
Speaker 1: with a new episode of What's Your Problem. Here's the show.
Speaker 1: This is Planet Money from NPR. Let's talk about houses
Speaker 1: in America. I'm going to go out on a limb
Speaker 1: and I'm going to say houses in America are too expensive.
Speaker 2: Bold words from Jacob Goldstein coming in hot. And there
Speaker 2: are a lot of reasons for this, right, there's the zoning,
Speaker 2: there's land prices. But one reason we do not hear
Speaker 2: much about one of the things driving the cost of housing,
Speaker 2: the process of building houses is just really slow and
Speaker 2: inefficient and expensive.
Speaker 1: There's this thing I heard a while back, years ago
Speaker 1: that really made me realize just how inefficient it is
Speaker 1: to build a house. And it goes like this, Imagine
Speaker 1: we built cars the same way we build houses. You'd
Speaker 1: have a meeting with the car designer where you tell
Speaker 1: them what kind of car you want, and they'd drop
Speaker 1: plans for your special car. Then you'd go to the
Speaker 1: city council, you'd get a permit. Then you'd go around town.
Speaker 1: You'd call different car builders, show them your blueprints, and
Speaker 1: they'd be like, yeah, sure, I can build you your
Speaker 1: special car. It'll cost I don't know, a million dollars
Speaker 1: be ready and say a year and a half.
Speaker 2: I'm sure there are developers who build whatever, like a
Speaker 2: hundred homes at a time, but even building one hundred
Speaker 2: homes at a time is this wildly slow and expensive process.
Speaker 1: It seems like we should be able to do better.
Speaker 1: We know how to make things cheaper. We've been doing
Speaker 1: it for hundreds of years. We make things cheaper by
Speaker 1: mass producing them in factories, just like we do with cars,
Speaker 1: and just like we do with lots of other things.
Speaker 1: So why don't we do that with houses. Hello, and
Speaker 1: welcome to Planet Money.
Speaker 2: I'm Jacob Goldstein's and I'm Nick found Jacob. So good
Speaker 2: to have you back, So good to see you.
Speaker 1: Thanks man, I'm happy to be back at Planet Money.
Speaker 2: We should say you now have another job. You now
Speaker 2: host this great show called What's Your Problem of a
Speaker 2: big fan. It's about people trying to solve problems out
Speaker 2: in the world, oftentimes with technology.
Speaker 1: Very good. Yes, thank you for listening and for What's
Speaker 1: Your Problem. I recently interviewed a homebuilder who is trying
Speaker 1: to do this thing we're talking about on the show today.
Speaker 1: He's trying to figure out how to build houses in
Speaker 1: a factory. And as I was preparing for that interview,
Speaker 1: I realized that there was actually a much bigger story here.
Speaker 1: It's a story that would be great for a Planet Money.
Speaker 1: It's this one hundred year story of people trying to
Speaker 1: do this thing, trying to figure out how to make
Speaker 1: houses cheaper by building them in factories.
Speaker 2: Today on the show, the story of something that should
Speaker 2: have taken off by now. There'll be some flying saucer houses,
Speaker 2: there'll be some double wides.
Speaker 1: And Nick, you get to do one of your favorite things,
Speaker 1: you get to go to a construction site swinging some hammus.
Speaker 1: Just a quick heads up, there is a mention of
Speaker 1: suicide in today's show.
Speaker 2: This dream of using factories, using mass production to make
Speaker 2: houses cheaper and better goes back about one hundred years now,
Speaker 2: and in those hundred years there have been some spectacular
Speaker 2: failures and at least one surprising boom along the way.
Speaker 1: So what we're gonna do on today's show is talk
Speaker 1: about three key people. There's an impractical genius, a very
Speaker 1: practical small businessman, and someone who is trying again right now,
Speaker 1: to mass produce houses in factories.
Speaker 2: The star of chapter one, that impractical genius is a
Speaker 2: man named Buckminster Fuller Bucky to his friends. Bucky was
Speaker 2: this famous weirdo. He was a designer, he was a futurist.
Speaker 2: He was beloved by Steve Jobs and other hippie adjacent
Speaker 2: tech types. Fortunately for us, someone just published a book
Speaker 2: about him.
Speaker 3: My name is alec Nevilla Lee, and the book is
Speaker 3: Inventor of the Future, The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller.
Speaker 1: And do you, by chance have any close connections to
Speaker 1: any of the current or former staff of Planet Money
Speaker 1: or the Indicator.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, Well, we should make this very clear that
Speaker 3: this is not a NEPO situation that you were not
Speaker 3: aware that I was married to Indicator reporter and co
Speaker 3: host Whalen until after you began looking into buckminster Fuller.
Speaker 2: It's true. Alex Has Buckminster Fuller's dream of making houses
Speaker 2: and factories starts in nineteen twenty seven. He's not famous yet.
Speaker 2: He's in his early thirties, living with his wife and
Speaker 2: his baby daughter in Chicago, and he's working for this
Speaker 2: company that sells construction materials. But then he gets fired.
Speaker 2: He's in a really bad place, and in the middle
Speaker 2: of all this, he walks to the edge of Lake
Speaker 2: Michigan and consider suicide.
Speaker 3: He is going through this crisis, and the story is
Speaker 3: that while he's looking out of the water, he starts
Speaker 3: to ask himself a series of questions, starting with, you know,
Speaker 3: is there a God? Does God have a plan for me?
Speaker 3: You know, do I know what this plan is? And
Speaker 3: then he has this kind of blinding worship insight that says,
Speaker 3: you do not belong to yourself, You belong to the universe,
Speaker 3: and you know it is for you to figure out
Speaker 3: how you can be a benefit to all of mankind.
Speaker 1: And you know what Buckminster Fuller, vessel of the universe,
Speaker 1: decides to do to devote himself to the betterment of
Speaker 1: all mankind. It's the mass produced houses in a factory.
Speaker 3: So the next day, you know, he starts to focus
Speaker 3: very seriously on this housing idea. Okay, because that's his background.
Speaker 3: He's someone who has spent years in construction. You know,
Speaker 3: his father in law is a famous architect, and so
Speaker 3: you know, for him to make an impact, the obvious
Speaker 3: places start is housing.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just his background. Bucky thinks the time
Speaker 2: is right for this idea. It's after World War One.
Speaker 2: Construction costs are really high, and like today, it was
Speaker 2: really hard back then for a working class family to
Speaker 2: buy a house. And this was a.
Speaker 1: Time when people really believed that technological progress could make
Speaker 1: life better. Radio is new. It's the dawn of mass
Speaker 1: consumer goods. People are starting to get things like refrigerators
Speaker 1: and washing machines and cars.
Speaker 2: Right this is about twenty years after Henry Ford had
Speaker 2: rolled out the Model T that was the first car
Speaker 2: that was affordable to the masses, and the reason it
Speaker 2: was affordable was because it was mass produced on the
Speaker 2: assembly line.
Speaker 1: The car was a really important stot for Bucky. That
Speaker 1: thing I did at the top of the show about
Speaker 1: you know, imagine we built cars the way we build houses.
Speaker 1: I got that from him. I got that from Bucky.
Speaker 2: Shout out to Bucky. So Bucky decides, I'm gonna build
Speaker 2: houses the way we build cars. And crucially, this means
Speaker 2: not just building regular style houses in a factory. It
Speaker 2: means rethinking from scratch what it means to build a house.
Speaker 1: So he has this big idea and he goes out
Speaker 1: and he starts pitching it. He calls it the Dimaxian House,
Speaker 1: and he starts to get popular as this sort of visionary,
Speaker 1: big idea guy. He's given lectures. If you were around today,
Speaker 1: he would definitely be big into ted talks. But one
Speaker 1: thing he is not doing building houses because to build
Speaker 1: these factory built houses, he needs a factory and he
Speaker 1: doesn't have one.
Speaker 2: And then finally, fifteen years after he first comes up
Speaker 2: with the idea, he gets his big chance. It's nineteen
Speaker 2: forty four. US factories have been churning out planes and
Speaker 2: ships and jeeps to fight World War Two, but now
Speaker 2: the war is starting to wind down.
Speaker 3: And one of the questions as the war starts to
Speaker 3: wind down, is what are we going to do with
Speaker 3: all of this industrial capacity that we've built up. And Fuller,
Speaker 3: who's kind of in the right place at the right time, says, well,
Speaker 3: you know, I have this idea for industrialized housing, and
Speaker 3: it makes a lot of sense for us just to
Speaker 3: convert to these aircraft plans to building houses because it
Speaker 3: will keep the plants operational, people will keep their jobs,
Speaker 3: and in theory, we're going to have a huge demand
Speaker 3: for post war housing after all these veterans come home.
Speaker 1: So Bucky convinces this airplane company in Kansas to let
Speaker 1: him use their factory to build a prototype of the
Speaker 1: house he's been dreaming of for years, And an airplane
Speaker 1: factory was actually a pretty good place to do it
Speaker 1: because his factory optimized house was nothing like a regular house.
Speaker 3: So it looks like a flying saucer, all right, it's
Speaker 3: kind of the best way to describe it. It's, you know,
Speaker 3: bare aluminum, so it's this shiny metal house and there's
Speaker 3: a ring of glass windows.
Speaker 2: To be clear, this is a round house.
Speaker 3: And you go inside and the floor is very springy
Speaker 3: because of the way the house is engineered. All these
Speaker 3: rooms are kind of like wedge shaped, and you know,
Speaker 3: he has these what he calls evolving shelves, which are
Speaker 3: shelves that are built into the walls that rotate the
Speaker 3: touch of.
Speaker 1: Buttons, basically the Jetson's house.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's funny because it was always like
Speaker 3: the House of the future, right, Like, even from early on,
Speaker 3: people are saying, oh, you know, Fuller is designing the
Speaker 3: House of the future, which I think kind of annoyed
Speaker 3: him at first because he was trying to do it
Speaker 3: for real.
Speaker 1: In the present, Bucky finally has a factory. He makes
Speaker 1: these prototypes. World War Two is over, the gis are
Speaker 1: coming home. So what happens next?
Speaker 3: So nothing ever happens, right, The company does not go
Speaker 3: into mass production.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Bucky's dream, the dream of the mass produced factory
Speaker 2: house does not come true. And Alex says there are
Speaker 2: a few reasons for this. For one, Bucky was just
Speaker 2: kind of a pain to work with, not a great
Speaker 2: guy to run a big company.
Speaker 1: Another reason, Bucky came up with this idea back in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties. But now it's the mid nineteen forties,
Speaker 1: and unusually in American history, This is a time when
Speaker 1: a lot of working class people actually could afford houses.
Speaker 1: Congress subsidized mortgages for returning troops, and developers were starting
Speaker 1: to build these cheap housing developments.
Speaker 2: And the last reason Bucky's factory built homes went nowhere
Speaker 2: maybe the most obvious, but it's worth pointing out. People
Speaker 2: do not want to live in a spaceship. These were
Speaker 2: weird ass round metal houses.
Speaker 3: This is kind of the tickaway here. It's like Fuller
Speaker 3: really said, you know, people will like what I tell
Speaker 3: them to like. He expects people to kind of change
Speaker 3: their lifestyle to fit this idealized house design that he
Speaker 3: has come up.
Speaker 1: With, and people didn't want to do that.
Speaker 2: Side note, we actually haven't mentioned the thing that Bucky
Speaker 2: is best known for today, the geodesic dome like Spaceship
Speaker 2: Earth at Epcot at disney World, and also the dome
Speaker 2: house that my hippie friends in the Santa Cruz Mountains
Speaker 2: used to live in.
Speaker 1: Everybody has hippie friends who live in a domehouse in
Speaker 1: the Santa Cruz Mountains. Anyway, you didn't need a factory
Speaker 1: to make one of these domes. It was a really
Speaker 1: simple design, very DIY friendly, but it didn't work that well.
Speaker 3: So Fill actually lived in a dome house and it
Speaker 3: was so leaky that apparently, you know, people would see
Speaker 3: him at home like reading the newspaper with an umbrella
Speaker 3: over his head and like a flashlight clutch between his teeth.
Speaker 3: You know, the you know, there's a reason why we
Speaker 3: don't mostly live in domes today.
Speaker 1: Final recap from Bucky timing is everything. Don't launch your
Speaker 1: factory built house at the one moment when working class
Speaker 1: people can afford traditional houses. And if you're gonna build
Speaker 1: houses in a factory, don't make them too weird. Make
Speaker 1: them like normal houses that people want to live in.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to chapter two.
Speaker 1: Okay, for the title of this chapter, I'm going to
Speaker 1: count to three, and we're both going to say our
Speaker 1: favorite name for the chapter one two three Stuck inside
Speaker 1: a mobile home field advantage with the zoning blues again
Speaker 1: is a Dylan reference this section. Yes, the section is
Speaker 1: about mobile homes and the mobile homes story, which is
Speaker 1: the next big moment for factory built homes. It doesn't
Speaker 1: happen through some grandiose, weirdo vision like the one Bucky had.
Speaker 1: It builds gradually and it comes sort of from the
Speaker 1: bottom up.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Our guide to this chapter is Brian Potter. He
Speaker 2: actually worked for a factory built construction company that had
Speaker 2: its own boom and bust.
Speaker 4: They raised several billion dollars in venture capital and then
Speaker 4: went bankrupt.
Speaker 2: Now he writes a newsletter that we love. It's called
Speaker 2: Construction Physics, and it's all about this thing that we're
Speaker 2: talking about in the show today. It's about productivity and construction.
Speaker 1: Brian has spent a long time looking back at the
Speaker 1: history of factory built homes, and he told us about
Speaker 1: this guy, Elmer Frye, kind of the anti Bucky, not
Speaker 1: a visionary, not touring the country giving lectures. He had
Speaker 1: a company that made camping trailers. There were a bunch
Speaker 1: of companies that made these, and some people did live
Speaker 1: in them, but mostly they were for towing around. And
Speaker 1: then one day, in the early nineteen fifties, Elmer heard
Speaker 1: from one of his customers.
Speaker 4: One day he got a request from somebody who wanted
Speaker 4: a ten foot wide trailer, and fry said, well, that's
Speaker 4: two wide to legally go on the roads. And the
Speaker 4: guy said, oh, that's okay, I'm not going to move
Speaker 4: it once I have it. I'll just call it a
Speaker 4: construction trailer and permit it like that, and Fry said okay,
Speaker 4: and then built it for him, and then he started
Speaker 4: building more of them, and they just turned out to
Speaker 4: be incredibly popular.
Speaker 2: And then the rest was history.
Speaker 4: The rest was history. The increase in width and mobile
Speaker 4: homes went on from there.
Speaker 2: People loved it. Pretty Soon everybody was ordering these extra
Speaker 2: wide trailers a few feet at a time. Those trailers
Speaker 2: people towed behind their car were becoming the mobile homes
Speaker 2: that we know today.
Speaker 4: Pretty soon, after the ten wide, you have the twelve wide,
Speaker 4: and then the fourteen wide, and then yeah, the double wide,
Speaker 4: which is two modules that get stuck together.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So right in the fifties, that's pretty much when that
Speaker 4: shift started.
Speaker 1: They were not building weird round spaceship houses of the
Speaker 1: future with push buttonshelves. They were building rectangular, cheap houses. Also,
Speaker 1: the timing was better that post World War two moment
Speaker 1: when so many ordinary people could afford traditional houses. That
Speaker 1: moment passed, so lots of people started buying these new,
Speaker 1: cheaper mobile homes. There was a mobile home boom.
Speaker 2: And companies also started building bigger, full sized houses and factories.
Speaker 2: By nineteen seventy mobile homes and those other factory built
Speaker 2: homes made up roughly half of newly built single family
Speaker 2: homes in America.
Speaker 1: Found and I'm going to say that again because it
Speaker 1: was so surprising to me when I learned it. It
Speaker 1: was why I wanted to do this whole chapter. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one in two newly built single family homes
Speaker 1: in America was built in a factory.
Speaker 4: The industry is so large and expanding so rapidly that
Speaker 4: at one point in the late sixties or early seventies,
Speaker 4: I think you know, three of the top ten most
Speaker 4: profitable companies in the US were mobile home companies. Uh,
Speaker 4: the largest home builder in the US is a mobile
Speaker 4: home company.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: It becomes just an enormous industry relatively quickly.
Speaker 2: This was it. This was the moment when lots of
Speaker 2: affordable homes were made in factories.
Speaker 1: But it didn't last. There was a recession that started
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy three, and a bunch of the mobile
Speaker 1: home manufacturers went out of business. After that, the industry
Speaker 1: never really got back to where it had been in
Speaker 1: the early seventies. Today, only around ten percent of new
Speaker 1: single family homes are made in factories.
Speaker 2: So the question is why what happened? Brian points to
Speaker 2: a few things. For one, middle class homeowners, the classic
Speaker 2: villains of affordable housing stories didn't want mobile homes in
Speaker 2: their neighborhoods. Mobile homes were targeted at low income people.
Speaker 2: There was a stigma attached to the way mobile homes looked,
Speaker 2: and so as a result, there was this wave of
Speaker 2: zoning rules that forced mobile homes out of town and
Speaker 2: into mobile home parks.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't just zoning, and in fact, Brian thinks
Speaker 1: there was a deeper problem, a problem that goes to
Speaker 1: the big law, long term question, why don't we build
Speaker 1: more houses and factories? Brian says, building houses in factories
Speaker 1: is just a fundamentally hard business. For one thing, home
Speaker 1: construction is very cyclical, and traditional contractors can deal with
Speaker 1: cyclical downturns by laying off workers, riding things out, and
Speaker 1: then hiring people back and starting to build again when
Speaker 1: the economy comes back.
Speaker 2: But companies building homes and factories they have this big
Speaker 2: fixed cost. They have the factory where they build the homes,
Speaker 2: and they have to pay for those factories. Whether the
Speaker 2: housing market is booming or crashing.
Speaker 4: So factory built housing tends to have a tough time
Speaker 4: in downturns. You see a lot of these operations just
Speaker 4: go out of business.
Speaker 1: This makes sense as far as it goes. But when
Speaker 1: Brian told us this, I asked him, what about all
Speaker 1: the other industries that have to keep factories open and downturns.
Speaker 1: It's not like, say, car companies go bankrupt every time
Speaker 1: there's a recession.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Brian said, In the car business, doing mass production
Speaker 2: in a factory is it's just so much more efficient
Speaker 2: than the alternative. Think of Henry Ford's assembly line. It
Speaker 2: was so much better than building bespoke cars one by
Speaker 2: one in some workshop.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, building mobile homes in factories, yeah
Speaker 1: it was more efficient than building houses on site. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't that much more efficient. It wasn't enough more
Speaker 1: efficient to ride out the inevitable downturns in housing. Brian says,
Speaker 1: once you paid to attach the mobile home to the
Speaker 1: back of a truck and haul it down the highway
Speaker 1: to wherever it was going and got it all set up,
Speaker 1: you lost a lot of the gains you got from
Speaker 1: building it in the factory in the first place.
Speaker 2: This is a really hard problem that in the end,
Speaker 2: mobile homes couldn't entirely solve. And for that matter, no
Speaker 2: one in this whole history of factory built housing has
Speaker 2: been able to crack.
Speaker 4: It is very, very hard to be the Henry Ford
Speaker 4: of housing, to be able to produce things in a
Speaker 4: factory that's so much cheaper that it just completely changes
Speaker 4: the way we build it and the way. You can't
Speaker 4: go back to the previous way. That is very hard
Speaker 4: to do, and nobody has managed to do it yet.
Speaker 1: Nobody has managed to do it yet yet. Yes, they
Speaker 1: are still trying, and we'll hear about that after the break.
Speaker 2: I grew up spending a lot of time on construction sites.
Speaker 2: My dad was a contractor, mostly remodeling kitchens and bathrooms.
Speaker 2: I used to work at a cabinet factory. It helped
Speaker 2: with a lot of kitchen installs. I am the reigning
Speaker 2: world champion of Belt Sander Racing Modified Division. Don't try
Speaker 2: this at home, it's pretty dangerous. And so it was
Speaker 2: a great delight that for this story I got to
Speaker 2: do something that's very familiar to me that I love.
Speaker 2: I got to go visit a job site and put
Speaker 2: my microphone very close to power Tools.
Speaker 1: Final chapter, Chapter three, working title, The work goes on,
Speaker 1: the cause endurers, the hope still lives, and the dream
Speaker 1: shall never die.
Speaker 2: So there are a few companies out there right now
Speaker 2: trying new ways to solve the factory built house problem.
Speaker 1: One of them is called Cover. I interviewed the founder,
Speaker 1: Alexis Revas, for this podcast I host What's Your Problem?
Speaker 1: And Nick, you got to go meet him at a
Speaker 1: job site in La where they were putting together one
Speaker 1: of these houses.
Speaker 2: Hey, guys, how's it good? Alexis niet.
Speaker 1: Alexis is trying to figure out how to have the
Speaker 1: kind of success that the mobile home companies had back
Speaker 1: in the early seventies, but without running into the same problems.
Speaker 1: And there are some big differences between what he's doing
Speaker 1: and what the mobile home companies were doing. For one,
Speaker 1: he is not building cheap homes, not at all. They're
Speaker 1: really expensive, at least for now.
Speaker 2: All right, So what are we looking at here? So
Speaker 2: this is a living area, kitchen area, a nice open
Speaker 2: kitchen area, kitchen.
Speaker 5: With a wide Florida ceiling window sliding.
Speaker 1: Alexis studied architecture in college and he fell in love
Speaker 1: with this big idea of building houses in factory, and
Speaker 1: he discovered that there is this relatively small industry that
Speaker 1: is building homes in factories, not mobile homes, full size houses.
Speaker 2: So Alexis went to intern for one of those companies,
Speaker 2: and what he saw there was that they're basically just
Speaker 2: building traditional homes in the factory, then moving them on
Speaker 2: these giant flatbed trucks and lifting them into place with
Speaker 2: giant cranes, and then doing lots of work to finish
Speaker 2: them on site. And he realized the same thing Brian
Speaker 2: Potter realized. When you do all that, the house doesn't
Speaker 2: wind up being that much cheaper than a traditional house.
Speaker 2: You don't get those sweet sweet productivity gains from factory
Speaker 2: based mass production.
Speaker 1: So Alexis starts this new company and their whole thing
Speaker 1: is sort of trying to do what Buckminster Fuller tried
Speaker 1: to do one hundred years ago. They want to rethink
Speaker 1: factory construction from the ground up.
Speaker 2: And I could see this at the job site. It
Speaker 2: was very different from the many that I'd been on
Speaker 2: in my life. One difference there's no wood framing, it's
Speaker 2: all steel studs, and also the ceiling is steel. I've
Speaker 2: never seen that on a job site before steel ceiling. Yeah,
Speaker 2: people people who.
Speaker 5: Are familiar with conventional construction, they kind of they kind
Speaker 5: of walk into here and they're like, this is this
Speaker 5: is some you know, alien alien system. Yeah, it's very unusual.
Speaker 2: To be clear, this is gonna look like a nice house.
Speaker 2: It's gonna look like something you'd see in an architectural magazine.
Speaker 2: But it isn't built like most houses. It's built mostly
Speaker 2: in the factory, one panel at a time.
Speaker 5: As wall panels, floor panels, ceiling panels, so you can
Speaker 5: think of it like life sized Lego blocks. And then
Speaker 5: we take those panels, we deliver them to site on
Speaker 5: a regular truck, no big crane, no big equipment, and
Speaker 5: then we assemble them into the.
Speaker 1: Homes those panels or flat It's not like shipping you know,
Speaker 1: half a house that you have to put on the
Speaker 1: back of a truck and install with the crane. So
Speaker 1: they solve a lot of that expensive to ship transportation
Speaker 1: problem that other factory built houses have.
Speaker 2: Alexis's company isn't the first to build houses with prefab panels,
Speaker 2: but they're trying to build a lot into those panels
Speaker 2: before they leave the factory. Alexis gets down on his
Speaker 2: knee and shows me an interior panel that already has
Speaker 2: wiring built into it.
Speaker 5: Is that you've got the Uh, you know what I'm
Speaker 5: doing here is I'm pulling out one of the electrical connections.
Speaker 5: But you can see here there's an electrical connection. This
Speaker 5: comes pre wired from the factory, and then there's this
Speaker 5: quick connect that you just plug in, uh, and then
Speaker 5: that makes the electrical connection.
Speaker 2: So this is one way they're trying to make home
Speaker 2: building more efficient. Rather than spend a few days wiring
Speaker 2: up the house on site, they pre cut the wires
Speaker 2: at the factory to the right legs, They put connectors
Speaker 2: on them, and they install them in some of the panels,
Speaker 2: and then when they get to the site, they just
Speaker 2: click the connectors together. Yep, I've never heard of that before.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean the idea is and this is so
Speaker 5: it's very unusual to do this kind of thing in construction.
Speaker 5: But in the automotive world, for example, right, it's called
Speaker 5: an electrical harness. You've got you've got the you know,
Speaker 5: there's there's hundreds of sensors in a car, right, and
Speaker 5: they have these these all these wires pre made in
Speaker 5: a factory shipped to you know, the main line and
Speaker 5: they have these connectors on the end, and then you know,
Speaker 5: you just plug it all together. So it's taking kind
Speaker 5: of an automotive approach to electrical and bringing that to
Speaker 5: home building.
Speaker 1: Again with the automotive industry, but this time it's not
Speaker 1: just a metaphor. Alexis company hired people from Tesla and
Speaker 1: other car companies to help them figure out mass production,
Speaker 1: but they have not really figured it out yet. They're
Speaker 1: still making houses one by one, which is part of
Speaker 1: the reason the houses they're selling cost a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the house I saw being built is a two bad,
Speaker 2: two bath, fancy house with high end appliances, and it's
Speaker 2: going to cost more than four hundred thousand dollars, a
Speaker 2: lot of money.
Speaker 1: They are not solving the housing affordability crisis with this house.
Speaker 2: The classic home depot bucket, you haven't innovated on that yet.
Speaker 5: No, We've got to prioritize my bucket.
Speaker 2: What shouldname? My name is? Gus? When I was on
Speaker 2: the job site, I got to spend a little time
Speaker 2: with Gus Contreras. What's your title?
Speaker 4: Is my title?
Speaker 5: Now?
Speaker 2: Are are you like the everything is my title?
Speaker 1: Magician?
Speaker 2: Gus was installing the bathroom, and talking with him helped
Speaker 2: me understand how this company might possibly be able to
Speaker 2: bring down the still very high costs of their houses.
Speaker 2: Four minutes and you guys already have the shower installed.
Speaker 6: Yeah, four minutes was fast, but it still takes Gus
Speaker 6: and five other experienced construction workers about a month to
Speaker 6: put the house together on site, and that month of
Speaker 6: skilled work makes the house cost more.
Speaker 2: So maybe the most important part of Gus's job is
Speaker 2: figuring out how to make it faster and easier to
Speaker 2: put together these houses. Gus says, plumbing the bathroom used
Speaker 2: to take like a whole day. Now it's just thirty minutes.
Speaker 2: And that's because Gus and his coworkers were constantly sending
Speaker 2: feedback to engineers at HQ, saying, Hey, try tweaking this
Speaker 2: one little thing at the factory before you ship it
Speaker 2: to us. Are you taking meetings from inside these these buildings?
Speaker 1: Baby zoom zoom, Google Meet or whatever I can log into.
Speaker 5: Do you know what I mean, We'll do it.
Speaker 2: That's that's pretty rare for the construction industry, being on
Speaker 2: a zoom at a job site.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I used to get yell that from
Speaker 3: being on my phone on praise for it.
Speaker 1: So, I mean, this is it. One zoom call from
Speaker 1: Gus at a time. This is the thing happening. They're
Speaker 1: trying to reduce the need for expensive, time consuming skilled
Speaker 1: labor of people like Gus, trying to mass produce the
Speaker 1: panels in the factory so that when those panels get
Speaker 1: to the job site, it doesn't take a team of
Speaker 1: skilled workers a month to put it all together. The
Speaker 1: goal is to make it so easy that almost anybody
Speaker 1: can put together a house in a few weeks. Think
Speaker 1: of it like a really big piece of Ikea furniture.
Speaker 1: Not quite that easy and somewhat fancier, but ikia s
Speaker 1: that is the dream anyway.
Speaker 2: This is the way we make things cheaper in the world.
Speaker 2: We figure out how to mass produce them in factories.
Speaker 2: We've done it over and over again for a long
Speaker 2: time now, and yet after one hundred years of trying,
Speaker 2: we still can't do it with houses and Jacob I
Speaker 2: have listened to the whole Alexis interview. There is a
Speaker 2: lot more about his backstory and the nitty gritty of
Speaker 2: what he needs to figure out to make own instruction
Speaker 2: really cheap. His goal, it's a great interview. It's a
Speaker 2: great show. It's called What's Your Problem with Jacob golds
Speaker 2: And you can find it where you can.
Speaker 1: Find it wherever. Thanks for the shout out, Mick. We'd
Speaker 1: like to thank James Schmidt's of the Minneapolis Fed, who
Speaker 1: talked to us about mobile homes. Also the late Ted Kennedy.
Speaker 1: I poached a line from one of his speeches for
Speaker 1: the title of chapter three. Thanks also to Emma Peasley
Speaker 1: for producing today's show, Molly Messick for editing the show,
Speaker 1: Sierra Juadez for fact checking it, and Brian Jarbo for engineering.
Speaker 2: If you or someone you know might be considering suicide
Speaker 2: or is in a crisis, you can call or text
Speaker 2: nine to eight eight to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Speaker 2: That's nine eight eight. I'm Nick Fountain, I'm Jacob Goldstein.
Speaker 2: This is NPR.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.