Building Tomorrow: A Special Look at the Future of Housing

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Building Tomorrow – A Special Look at the Future of Housing"

Marketplace Morning Report (Marketplace & This Old House Radio Hour)
Aired: February 21, 2026
Hosts: David Brancaccio (Marketplace), Jen Largess (This Old House Radio Hour)

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Episode Overview

This special collaborative episode explores “building for the next hundred years” amid climate change, housing shortages, and shifting community needs. Against the backdrop of David Brancaccio’s personal experience losing his home in California’s wildfires, the episode dives into new materials, prefab construction, innovative processes, and evolving visions for what a home should be—centering not just on physical resilience and affordability, but on how homes help people thrive in changing times.

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Key Discussion Points & Segments

1. The Urgent Housing Challenge (00:59–02:26)

• The U.S. faces a severe housing affordability crisis, requiring 2–5 million new homes.
• Climate disasters are making questions of resilience and future-proofing urgent.
• Brancaccio frames the investigation: “Not just how we build houses, but how we build enough of them, fast enough, resilient enough, comfortable enough for our changing times.”

2. Personal Story: Rebuilding After Fire (03:38–06:10)

• Standing on the charred remains of his Altadena, CA home, Brancaccio recounts the emotional and practical impact of loss.
• Quote (David Brancaccio, 04:21):
  “I want to rebuild here, but I want to do it right... in terms of resilience to the next fire, in terms of energy efficiency and climate change, and I want it to look nice and be comfortable.”
• Mary Brancaccio’s poignant reflection drives the central theme:
  • (David Brancaccio quoting his wife, 04:51):
    “We had the perfect house for the last hundred years. When we rebuild, we need to build a house for the next hundred years.”

3. The Promise (and Challenge) of Prefab Construction

Site Visit: Neighbor Aloe Blacc’s Prefab Home (06:37–09:41)

• Musician Aloe Blacc’s new home, built in five months via factory-prefabrication, showcases prefab speed and quality.
• Quote (Aloe Blacc, 08:08):
  “Five months from the time I signed the contract to the time they put these buildings on site...”
• The prefab experience evokes both European modernity and logistical efficiency.

History & Systems Barriers (09:43–12:33)

• U.S. history of prefab—from kit homes to Operation Breakthrough (HUD, 1970s)—shows repeated promise but system-level snarls (local codes, financing, zoning).
• Quote (Ivan Rupnick, via Aloe Blacc, 11:44):
  “The real bottleneck isn’t can we build in a factory? It’s can we approve, can we finance, can we permit consistently across jurisdictions?”
• Steve Glenn’s plant in California demonstrates modern prefab’s potential if systemic barriers fall.

4. Material Innovation: Concrete vs. Mass Timber

Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) — "Building a Bunker" (17:06–19:08)

• Neighbor Heidi Lust opts for ICF blocks (concrete poured between insulated foam), building for extreme fire and wind resistance.
• Quote (Heidi Lust, 18:32):
  “So it’s ICF blocks, it’s 2-inch foam, 6-inch concrete, another 2-inch foam... The walls are gonna be about a foot thick. It can take up to 250 mile an hour winds. It’s going to give me a four to six hour firewall.”

Mass Timber / Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) (19:41–24:25)

• Brancaccio seeks lower-carbon solutions:
  “I’m looking for something that actually sucks in carbon dioxide. It’s called cross laminated timber.” (19:41)
• Architect Susan Jones (Seattle) champions CLT: strong, custom, prefab-friendly, fire-resistant due to charring.
• Quote (Susan Jones, 21:55):
  “Every building can be a custom building... but it’s also very precise.”
• Living in a CLT house:
  “It’s a rich, natural, immersive experience... I want to give it to other people.” (Susan Jones, 23:15)

5. Crash-Testing Resilience: Scientific Research

Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) (25:32–29:49)

• The IBHS “crash tests” homes with wind, hail, and fire to drive real-world building codes and standards.
• Quote (Roy Wright, IBHS CEO, 26:12):
  “We can lead with evidence so that homeowners, builders and developers make choices that withstand what Mother Nature is going to send our way.”
• Quote (Ann Cope, Chief Engineer, 26:58):
  “We destroy all these buildings, literally burn them down... so that we can figure out how to make them better.”
• Lab innovations are influencing codes; closing interior doors, for instance, slows internal fire spread.

6. Process Innovation: Microfactories and Digitization

Reframe Systems Case Study (30:23–34:27)

• U.S. housing is stymied by 30,000 local codes; Reframe Systems uses small, software-driven factories to standardize the process, not the design.
• Quote (Felipe Polito, 31:15):
  “Every single project has to be built custom to meet the demands for that site. You cannot build a single product repeatedly in a factory because you need to get this variation outcome.”
• Prefabricated kits, standardized assembly (“like an Ikea kit”), expand the construction workforce.
• Vision: 1 million homes by 2040 using this distributed, tech-centered approach.

7. Rethinking the Purpose and Experience of Home

Psychological & Cultural Dimensions (35:35–37:03)

• Brancaccio reflects on homes’ true value:
  “What I see clearly now is not just a structure that needs replacement. I see a place where life actually happened.” (35:58)
• Homes today must accommodate aging, work, healing, connection—prompting reexamination of design and community norms.

Net Zero Retrofits — Reviving the Old (37:52–42:50)

• Zeyneb Maghavi retrofits her 1925 home in Cambridge, MA for net zero energy, combining careful sequencing with new mechanicals.
• Quote (Maghavi, 42:35):
  “I certainly approached this home as a forever home, as a place I wanted to invest in... for my kids, for the community. I was really trying intentionally to build a home for the future.”

8. Community Innovation: Tiny House Retirement Community

(43:07–49:26)

• Robin Urian founds The Bird’s Nest, a tiny house community in Texas for retired women; focuses on empowerment and mutual aid.
• Quote (Robin Urian, 43:38):
  “My amenity was going to be my community.”
  “We tackle everything on our own and no one’s around to say, oh, you’re not doing this that right... If it doesn’t work, we do it a different way.” “Home is home and I can make a home anywhere that I choose.”

9. Synthesis & Closing Reflections

(49:26–52:12)

• The “house of the future” isn’t just materials or processes, but deliberate choices about how to live.
• Quote (David Brancaccio, 51:29):
  “Can we say it? It’s a relationship, really. One that... has to hold change and stress and healing, growth and care.”
• Jen Largess on the heart of it:
  “Making deliberate choices about how we want to live, not just what we want to build.” (52:12)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Rebuilding for the Future:
  “When we rebuild, we need to build a house for the next hundred years.” — Mary Brancaccio (as recounted, 04:51)
• On Community:
  “My amenity was going to be my community.” — Robin Urian (43:38)
• On Resilience through Science:
  “We destroy all these buildings... so that we can figure out how to make them better.” — Ann Cope (26:58)
• On Relationship to Home:
  “It’s a relationship... One that has to hold change and stress and healing, growth and care.” — David Brancaccio (51:29)

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Main Themes

• Urgency: Housing must quickly adapt to affordability and climate crises.
• Innovation: Prefab, mass timber, and microfactories offer hope—if systemic changes follow.
• Resilience: Scientific testing and evolving codes are critical for future-proof homes.
• Community & Agency: The way we live together—tiny houses, supportive communities, net-zero retrofits—matters as much as what we build.
• Deliberate Living: The true measure of future housing is how well it supports lives—not just withstanding disaster, but enabling connection, aging, and thriving.

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Detailed Timestamps

• 00:59 — Framing the problem: housing crisis and climate disasters
• 03:38 — Brancaccio's story of loss and rebuilding
• 06:37 — Aloe Blacc’s prefab home tour and discussion
• 09:43 — The history and barriers of prefab housing in the U.S.
• 13:01 — Modern prefab processes and plant tours
• 17:06 — ICF concrete building for fire/wind resistance
• 19:41 — Cross-laminated timber and the carbon question
• 21:55 — Prefab and customization in mass timber
• 25:32 — IBHS crash-testing and resilience research
• 30:23 — Reframe Systems: microfactories and software
• 35:35 — Rethinking the meaning and design of home
• 37:52 — Net zero retrofitting in practice
• 43:07 — Tiny house community for retired women
• 49:26 — Synthesis, connecting housing innovation with ways of living
• 51:29–52:12 — Final reflections: home as relationship, not just shelter

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This episode weaves technical, personal, and societal threads, challenging listeners to imagine not just better structures, but better ways of living for the next hundred years.

Transcript

[David Brancaccio]

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[Jen Largess]

from Marketplace and this Old House Radio Hour. It's Building Tomorrow, a special look at the future of housing, brought to you by La Eston APM American Public Media. I'm Jen Largess.

[David Brancaccio]

And I'm Marketplace's David Brancaccio. This hour explores how new materials, new methods and new expectations are reshaping how homes are built and the way we live in them.

[Jen Largess]

We'll Visit a factory in California where houses are built like cars on an

[David Brancaccio]

assembly line at a research facility in South Carolina where engineers destroy full scale houses to learn how to save them. Some people would say we crash test houses.

[Jen Largess]

Here in East Texas, a tiny house community is rewriting the rules of retirement.

[Robin Urian]

I didn't need amenities. My amenity was going to be my community.

[David Brancaccio]

How a wave of material innovation is reshaping home construction.

[Jen Largess]

But first, the news right after this. This old House Radio hour is supported by the Home Depot, helping customers with tools and guidance on any project from installation to inspiration. The Home Depot. How doers get more done. This is building Tomorrow, a special look at the future of housing from Marketplace and this old House Radio Hour. I'm Jen Largess. We begin in Altadena, California, where Marketplace host David Brancaccio's home used to be. Hi, David. Thanks for having us.

[David Brancaccio]

Thanks for coming up to the property,

[Jen Largess]

Jen, which at the moment is an empty lot. It's been what, a year since your home burned down in the California wildfires?

[Aloe Black]

Yeah.

[David Brancaccio]

Here we are on a rectangular suburban lot. There is a square where the house used to be, just dug out of the earth. And there's some cactus over there, not a lot else.

[Jen Largess]

Yeah. Well, you've got a picture here that shows what used to be here. Tell us what you're looking at.

[David Brancaccio]

Yeah, it was small by choice, barely 1100 square feet, two bedroom, one bath with the detached garage. It was kind of Tudor y, but it was scaled to what my wife Mary and I needed.

[Jen Largess]

How does it feel to be here right now?

[David Brancaccio]

Well, when I see the San Gabriel mountains in the distance, it's a winter day, but the sun is burning our foreheads. You're like, I want to rebuild here, but I want to do it right. I want to do it right in terms of resilience to the next fire. I want to do it right in terms of energy efficiency and climate change. And I want to do it right because I got to live in it and I want it to look nice and be comfortable.

[Jen Largess]

Your wife, Mary Brancaccio, I think she said a line that summed it up quite perfectly.

[David Brancaccio]

Yeah. She was standing right where you're sitting when she said this, within moments of us having seen the property burnt down for the first time. And she said, look, it was 99 years old. We had the perfect house for the last hundred years. When we rebuild, we need to build a house for the next hundred years. Well, what is that? What techniques do you use? What building materials, what design choices? I Think those are all interesting questions that will be of use after these compounded disasters across the country.

[Jen Largess]

Yeah. And it isn't just about one house or one community really.

[David Brancaccio]

Think about it, Jen. Just on this little street, 15 houses burned to the ground in the community. 5,000 in all of Southern California in those fires, 12,000 houses. But across the country. Right. We have an affordability crisis. We need to build houses. And I think it's useful that we're in Altadena. It's a community known not for a cookie cutter approach to anything. Altadena, California, I think, is a laboratory for ways to rebuild.

[Jen Largess]

And your idea of how will we build for the next hundred years or are we gonna just keep repeating the last? That's a question that really anchors everything we're exploring today.

[David Brancaccio]

So we can just go on foot? Actually, Jen, we can walk to a bunch of places where people are trying it. Not the old fashioned way where a crew shows up with a bunch of sticks and sheets of plywood and nails it together piece by piece to see what are just some of the options for doing it for the next century.

[Jen Largess]

So where are we headed now?

[David Brancaccio]

This is a neighbor I'm jealous about. This gentleman has almost a finished house. Wow.

[Jen Largess]

How is he able to move so quickly here?

[David Brancaccio]

I want to know more about it, but he's prefabricated in a factory. Large sections were built elsewhere and assembled here. I've never met Alo Black, who happens to be a well known musical artist, but when I saw the prefab, I wanted to know more. And we'll be shaking hands for the first time. We didn't get to meet before the fire, but one of the things about the fire is I get to meet the neighbors.

[Aloe Black]

Howdy, neighbor.

[David Brancaccio]

You're the Aloe Black, aren't you?

[Aloe Black]

Yeah, I'm a singer and a songwriter entertainer, lucky enough to be part of this beautiful community and help restore it

[David Brancaccio]

in the way that I can.

[Aloe Black]

Every time I was coming up with what I could put on the property, I couldn't make a decision about what kind of design. And I thought, well, if there's something that's already made, I could just purchase and place placed. That would really help me out. When I saw the showroom, I knew that this was a solution that I should really consider. When I learned how quickly they could manufacture and deliver, this was far and above the rest. Five months from the time I signed the contract to the time they put these buildings on site, it felt like

[David Brancaccio]

an apartment that I had stayed in in Germany. A modern High quality dwelling. So five months from contract signing to having something here.

[Jen Largess]

It's not something. I mean there's lighting. Are you near completion or are you complete?

[Aloe Black]

It's near completion.

[David Brancaccio]

What's it look like on the inside? Can we peer in?

[Aloe Black]

It's really nice on the inside. I'd be happy to show you guys.

[David Brancaccio]

Oh, this is like Euro.

[Aloe Black]

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

[David Brancaccio]

This door is. The door is amazing.

[Aloe Black]

So this half that you're standing in was on a shipping container and it was brought in by a crane and dropped here. As we progressed to the other half,

[David Brancaccio]

they were just joined together.

[Aloe Black]

You can see how wide the wall is. That's joining two halves together. It was awesome to see them just bring it on a big truck, back it in and plop it down.

[Jen Largess]

Look at the length of these windows.

[Aloe Black]

The windows offer so much lighting. Everything looks really clean and new and modern. It feels really good.

[Jen Largess]

Prefab housing has long promised a way to build faster, cheaper and at scale, especially in moments of crisis. And yet every time the country has tried to push factory built housing nationwide, it's stalled or it's failed. The question isn't whether prefab can work, it's why it hasn't. At least not yet.

[David Brancaccio]

Every day in testing laboratories throughout the country, men and women are working to develop new ways to build better and cheaper living units. For more than a century, the US has turned to factory built homes in moments of urgency. From gold rush era kit houses shipped west to to Sears catalog homes delivered by rail to post war efforts to house millions of returning gis. Again and again the idea made sense on paper. But a truly national prefab housing system never quite took hold. To understand why, we need to revisit one of the boldest housing experiments in American history. A federal program called Operation Breakthrough. Much of our basic supply of housing is growing older and less than adequate.

[Aloe Black]

So Operation Breakthrough was a major HUD research project from the early 70s to run a large scale experiment using new housing technologies.

[David Brancaccio]

That's Ivan Rupnick, an architect and housing historian who uncovered the forgotten story of Operation Breakthrough. A new way of doing things. A housing breakthrough. In the late 1960s, Washington was grappling with a housing crunch that feels eerily familiar today.

[Aloe Black]

Housing supply wasn't keeping up with demand. Construction productivity was lagging, and then the costs of labor, lumber and land were all rising. And at the same time, we knew how to scale complex products. Through industrial policy. Policymakers compared not just housing to automobiles and airplanes, but to the policies that had helped those industries scale. So that logic shaped the decision from the Nixon administration to appoint an auto executive, George Romney, to head Operation Breakthrough.

[David Brancaccio]

Because I believe that working together, we can build a new America. I will work toward this goal with all my heart, mind and spirit. They very quickly built 4,000 units, but learned that they were facing a different problem than they anticipated.

[Aloe Black]

The real bottleneck isn't can we build in a factory? It's can we approve, can we finance, can we permit consistently across jurisdictions, technologies that are not familiar to us.

[David Brancaccio]

It was a systems problem.

[Aloe Black]

The built environment is by layered systems. Codes, zoning, inspection, financing, all involved around conventional on site construction.

[David Brancaccio]

Operation Breakthrough stopped not because the idea failed, because the system wasn't ready to support it. But the lesson didn't disappear.

[Aloe Black]

What's amazing is that after 50 years of what I would call an extinction event of our prefab sector, we have had real innovators, companies coming back, improving technologies, improving outcomes, despite of the fact that really our framework is not set up for it.

[David Brancaccio]

Today we're back in a housing crisis, short on homes and short on labor. That pressure is pushing builders toward a new wave of industrialized housing.

[Jen Largess]

And it's happening now, led by builders like Steve Glenn inside facilities like plant prefab outside of Bakersfield, California, where the future of factory built housing is already on the floor.

[Aloe Black]

Let me orient you. This is a 270,000 square foot facility. It was actually built for us, size of four football fields. This is the only facility in the US built to do both panels and modules, two major building systems in prefab

[Jen Largess]

inside building a home becomes a coordinated process where walls, floors, roofs and entire rooms are made in parallel, then assembled with precision.

[Aloe Black]

So what you're seeing here is a piece of equipment called a hundigger. Every piece of wood we use is cut here. We start with 40 foot lengths of KDDF. It's a kind of lumber. That machine model tells this what to do, it labels it, so it's saying the project and the part in the project. And all this gets batched together and then taken to the appropriate panel stations. So no plumber or electrician measures anything in there. It's all done here, including gravity drops. It's all part of that machine model and that equipment does it. And by the way, it can do very complex cuts. It nails every stud and joists and it makes sure it's the right nail, the right paddle does that automatically and then the frames roll down the line.

[Robin Urian]

Here

[Jen Largess]

at the end of the assembly line, the module is completely Finished and ready to ship.

[Aloe Black]

This is a 60 unit affordable housing project. 400 square feet. This is how it ships. The flooring is in, the millwork is in. The appliances are installed. Here's the washer and dryer, A Murphy bed. The bathroom was fully finished. Tiles are in. The toilet, the shower fixtures.

[Jen Largess]

Steve Glenn is convinced prefabrication won't sit at the margins of American housing for long. It will soon define it.

[Aloe Black]

We will see more single and multifamily projects built off site. It is easier in any manufacturing environment to build the same thing again and again.

[Jen Largess]

What we're seeing here is factory built housing working the way it's supposed to. Faster timelines, consistent quality, and fewer surprises. If zoning and financing rules evolve to match, prefab could shift from a niche approach to a more practical tool for building housing at scale. Coming up next, a new wave of building materials and processes are radically changing how houses are being built to last. This Old House Radio hour is supported by the Home Depot. How doers get more done. This is Building Tomorrow, a special look at the future of housing from Marketplace and this old House Radio Hour. Hi, I'm Jen Larges. We're back in Altadena, California, where Marketplace host David Brancaccio's home used to be.

[David Brancaccio]

I want to go back just briefly to what used to stand on our property, that picture of my house. Because when I look at it now, I don't see some sort of failure. I see a house that did exactly what it was designed to do for the last hundred years.

[Jen Largess]

Yeah. And the question is whether we keep building that same house.

[David Brancaccio]

Yeah. Or whether we take advantage of what has changed. New knowledge that's been taken aboard, new materials that have come our way.

[Jen Largess]

And what's really striking is that you don't have to go far to see how different neighbors are answering that question.

[David Brancaccio]

So just a couple blocks away, my new friend Heidi is building with something called icf. Insulated concrete forms. It looks like Styrofoam from a cup, but flattened into LEGO bricks that click together. You pour concrete in between Jen, and you end up with an insulated concrete house. And what we know about concrete, whatever happens, it's not going to burn down.

[Susan Jones]

I'm not building a house. I'm building a bunker. So I decided to name my house Edith, Edith Bunker. I figured as long as I have a house and it's gonna be strong and sturdy, why not give her a name?

[David Brancaccio]

So, Heidi, tell me your whole name.

[Susan Jones]

Heidi Lust. I'm pretty much a scenic artist. I've done a lot of backdrops for the movie and music industry. Katy Perry, super bowl halftime show. Props for Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney. A coffin for a Motley Crue.

[David Brancaccio]

Too bad we can't just paint a backdrop of our houses and call it a day. But that doesn't quite work. We can't live in those.

[Susan Jones]

No.

[David Brancaccio]

How long are you here?

[Susan Jones]

Almost 25 years. My house is almost 100, so I'm sad it's gone, but at least something's coming back.

[David Brancaccio]

I gotta say, more than something, you're using an unusual construction technique. Give me a sense of it.

[Susan Jones]

So it's ICF blocks, it's 2 inch foam, 6 inch concrete, another 2 inch foam. You put rebar in the center and you pour concrete in it. The outside's gonna have 1 inch stucco and then drywall on the inside. It's like a Lego. It's got the tongue and groove and they snap together. And then you have rebar going horizontally and vertically with the concrete inside. So the walls are gonna be about a foot thick. It can take up to 250 mile an hour winds. It's going to give me a four to six hour firewall. And I probably won't need any heating or cooling because it's that much insulated.

[David Brancaccio]

I don't want to jinx anything, but when do you think you might be able to spend your first night in here?

[Susan Jones]

Cinco de Mayo?

[David Brancaccio]

I'm hoping so early spring. Not even late spring.

[Susan Jones]

Yes.

[Jen Largess]

So this is one answer to how we might build in the future. But this is not the way that you're leaning.

[David Brancaccio]

No, I love what Heidi's doing, but it's a lot of concrete. For my own tastes, concrete requires a lot of carbon dioxide to be spilled to make the stuff. And I'm looking for something that actually sucks in carbon dioxide. It's called cross laminated timber. We're going to rebuild from wood.

[Jen Largess]

You said wood.

[David Brancaccio]

Surprising, I know, given the fact that all the wood was consumed on my property. This is big, thick wood pressed together. It can be harvested from sustainable forests. You can get the wood from culling smaller trees to allow the bigger trees to thrive and also to reduce the chance of forest fires. There's a prefab angle to CLT and a small crew can frame in your house, including the ceiling, they say in a week.

[Jen Largess]

So we're going to travel north to Washington state where architect Susan Jones has been building with mass timber, including clt.

[David Brancaccio]

And she's asking some of the same questions we're asking here. How do we build homes that are stronger, smarter, and better suited to the next century.

[Susan Jones]

My name is Susan Jones. I'm principal architect of Atelier Jones, an architectural firm in Seattle, A pioneering front runner in the world of mass timber

[David Brancaccio]

in the US I'm here to learn about this thing called cross laminated timber, or clt. Let me make sure I got this right. It's basically regular wood stacked and glued together in crisscross layers so it acts more like concrete, forming these big solid panels you could use for walls, floors, and ceilings.

[Susan Jones]

I think tilt up concrete only made out of a really low carbon material that's actually replacing the higher content carbon of concrete.

[David Brancaccio]

There's a prefab piece of this. Not prefab in the sense of standardization, but a prefab in the sense of a lot of the work gets done in the factory setting, and then I guess it shows up on a truck.

[Susan Jones]

Exactly. And that's what I loved about mass timber, was that it had so much freedom. It's not prefabricated as like, okay, we're making, you know, 20,000 cookie cutter pieces. No, no, we're making. Actually, every building can be a custom building, which to me, the designer loves that. Right. But it's also very precise.

[David Brancaccio]

Do you think I'm crazy for trying to use cross laminated timber to build a small single family home in the fire zone?

[Susan Jones]

I'm just bummed we didn't talk earlier because we've already built four of these in the middle of a fire zone in Greenville, California.

[David Brancaccio]

Wood burns, that's the obvious concern. But what researchers have found is that thick mass timber behaves very differently under extreme heat. When CLT is exposed to fire, the outer layer chars and burns away first, forming a blackened crust. That char layer actually protects what's underneath, slowing the fire and insulating the remaining wood.

[Susan Jones]

When I designed my house, I covered it with a material called shao shogi ban. It's an ancient Japanese exterior wood treatment of natural Douglas fir that's burned. And the Japanese did that to protect the houses from burning in the future.

[David Brancaccio]

What's it like to live in your CLT house?

[Susan Jones]

I was just there this morning. It's just a beautiful experience every day. It's a very immersive experience. The acoustics are even different. Yes, we have some beautiful triple glazed windows, which also add to the. The silence of the house, the quiet of the house. But it's a rich, natural, immersive experience that when I finished, I felt, this is so beautiful. I want to give it to other people.

[David Brancaccio]

Susan decided to build her own house as a living case study. Small, urban and experimental, just 1,500 square feet. It's a proof point for how this material can work not just in big buildings, but in homes. So first of all we see some beautiful surfaces. These are CLT panels I'm looking at.

[Susan Jones]

These are CLT panels. They are the structure for the house. And all of the wall panels are going up. They're three ply. You can see that side cut of the panel up there where you have one piece of wood and then another going perpendicular and then another one going the other way. And that's the structural strength.

[David Brancaccio]

You can see the cross section of your CLT behind you really clearly right here.

[Susan Jones]

It's interesting you mention this, David. This is a piece of timber that was from a tree that had been killed by a beetle that took over so much of the western Canadian forest stock. And they killed the tree by infesting in it. And as they die, they secrete a certain fungus that stains the tree and it turns the wood a slight blue. And so the history of this panel, the history of this forest is embodied in this 4 inch wide panel that's facing my dining room. As you might notice, it's not exactly covered up. It's not a fancy place. It's a warm hospitable place.

[David Brancaccio]

Beautiful. Walking these few blocks, Jen, what stands out is how many different answers there are to the same question. Not whether to rebuild, but how, especially in a more extreme climate.

[Jen Largess]

In the building trade they call that resiliency. How do we build homes that actually hold up against whatever mother Nature can throw throw at them? That's the question being tested at the Insurance Institute for Business and home safety or IBHS. On 90 acres in Richburg, South Carolina, the IBHS runs one of the most extreme building research facilities in the world. Their engineers build full scale houses and push them to the breaking point.

[David Brancaccio]

Some people would say we, we crash test houses here.

[Jen Largess]

Roy Wright is the president and CEO of ibhs.

[Aloe Black]

We're not going to stop the storms,

[David Brancaccio]

we're not going to stop the ignitions. But we can lead with evidence so that homeowners, builders and developers make choices

[Aloe Black]

that withstand what Mother Nature is going

[David Brancaccio]

to send our way.

[Jen Largess]

The six story facility feels less like a laboratory and more like a Hollywood. Sounds talented for blockbuster movies. Inside, engineers position massive fans capable of generating 130 mile per hour winds directly at whatever they're about to test.

[David Brancaccio]

Start data collection in 3, 2, 1.

[Susan Jones]

Start. We destroy all these buildings, literally burn them down. Or shoot them with hail or throw a Category 3 hurricane at them so that we can figure out how to make them better.

[Jen Largess]

That's Ann Cope, the chief engineer for ibhs. Their ability to test full scale homes really changes what researchers can see and understand.

[Susan Jones]

We can recreate hurricanes, driving rain. We can manufacture hail and shoot the hail at the buildings. We recreate wildfire conditions.

[David Brancaccio]

20 seconds to ignition. The front walls look like they're starting to lean in and make at any time.

[Susan Jones]

Be aware, we have ember generators that create this ember flow that you see in real wildfire events so that we can study how things start and how to prevent the level of devastation that we have seen in the past.

[Jen Largess]

What researchers are watching isn't just the storm. It's the house itself. How every part of the structure reacts once the wind hits.

[Susan Jones]

How do those small shingles flutter? What about the vinyl siding that's on the side? How does the wind move around the corner and get up into the attic vent and then into the attic?

[Jen Largess]

To understand wildfire risk, researchers look closely at the smallest moments, how fire actually reaches a house and what happens when it does.

[Susan Jones]

We have this series of smokers that you might have in a barbecue that creates all of the small burning embers that then attack the home. And then we can figure out how do we prevent those embers from igniting the houses. We literally light buildings on fire and destroy them all the way down to the ground in the name of science so that we can study how bad is it if your neighbor's house is burning 10, 15, 20ft away, what does that mean? As we plan our neighborhoods, what they

[Jen Largess]

learn here doesn't stay in the lab. In many cases, it can change how homes are built and how people prepare before a storm.

[Susan Jones]

Specific changes that have come out of our research here at the lab, we've had a direct impact on the test standards for vinyl siding, on the pressure loads that are within the building codes. Direct correlation research right into the code. We figured out closing all the interior doors actually makes a difference.

[Jen Largess]

The question at IBHS isn't what they know about safer building. It's how to get more communities to put that knowledge into practice.

[Susan Jones]

Here in the United States, we have some of the best building codes, we have some of the best building science. We have great mitigation techniques. And so the mission is that we can use the safety information that we have to protect more of our homes, more of our businesses, more of our towns, more of our communities, because we have the knowledge. We have to use the knowledge this

[Jen Largess]

isn't about creating fear or retreating from the world. It's about agency.

[Susan Jones]

The good news? We know what choices to make. The pieces are out there and consumers can choose. It can feel overwhelming. You are not powerless when you're ready to take a step. Do one thing at a time.

[Jen Largess]

We've been looking at what homes are made of, which materials hold up and which ones fail under pressure. But materials alone really don't determine how many homes actually get built.

[David Brancaccio]

In this case, the innovation isn't a new material, but a new way of building. The challenge isn't just resilience. It's how to build better homes at scale in a country with thousands of different local codes. At Reframe Systems in Andover, Massachusetts, the answer is to standardize the process instead of the house, using software and small factories to adapt each build address by address.

[Aloe Black]

My name is Felipe Polito. I am one of the co founders and lead the technology teams at Reframe Systems that do manufacturing, factory software and robotics across our production process.

[David Brancaccio]

Building homes like cars makes economic sense, but in the US it breaks down fast. Housing rules change from place to place, forcing the same home to be redesigned thousands of times.

[Aloe Black]

In the United States, There are over 30,000 zoning jurisdictions. Every single project has to be built custom to meet the demands for that site. You cannot build a single product repeatedly in a factory because you need to get this variation outcome.

[David Brancaccio]

Reframe is trying to scale housing by spreading a network of small factories across the country, keeping labor local while standardizing everything else.

[Aloe Black]

What that lets us do is have the local labor work on the houses in our communities. So our electrician, our plumber, who are working in the factory are the same ones that are wrapping up the work on site. Which means that we as Reframe are going all the way to the finish and delivering that home from end to end. So imagine a world where you can type in an address and get a house that is compliant to that local with the ready price and time frame for it to be built.

[David Brancaccio]

The philosophy goes beyond automation. It's about structuring work by turning construction into a clear step by step process. Almost paint by numbers.

[Aloe Black]

Behind you over here is a smart saw. This machine feeds lumber and cuts it automatically while printing onto the material. And what we get here then is that this is a kit that then will be assembled into a wall. But as somebody assembling it, all you need to know is that 18 goes to 18, 16 goes to 16, 14 goes to 14. And very much like an Ikea kit, you're Just assembled, assembling it the way

[David Brancaccio]

it's supposed to be by shifting the work into a controlled factory and guiding each step with software, reframe streamlines requirements so more people can do precision work without sacrificing quality.

[Aloe Black]

What is interesting is that today, actually, we have much wider pool of operators than you would get on the field. We can have folks that otherwise would not be doing construction actually doing these tasks. We have six high school students from Lawrence Technical, and they come in every other week. And they're just as effective as our master carpenters, master plumbers, because they are operating in an environment that guides them through that digital information, but also lets them do the work without requiring a lot of the skills that you would require to do it on site.

[David Brancaccio]

The idea behind Re Frame's microfactories borrows from a model people already know. Small distributed hubs coordinated by software designed to move fast. It's an approach Polito says he helped build long before housing was the focus.

[Aloe Black]

One thing my co founders and I were doing at Amazon was building fulfillment centers within 100 days once a lease was signed. Within 100 days from that lease, we had first artifact coming out of that facility. And we intend to do something very similar here. Signing on demand and building a factory to deliver on that demand. We have a thesis to build 1 million homes by 2040, and we're on track to get to that world. And it's really going to drive costs and outcomes to a lot of people in need.

[Jen Largess]

Coming up, the house of the Future is over 100 years old. That's next on Building Tomorrow from Marketplace and this Old House Radio Hour. Welcome back to Building Tomorrow, a special look at the future of housing from Marketplace and this old House Radio Hour. I'm Jen Larges with David Brancaccio. We're back in Altadena, California, where Marketplaces host David Brancaccio's home used to be. So we've been talking about how homes get built and what they're built with. New materials, new processes, new ways to make houses stronger, faster, more resilient. But there's really one part of the equation we haven't touched on, which is how people actually want to live.

[David Brancaccio]

Yeah. And I think it's the most important one. I want to look at that picture of my old house just one more time. Jen, take a look. Yeah. And what I see clearly now is not just a structure that needs replacement. I see a place where life actually happened. The house shaped how we lived, often in ways that we don't consciously Choose.

[Jen Largess]

So when you imagine your next house, what do you really hope for?

[David Brancaccio]

I mean, at my age, it's a place that we'll grow old in. I think it's our forever house when we rebuild again. A place where my family can organize, orbit each other and thrive without colliding with each other. Where there's room to be together and frankly, room to be quiet apart. A house that supports daily life instead of tugging against it.

[Jen Largess]

Gosh. And that question of how you want to live, that really isn't unique to you?

[David Brancaccio]

Not at all. All around the country, people are rethinking what a home actually means. And it's not just how strong that shelter is, but how it works for the lives inside it.

[Jen Largess]

Yeah, I think the idea of a single purpose house is really starting to break down, actually.

[David Brancaccio]

Yeah. Homes are becoming places where people, I mean, certainly work. Right. It's the world we live in now, but also at different levels to heal from whatever life throws at us. In our case, to age, I think most importantly to connect. And that requires different layouts, different systems, and I think different assumptions.

[Jen Largess]

This isn't just a housing shift.

[David Brancaccio]

No, let's call it a cultural one. We're being forced, maybe for the first time in a long time, to ask what we want our homes to do for us as humans.

[Jen Largess]

And that question really sits underneath everything else that we've talked about today.

[David Brancaccio]

Yeah. Because no matter how advanced the building materials are, a home only succeeds if it supports the lives of the people within.

[Jen Largess]

So next we'll look at how these new ways of living are reshaping design and energy use in community.

[David Brancaccio]

Houses are not just a shelter machine. They're supposed to be something that helps us thrive, helps us prosper.

[Jen Largess]

In one place that shift is showing up is energy. How much homes use, how directly they're tied to it. And for some homeowners, that's really changing how they think about the house itself.

[David Brancaccio]

Not just as something that consumes it, energy gen, but something designed to produce it. It's called net zero. Less a technical target than a way of designing homes to meet their own energy needs. Building for tomorrow doesn't always require new construction. Sometimes it means rethinking what already exists. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Zeyneb Maghavi has spent nearly two decades retrofitting her hundred year old house, turning it into a net zero experiment and extending its life well into the next century.

[Susan Jones]

Hi, are you okay with Donald? This is Nanu. So the irony of there being geothermal drillers at the moment is not lost for Me, but I'm hoping the sound's okay. That sound is actually the guy's banging the pipes on the geothermal well as they pull out their casing.

[David Brancaccio]

When McGavi bought this house in 2007, it was constructed for another era, straight from 1925.

[Susan Jones]

They had steam radiators. There was a boiler in the basement. There was a place to burn your trash, which was traditional back then.

[David Brancaccio]

This kind of retrofit isn't about tearing everything out at once. It's about sequencing, making the changes that are hardest to undo first and leaving room for what comes later.

[Susan Jones]

Anything you're putting in the walls, you do it up front. So, for example, I put a air distribution system into the walls, but didn't install AC at the time. Didn't really need it. Now with the geothermal coming on and also with much hotter summers since we began this, the stuff's in the walls already, and all we have to do is install the equipment. We have a house built for these future energy systems.

[David Brancaccio]

As we walk through the house, it's not just the big systems that stand out, but how much thought went into the parts that you don't actually see but feel every day.

[Susan Jones]

We can start all the way up here. This used to be a sleeping porch. We enclosed it fully and insulated it, so it is now much more energy efficient. And you can see there's a guava tree and a whole bunch of orchids. So it's a very comfortable house and room. The piano actually came with the house. It's one of the things we didn't move. Oh, I tried to use all materials that were local. If you go and you want like a granite countertop, almost all of it is coming from Brazil or India or somewhere far away. And it turns out we have really cool rocks around here. I mean, New England's a rocky place. And so this is from Vermont, the countertop from a quarry in Vermont that is still operating. Let me grab my shoes. We're going to go to the basement stairs.

[David Brancaccio]

As we step outside the home's envelope, the shell that separates living space from everything else, we come face to face with the mechanical systems that quietly keep this house running.

[Susan Jones]

Yeah, we're in the basement next to the mechanicals for the hot water distribution system currently providing hot water which gets pumped in and through these radiators. The same hot water and radiators will work equally well with the geothermal heat pump swapped out for the gas boiler.

[David Brancaccio]

Geothermal is the final step in McGavi's 18 year experiment in future proofing an old house, crews drill deep into the ground to reach the earth's constant temperature, then pipe that steady heat to the basement where a heat pump replaces the gas boiler, heating and cooling the home while the pipes and radiators inside remain the same.

[Susan Jones]

The best moment of a gas boiler approaches 98, 99% efficiency with a geothermal heat pump for a single building, it's four or five times. So it's like a 400 or 500% efficiency. There's just such a large conversation about affordability in this moment and the the cost on a monthly basis of heating and cooling is the lowest cost. The energy itself is nearly free.

[David Brancaccio]

It's worth noting that McGavi also leads a non profit advocating for geothermal heating and cooling. But more than a demonstration home, this house is about thinking in generations.

[Susan Jones]

I certainly approached this home as a forever home, as a place I wanted to invest in, not just for myself, for my kids, for the community. And I was really trying intentionally to build a home for the future.

[David Brancaccio]

Zeyneb Maghavi shows what's possible when we rethink the buildings we already have, how much longer they can last and how much less energy they can use.

[Jen Largess]

Every experiment in building for the future isn't necessarily high tech. It's how people choose to live together. In Combie, Texas, a small community is offering a window into how some Americans are choosing to live out their golden years. The Bird's Nest was founded by Robin Urian, a 70 year old retiree who cashed out her 401k, bought 5 acres of raw land and built a tiny house community.

[Robin Urian]

I'm Robin Arian. I founded the Bird's Nest. I knew I wanted to have 55 and over community. I didn't start out to be all women, never was my intention. But the statistics are that 85% of people that live in tiny houses are retired women. Women baby boomers. We didn't make as much money. You all still don't. Husbands leave with all their money. At the last minute, they're gone. Men die before women and there we are. I did not set out to be this great person that oh, I'm going to provide for older women. It just is what it is. Women are lost out there. They don't have the funds, they don't have the community. We're just 11 tiny houses on two and a half acres. Back in 2019, I found raw land and put all the infrastructure in and I didn't need amenities. My amenity was going to be my community. We Know our neighbors and I chose my neighbors. I don't do background checks, I don't do credit checks. You have to face to face and you have to meet with me and whoever is here and sit and talk to us. And I have several people that are from out of state, they flew in, spent a couple days and that's really how I've been able to get the people that I have. It's very easygoing. There's no structure. It gives me built in friendships. You're never alone, but you are alone. We've had several people have surgeries and things. So we take them, pick them up from physical therapy, go pick up their medications, we take care of them as much as they need. I think it's nice to know that you have people that actually care enough about you that they're going to watch out for you. And we've all had the discussions on hey, we're not going to get younger and when you come here you need to be able bodied and self sufficient. But maintaining that, hey, that may not happen. And we've all vowed, hey, we'll keep each other out of nursing homes or facilities as long as we can. We talked about maybe one day renting out a tiny to a healthcare nurse. She's got built in people right here. You don't even have to get in your car. But you know, we don't know how that works but we have it in our head. That's comforting. We don't have to bug our kids. Our car breaks down, oh, use my car. The women that come in here, I try to pump them up. I can't do that. Yeah, you can. You can crawl underneath there and you can do it. And that's why I came up with empowering Women. Empowering women. And that's what I like it to be out here. We tackle everything on our own and no one's around to say, oh, you're not doing this that right or let me do it. If it doesn't work, we do it a different way. And a lot of times a lot of stuff works, but it would not be what someone else would think was appropriate. So there's all that. I never thought of it as a risk. I always knew people would come. There is so much need out there for women. I'm not getting rich. It's not like you can have exorbitant rent. These women are all on fixed incomes too. You know, I sat down with pen and paper, said this is what would be comfortable for me. I'm sticking to those guns because the situation we're in now has made it a lot worse. You know, women enjoy each other's company, but when you were a kid you thought, oh yeah, you know, we're going to grow up and we're going to, we're going to live in the same neighborhood. Now I do. But I would never have crossed paths with any of the people that are here in any part of my life. And now here I am. They're my built in best friends. Home is home and I can make a home anywhere that I choose. When we get older, our husbands are gone, our children are grown, and yes, you see your children, but it's not like it was. Now home is with my girlfriends and my kids love them just like I do. They're happy their moms are here because they don't have to worry cause they're busy. You know, our kids are in their late 30s, working hard to get up to the pinnacle, wherever they can get. We keep thinking that the dream is to have that big house. And a house used to be an investment, it's not an investment. Nobody's ever going to pay off their homes anymore and live comfortably. And I think that for women, even if they can't open up a community, go find a community, take that 401k money and have a tiny house built, own it free and clear and live in a community, women are sitting in their houses lonely and depressed. We're out here, you can't, can't get depressed. If you come outside, you're going to start laughing. They say laughter is the best medicine. We're going to live forever out here.

[Jen Largess]

So we've talked about housing from just about every angle. Why people are being asked to build, how homes are being built differently, and how all that really changes the way we live inside them.

[David Brancaccio]

Yeah. What's striking, Jen, is that none of those questions stand on their own. They're all connected. I keep coming back to this burnt, empty property here and thinking about the house that used to be. Not as something to dwell on about, but really as a reminder that a house shapes the way we live, often in ways that we don't even realize. The rooms had us gather in certain ways. The kitchen would allow us to create beautiful things to share the systems that would tell us what's comfortable, what's not. The building materials would show us what was really possible.

[Jen Largess]

And what we've heard today is that people all over the country are being asked to make those choices consciously.

[David Brancaccio]

Now we no longer are just taking the home we were handed by Fate if we can. Designing our futures by figuring out how it is that we want to live through materials that are more resilient given everything that's outside. Through systems that use less energy, through layouts that reflect how families actually live today.

[Jen Largess]

Yeah, we heard about new ways of building, too. You know, microfactories, mass timber, concrete systems, not as abstract innovations, but really as tools that people are using right now.

[David Brancaccio]

And we heard something, I think j just as important, that better building is not about chasing square footage or chasing some kind of perfection. It's, in a way, about alignment. Between climate considerations and cost considerations, between resilience and comfort, between the house and the human life that's inside the house.

[Jen Largess]

At the end of the day, a home isn't a product.

[David Brancaccio]

No, I mean, can we say it? It's a relationship, really. One that, you know, can unfold over decades. Ours unfolded over two months, but we hope the next one will be many decades. One that has to hold change and stress and healing, growth and care.

[Jen Largess]

Yeah. So when we talk about building for the next hundred years, you're really talking

[David Brancaccio]

about how we want to live together for the next decades or even hundreds of years. What do we value? What do we want to hold on to? What do we choose to pass on?

[Jen Largess]

That's the work in front of us. Definitely.

[David Brancaccio]

Yeah. Not just rebuilding homes, but building lives so that they can thrive inside those homes.

[Jen Largess]

And that's really what building for the future comes down to. Making deliberate choices about how we want to live, not just what we want to build. If we get that right, the homes can change, the systems can evolve, but the lives inside them have a chance to truly thrive. Thanks for listening. I'm Jen Larges.

[David Brancaccio]

And I'm David Brancaccio.

[Jen Largess]

This was a special episode of this Old House right Radio Hour. Building Tomorrow was produced in partnership with Marketplace, created and produced by Jimmy Chelnick, co produced by Michelle Lands and Matt Bogart with Ember 20 sound, design, mix and engineered by Jeremiah Zimmerman, executive producers Chris Wolf and David Thwaites. And I'm your host, Jen Largess. Co hosted by David Brancaccio. Special thanks to Nancy Fargali. Tune in weekends for new episodes of this Old House Radio Hour. Listen to new episodes of the podcast every Tuesday from apm, American Public Media and Las Studios. See you next week. This Old House Radio hour is supported by the Home Depot, helping customers with tools and guidance on any project from installation to inspiration to Home Depot. How doers get more done.

[David Brancaccio]

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