Latest / What's Your Problem? / The Quest for the Factory-Built House

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The Quest for the Factory-Built House · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, it's Jacob. Just a quick note that today's
0:23
Speaker 1: show is a collaboration with my old friends at Planet Money.
0:26
Speaker 1: It's kind of a follow up to last week's episode
0:29
Speaker 1: of What's Your Problem. It's about the century long quest
0:32
Speaker 1: to mass produce houses in a factory, so it does
0:35
Speaker 1: hit on that core What's Your Problem theme using technology
0:38
Speaker 1: to try to make things cheaper. I hope you'll like it.
0:42
Speaker 1: If you're a new listener who found What's Your Problem
0:44
Speaker 1: because of the Planet Money episode, let me say welcome.
0:48
Speaker 1: I'm delighted that you're here, and I hope you stick around.
0:50
Speaker 1: You can check out our back catalog, which has dozens
0:53
Speaker 1: of shows in it, and we'll be back next week
0:55
Speaker 1: with a new episode of What's Your Problem. Here's the show.
1:00
Speaker 1: This is Planet Money from NPR. Let's talk about houses
1:07
Speaker 1: in America. I'm going to go out on a limb
1:10
Speaker 1: and I'm going to say houses in America are too expensive.
1:14
Speaker 2: Bold words from Jacob Goldstein coming in hot. And there
1:19
Speaker 2: are a lot of reasons for this, right, there's the zoning,
1:22
Speaker 2: there's land prices. But one reason we do not hear
1:26
Speaker 2: much about one of the things driving the cost of housing,
1:29
Speaker 2: the process of building houses is just really slow and
1:33
Speaker 2: inefficient and expensive.
1:35
Speaker 1: There's this thing I heard a while back, years ago
1:38
Speaker 1: that really made me realize just how inefficient it is
1:42
Speaker 1: to build a house. And it goes like this, Imagine
1:45
Speaker 1: we built cars the same way we build houses. You'd
1:49
Speaker 1: have a meeting with the car designer where you tell
1:51
Speaker 1: them what kind of car you want, and they'd drop
1:53
Speaker 1: plans for your special car. Then you'd go to the
1:56
Speaker 1: city council, you'd get a permit. Then you'd go around town.
1:59
Speaker 1: You'd call different car builders, show them your blueprints, and
2:02
Speaker 1: they'd be like, yeah, sure, I can build you your
2:04
Speaker 1: special car. It'll cost I don't know, a million dollars
2:09
Speaker 1: be ready and say a year and a half.
2:11
Speaker 2: I'm sure there are developers who build whatever, like a
2:14
Speaker 2: hundred homes at a time, but even building one hundred
2:17
Speaker 2: homes at a time is this wildly slow and expensive process.
2:21
Speaker 1: It seems like we should be able to do better.
2:24
Speaker 1: We know how to make things cheaper. We've been doing
2:27
Speaker 1: it for hundreds of years. We make things cheaper by
2:30
Speaker 1: mass producing them in factories, just like we do with cars,
2:34
Speaker 1: and just like we do with lots of other things.
2:36
Speaker 1: So why don't we do that with houses. Hello, and
2:40
Speaker 1: welcome to Planet Money.
2:41
Speaker 2: I'm Jacob Goldstein's and I'm Nick found Jacob. So good
2:44
Speaker 2: to have you back, So good to see you.
2:47
Speaker 1: Thanks man, I'm happy to be back at Planet Money.
2:49
Speaker 2: We should say you now have another job. You now
2:51
Speaker 2: host this great show called What's Your Problem of a
2:54
Speaker 2: big fan. It's about people trying to solve problems out
2:58
Speaker 2: in the world, oftentimes with technology.
3:01
Speaker 1: Very good. Yes, thank you for listening and for What's
3:04
Speaker 1: Your Problem. I recently interviewed a homebuilder who is trying
3:08
Speaker 1: to do this thing we're talking about on the show today.
3:11
Speaker 1: He's trying to figure out how to build houses in
3:14
Speaker 1: a factory. And as I was preparing for that interview,
3:17
Speaker 1: I realized that there was actually a much bigger story here.
3:20
Speaker 1: It's a story that would be great for a Planet Money.
3:23
Speaker 1: It's this one hundred year story of people trying to
3:26
Speaker 1: do this thing, trying to figure out how to make
3:28
Speaker 1: houses cheaper by building them in factories.
3:31
Speaker 2: Today on the show, the story of something that should
3:33
Speaker 2: have taken off by now. There'll be some flying saucer houses,
3:37
Speaker 2: there'll be some double wides.
3:39
Speaker 1: And Nick, you get to do one of your favorite things,
3:42
Speaker 1: you get to go to a construction site swinging some hammus.
3:53
Speaker 1: Just a quick heads up, there is a mention of
3:56
Speaker 1: suicide in today's show.
3:58
Speaker 2: This dream of using factories, using mass production to make
4:02
Speaker 2: houses cheaper and better goes back about one hundred years now,
4:07
Speaker 2: and in those hundred years there have been some spectacular
4:10
Speaker 2: failures and at least one surprising boom along the way.
4:14
Speaker 1: So what we're gonna do on today's show is talk
4:16
Speaker 1: about three key people. There's an impractical genius, a very
4:21
Speaker 1: practical small businessman, and someone who is trying again right now,
4:26
Speaker 1: to mass produce houses in factories.
4:28
Speaker 2: The star of chapter one, that impractical genius is a
4:31
Speaker 2: man named Buckminster Fuller Bucky to his friends. Bucky was
4:35
Speaker 2: this famous weirdo. He was a designer, he was a futurist.
4:39
Speaker 2: He was beloved by Steve Jobs and other hippie adjacent
4:43
Speaker 2: tech types. Fortunately for us, someone just published a book
4:46
Speaker 2: about him.
4:47
Speaker 3: My name is alec Nevilla Lee, and the book is
4:50
Speaker 3: Inventor of the Future, The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller.
4:53
Speaker 1: And do you, by chance have any close connections to
4:57
Speaker 1: any of the current or former staff of Planet Money
4:59
Speaker 1: or the Indicator.
5:00
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, Well, we should make this very clear that
5:02
Speaker 3: this is not a NEPO situation that you were not
5:05
Speaker 3: aware that I was married to Indicator reporter and co
5:08
Speaker 3: host Whalen until after you began looking into buckminster Fuller.
5:11
Speaker 2: It's true. Alex Has Buckminster Fuller's dream of making houses
5:16
Speaker 2: and factories starts in nineteen twenty seven. He's not famous yet.
5:19
Speaker 2: He's in his early thirties, living with his wife and
5:22
Speaker 2: his baby daughter in Chicago, and he's working for this
5:25
Speaker 2: company that sells construction materials. But then he gets fired.
5:29
Speaker 2: He's in a really bad place, and in the middle
5:32
Speaker 2: of all this, he walks to the edge of Lake
5:35
Speaker 2: Michigan and consider suicide.
5:38
Speaker 3: He is going through this crisis, and the story is
5:41
Speaker 3: that while he's looking out of the water, he starts
5:43
Speaker 3: to ask himself a series of questions, starting with, you know,
5:46
Speaker 3: is there a God? Does God have a plan for me?
5:48
Speaker 3: You know, do I know what this plan is? And
5:49
Speaker 3: then he has this kind of blinding worship insight that says,
5:53
Speaker 3: you do not belong to yourself, You belong to the universe,
5:56
Speaker 3: and you know it is for you to figure out
5:58
Speaker 3: how you can be a benefit to all of mankind.
6:01
Speaker 1: And you know what Buckminster Fuller, vessel of the universe,
6:04
Speaker 1: decides to do to devote himself to the betterment of
6:07
Speaker 1: all mankind. It's the mass produced houses in a factory.
6:11
Speaker 3: So the next day, you know, he starts to focus
6:13
Speaker 3: very seriously on this housing idea. Okay, because that's his background.
6:16
Speaker 3: He's someone who has spent years in construction. You know,
6:19
Speaker 3: his father in law is a famous architect, and so
6:22
Speaker 3: you know, for him to make an impact, the obvious
6:23
Speaker 3: places start is housing.
6:25
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just his background. Bucky thinks the time
6:27
Speaker 2: is right for this idea. It's after World War One.
6:31
Speaker 2: Construction costs are really high, and like today, it was
6:34
Speaker 2: really hard back then for a working class family to
6:37
Speaker 2: buy a house. And this was a.
6:39
Speaker 1: Time when people really believed that technological progress could make
6:44
Speaker 1: life better. Radio is new. It's the dawn of mass
6:47
Speaker 1: consumer goods. People are starting to get things like refrigerators
6:51
Speaker 1: and washing machines and cars.
6:53
Speaker 2: Right this is about twenty years after Henry Ford had
6:56
Speaker 2: rolled out the Model T that was the first car
6:59
Speaker 2: that was affordable to the masses, and the reason it
7:02
Speaker 2: was affordable was because it was mass produced on the
7:05
Speaker 2: assembly line.
7:07
Speaker 1: The car was a really important stot for Bucky. That
7:10
Speaker 1: thing I did at the top of the show about
7:12
Speaker 1: you know, imagine we built cars the way we build houses.
7:15
Speaker 1: I got that from him. I got that from Bucky.
7:17
Speaker 2: Shout out to Bucky. So Bucky decides, I'm gonna build
7:20
Speaker 2: houses the way we build cars. And crucially, this means
7:23
Speaker 2: not just building regular style houses in a factory. It
7:26
Speaker 2: means rethinking from scratch what it means to build a house.
7:30
Speaker 1: So he has this big idea and he goes out
7:32
Speaker 1: and he starts pitching it. He calls it the Dimaxian House,
7:36
Speaker 1: and he starts to get popular as this sort of visionary,
7:39
Speaker 1: big idea guy. He's given lectures. If you were around today,
7:43
Speaker 1: he would definitely be big into ted talks. But one
7:46
Speaker 1: thing he is not doing building houses because to build
7:51
Speaker 1: these factory built houses, he needs a factory and he
7:54
Speaker 1: doesn't have one.
7:55
Speaker 2: And then finally, fifteen years after he first comes up
7:59
Speaker 2: with the idea, he gets his big chance. It's nineteen
8:02
Speaker 2: forty four. US factories have been churning out planes and
8:05
Speaker 2: ships and jeeps to fight World War Two, but now
8:09
Speaker 2: the war is starting to wind down.
8:11
Speaker 3: And one of the questions as the war starts to
8:14
Speaker 3: wind down, is what are we going to do with
8:16
Speaker 3: all of this industrial capacity that we've built up. And Fuller,
8:19
Speaker 3: who's kind of in the right place at the right time, says, well,
8:22
Speaker 3: you know, I have this idea for industrialized housing, and
8:25
Speaker 3: it makes a lot of sense for us just to
8:26
Speaker 3: convert to these aircraft plans to building houses because it
8:30
Speaker 3: will keep the plants operational, people will keep their jobs,
8:33
Speaker 3: and in theory, we're going to have a huge demand
8:36
Speaker 3: for post war housing after all these veterans come home.
8:39
Speaker 1: So Bucky convinces this airplane company in Kansas to let
8:42
Speaker 1: him use their factory to build a prototype of the
8:46
Speaker 1: house he's been dreaming of for years, And an airplane
8:49
Speaker 1: factory was actually a pretty good place to do it
8:51
Speaker 1: because his factory optimized house was nothing like a regular house.
8:57
Speaker 3: So it looks like a flying saucer, all right, it's
8:59
Speaker 3: kind of the best way to describe it. It's, you know,
9:01
Speaker 3: bare aluminum, so it's this shiny metal house and there's
9:07
Speaker 3: a ring of glass windows.
9:09
Speaker 2: To be clear, this is a round house.
9:12
Speaker 3: And you go inside and the floor is very springy
9:15
Speaker 3: because of the way the house is engineered. All these
9:18
Speaker 3: rooms are kind of like wedge shaped, and you know,
9:21
Speaker 3: he has these what he calls evolving shelves, which are
9:24
Speaker 3: shelves that are built into the walls that rotate the
9:26
Speaker 3: touch of.
9:27
Speaker 1: Buttons, basically the Jetson's house.
9:29
Speaker 2: Yeah.
9:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's funny because it was always like
9:31
Speaker 3: the House of the future, right, Like, even from early on,
9:33
Speaker 3: people are saying, oh, you know, Fuller is designing the
9:35
Speaker 3: House of the future, which I think kind of annoyed
9:37
Speaker 3: him at first because he was trying to do it
9:39
Speaker 3: for real.
9:40
Speaker 1: In the present, Bucky finally has a factory. He makes
9:43
Speaker 1: these prototypes. World War Two is over, the gis are
9:46
Speaker 1: coming home. So what happens next?
9:49
Speaker 3: So nothing ever happens, right, The company does not go
9:52
Speaker 3: into mass production.
9:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, Bucky's dream, the dream of the mass produced factory
9:56
Speaker 2: house does not come true. And Alex says there are
9:59
Speaker 2: a few reasons for this. For one, Bucky was just
10:02
Speaker 2: kind of a pain to work with, not a great
10:05
Speaker 2: guy to run a big company.
10:06
Speaker 1: Another reason, Bucky came up with this idea back in
10:10
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties. But now it's the mid nineteen forties,
10:13
Speaker 1: and unusually in American history, This is a time when
10:17
Speaker 1: a lot of working class people actually could afford houses.
10:21
Speaker 1: Congress subsidized mortgages for returning troops, and developers were starting
10:25
Speaker 1: to build these cheap housing developments.
10:28
Speaker 2: And the last reason Bucky's factory built homes went nowhere
10:31
Speaker 2: maybe the most obvious, but it's worth pointing out. People
10:35
Speaker 2: do not want to live in a spaceship. These were
10:38
Speaker 2: weird ass round metal houses.
10:40
Speaker 3: This is kind of the tickaway here. It's like Fuller
10:43
Speaker 3: really said, you know, people will like what I tell
10:46
Speaker 3: them to like. He expects people to kind of change
10:48
Speaker 3: their lifestyle to fit this idealized house design that he
10:52
Speaker 3: has come up.
10:53
Speaker 1: With, and people didn't want to do that.
10:55
Speaker 2: Side note, we actually haven't mentioned the thing that Bucky
10:58
Speaker 2: is best known for today, the geodesic dome like Spaceship
11:03
Speaker 2: Earth at Epcot at disney World, and also the dome
11:06
Speaker 2: house that my hippie friends in the Santa Cruz Mountains
11:08
Speaker 2: used to live in.
11:09
Speaker 1: Everybody has hippie friends who live in a domehouse in
11:11
Speaker 1: the Santa Cruz Mountains. Anyway, you didn't need a factory
11:15
Speaker 1: to make one of these domes. It was a really
11:17
Speaker 1: simple design, very DIY friendly, but it didn't work that well.
11:21
Speaker 3: So Fill actually lived in a dome house and it
11:24
Speaker 3: was so leaky that apparently, you know, people would see
11:26
Speaker 3: him at home like reading the newspaper with an umbrella
11:30
Speaker 3: over his head and like a flashlight clutch between his teeth.
11:35
Speaker 3: You know, the you know, there's a reason why we
11:38
Speaker 3: don't mostly live in domes today.
11:39
Speaker 1: Final recap from Bucky timing is everything. Don't launch your
11:43
Speaker 1: factory built house at the one moment when working class
11:46
Speaker 1: people can afford traditional houses. And if you're gonna build
11:50
Speaker 1: houses in a factory, don't make them too weird. Make
11:54
Speaker 1: them like normal houses that people want to live in.
11:56
Speaker 2: Which brings us to chapter two.
11:58
Speaker 1: Okay, for the title of this chapter, I'm going to
12:00
Speaker 1: count to three, and we're both going to say our
12:02
Speaker 1: favorite name for the chapter one two three Stuck inside
12:07
Speaker 1: a mobile home field advantage with the zoning blues again
12:12
Speaker 1: is a Dylan reference this section. Yes, the section is
12:14
Speaker 1: about mobile homes and the mobile homes story, which is
12:17
Speaker 1: the next big moment for factory built homes. It doesn't
12:21
Speaker 1: happen through some grandiose, weirdo vision like the one Bucky had.
12:26
Speaker 1: It builds gradually and it comes sort of from the
12:28
Speaker 1: bottom up.
12:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. Our guide to this chapter is Brian Potter. He
12:32
Speaker 2: actually worked for a factory built construction company that had
12:35
Speaker 2: its own boom and bust.
12:37
Speaker 4: They raised several billion dollars in venture capital and then
12:39
Speaker 4: went bankrupt.
12:40
Speaker 2: Now he writes a newsletter that we love. It's called
12:43
Speaker 2: Construction Physics, and it's all about this thing that we're
12:46
Speaker 2: talking about in the show today. It's about productivity and construction.
12:50
Speaker 1: Brian has spent a long time looking back at the
12:52
Speaker 1: history of factory built homes, and he told us about
12:55
Speaker 1: this guy, Elmer Frye, kind of the anti Bucky, not
12:59
Speaker 1: a visionary, not touring the country giving lectures. He had
13:02
Speaker 1: a company that made camping trailers. There were a bunch
13:05
Speaker 1: of companies that made these, and some people did live
13:08
Speaker 1: in them, but mostly they were for towing around. And
13:10
Speaker 1: then one day, in the early nineteen fifties, Elmer heard
13:14
Speaker 1: from one of his customers.
13:15
Speaker 4: One day he got a request from somebody who wanted
13:18
Speaker 4: a ten foot wide trailer, and fry said, well, that's
13:21
Speaker 4: two wide to legally go on the roads. And the
13:23
Speaker 4: guy said, oh, that's okay, I'm not going to move
13:25
Speaker 4: it once I have it. I'll just call it a
13:27
Speaker 4: construction trailer and permit it like that, and Fry said okay,
13:30
Speaker 4: and then built it for him, and then he started
13:32
Speaker 4: building more of them, and they just turned out to
13:34
Speaker 4: be incredibly popular.
13:36
Speaker 2: And then the rest was history.
13:37
Speaker 4: The rest was history. The increase in width and mobile
13:39
Speaker 4: homes went on from there.
13:41
Speaker 2: People loved it. Pretty Soon everybody was ordering these extra
13:45
Speaker 2: wide trailers a few feet at a time. Those trailers
13:48
Speaker 2: people towed behind their car were becoming the mobile homes
13:51
Speaker 2: that we know today.
13:52
Speaker 4: Pretty soon, after the ten wide, you have the twelve wide,
13:55
Speaker 4: and then the fourteen wide, and then yeah, the double wide,
13:58
Speaker 4: which is two modules that get stuck together.
14:00
Speaker 2: Yeah.
14:00
Speaker 4: So right in the fifties, that's pretty much when that
14:02
Speaker 4: shift started.
14:04
Speaker 1: They were not building weird round spaceship houses of the
14:06
Speaker 1: future with push buttonshelves. They were building rectangular, cheap houses. Also,
14:12
Speaker 1: the timing was better that post World War two moment
14:15
Speaker 1: when so many ordinary people could afford traditional houses. That
14:19
Speaker 1: moment passed, so lots of people started buying these new,
14:23
Speaker 1: cheaper mobile homes. There was a mobile home boom.
14:27
Speaker 2: And companies also started building bigger, full sized houses and factories.
14:32
Speaker 2: By nineteen seventy mobile homes and those other factory built
14:35
Speaker 2: homes made up roughly half of newly built single family
14:38
Speaker 2: homes in America.
14:39
Speaker 1: Found and I'm going to say that again because it
14:41
Speaker 1: was so surprising to me when I learned it. It
14:44
Speaker 1: was why I wanted to do this whole chapter. In
14:46
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one in two newly built single family homes
14:50
Speaker 1: in America was built in a factory.
14:53
Speaker 4: The industry is so large and expanding so rapidly that
14:57
Speaker 4: at one point in the late sixties or early seventies,
14:59
Speaker 4: I think you know, three of the top ten most
15:02
Speaker 4: profitable companies in the US were mobile home companies. Uh,
15:06
Speaker 4: the largest home builder in the US is a mobile
15:10
Speaker 4: home company.
15:12
Speaker 1: Yeah.
15:12
Speaker 4: It becomes just an enormous industry relatively quickly.
15:16
Speaker 2: This was it. This was the moment when lots of
15:19
Speaker 2: affordable homes were made in factories.
15:22
Speaker 1: But it didn't last. There was a recession that started
15:24
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy three, and a bunch of the mobile
15:27
Speaker 1: home manufacturers went out of business. After that, the industry
15:30
Speaker 1: never really got back to where it had been in
15:32
Speaker 1: the early seventies. Today, only around ten percent of new
15:36
Speaker 1: single family homes are made in factories.
15:38
Speaker 2: So the question is why what happened? Brian points to
15:42
Speaker 2: a few things. For one, middle class homeowners, the classic
15:46
Speaker 2: villains of affordable housing stories didn't want mobile homes in
15:49
Speaker 2: their neighborhoods. Mobile homes were targeted at low income people.
15:53
Speaker 2: There was a stigma attached to the way mobile homes looked,
15:56
Speaker 2: and so as a result, there was this wave of
15:59
Speaker 2: zoning rules that forced mobile homes out of town and
16:02
Speaker 2: into mobile home parks.
16:03
Speaker 1: But it wasn't just zoning, and in fact, Brian thinks
16:06
Speaker 1: there was a deeper problem, a problem that goes to
16:08
Speaker 1: the big law, long term question, why don't we build
16:11
Speaker 1: more houses and factories? Brian says, building houses in factories
16:15
Speaker 1: is just a fundamentally hard business. For one thing, home
16:19
Speaker 1: construction is very cyclical, and traditional contractors can deal with
16:24
Speaker 1: cyclical downturns by laying off workers, riding things out, and
16:28
Speaker 1: then hiring people back and starting to build again when
16:31
Speaker 1: the economy comes back.
16:32
Speaker 2: But companies building homes and factories they have this big
16:37
Speaker 2: fixed cost. They have the factory where they build the homes,
16:40
Speaker 2: and they have to pay for those factories. Whether the
16:43
Speaker 2: housing market is booming or crashing.
16:45
Speaker 4: So factory built housing tends to have a tough time
16:48
Speaker 4: in downturns. You see a lot of these operations just
16:51
Speaker 4: go out of business.
16:52
Speaker 1: This makes sense as far as it goes. But when
16:54
Speaker 1: Brian told us this, I asked him, what about all
16:57
Speaker 1: the other industries that have to keep factories open and downturns.
17:00
Speaker 1: It's not like, say, car companies go bankrupt every time
17:04
Speaker 1: there's a recession.
17:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, Brian said, In the car business, doing mass production
17:07
Speaker 2: in a factory is it's just so much more efficient
17:10
Speaker 2: than the alternative. Think of Henry Ford's assembly line. It
17:14
Speaker 2: was so much better than building bespoke cars one by
17:17
Speaker 2: one in some workshop.
17:19
Speaker 1: On the other hand, building mobile homes in factories, yeah
17:23
Speaker 1: it was more efficient than building houses on site. But
17:25
Speaker 1: it wasn't that much more efficient. It wasn't enough more
17:29
Speaker 1: efficient to ride out the inevitable downturns in housing. Brian says,
17:34
Speaker 1: once you paid to attach the mobile home to the
17:36
Speaker 1: back of a truck and haul it down the highway
17:38
Speaker 1: to wherever it was going and got it all set up,
17:41
Speaker 1: you lost a lot of the gains you got from
17:44
Speaker 1: building it in the factory in the first place.
17:46
Speaker 2: This is a really hard problem that in the end,
17:49
Speaker 2: mobile homes couldn't entirely solve. And for that matter, no
17:53
Speaker 2: one in this whole history of factory built housing has
17:55
Speaker 2: been able to crack.
17:57
Speaker 4: It is very, very hard to be the Henry Ford
18:00
Speaker 4: of housing, to be able to produce things in a
18:03
Speaker 4: factory that's so much cheaper that it just completely changes
18:05
Speaker 4: the way we build it and the way. You can't
18:07
Speaker 4: go back to the previous way. That is very hard
18:10
Speaker 4: to do, and nobody has managed to do it yet.
18:14
Speaker 1: Nobody has managed to do it yet yet. Yes, they
18:17
Speaker 1: are still trying, and we'll hear about that after the break.
18:31
Speaker 2: I grew up spending a lot of time on construction sites.
18:34
Speaker 2: My dad was a contractor, mostly remodeling kitchens and bathrooms.
18:37
Speaker 2: I used to work at a cabinet factory. It helped
18:39
Speaker 2: with a lot of kitchen installs. I am the reigning
18:42
Speaker 2: world champion of Belt Sander Racing Modified Division. Don't try
18:46
Speaker 2: this at home, it's pretty dangerous. And so it was
18:49
Speaker 2: a great delight that for this story I got to
18:51
Speaker 2: do something that's very familiar to me that I love.
18:54
Speaker 2: I got to go visit a job site and put
18:56
Speaker 2: my microphone very close to power Tools.
19:00
Speaker 1: Final chapter, Chapter three, working title, The work goes on,
19:04
Speaker 1: the cause endurers, the hope still lives, and the dream
19:07
Speaker 1: shall never die.
19:09
Speaker 2: So there are a few companies out there right now
19:12
Speaker 2: trying new ways to solve the factory built house problem.
19:15
Speaker 1: One of them is called Cover. I interviewed the founder,
19:18
Speaker 1: Alexis Revas, for this podcast I host What's Your Problem?
19:22
Speaker 1: And Nick, you got to go meet him at a
19:24
Speaker 1: job site in La where they were putting together one
19:26
Speaker 1: of these houses.
19:27
Speaker 2: Hey, guys, how's it good? Alexis niet.
19:31
Speaker 1: Alexis is trying to figure out how to have the
19:33
Speaker 1: kind of success that the mobile home companies had back
19:36
Speaker 1: in the early seventies, but without running into the same problems.
19:39
Speaker 1: And there are some big differences between what he's doing
19:42
Speaker 1: and what the mobile home companies were doing. For one,
19:45
Speaker 1: he is not building cheap homes, not at all. They're
19:47
Speaker 1: really expensive, at least for now.
19:49
Speaker 2: All right, So what are we looking at here? So
19:52
Speaker 2: this is a living area, kitchen area, a nice open
19:55
Speaker 2: kitchen area, kitchen.
19:57
Speaker 5: With a wide Florida ceiling window sliding.
20:03
Speaker 1: Alexis studied architecture in college and he fell in love
20:06
Speaker 1: with this big idea of building houses in factory, and
20:09
Speaker 1: he discovered that there is this relatively small industry that
20:13
Speaker 1: is building homes in factories, not mobile homes, full size houses.
20:17
Speaker 2: So Alexis went to intern for one of those companies,
20:20
Speaker 2: and what he saw there was that they're basically just
20:23
Speaker 2: building traditional homes in the factory, then moving them on
20:27
Speaker 2: these giant flatbed trucks and lifting them into place with
20:30
Speaker 2: giant cranes, and then doing lots of work to finish
20:33
Speaker 2: them on site. And he realized the same thing Brian
20:36
Speaker 2: Potter realized. When you do all that, the house doesn't
20:39
Speaker 2: wind up being that much cheaper than a traditional house.
20:42
Speaker 2: You don't get those sweet sweet productivity gains from factory
20:46
Speaker 2: based mass production.
20:48
Speaker 1: So Alexis starts this new company and their whole thing
20:51
Speaker 1: is sort of trying to do what Buckminster Fuller tried
20:54
Speaker 1: to do one hundred years ago. They want to rethink
20:57
Speaker 1: factory construction from the ground up.
20:59
Speaker 2: And I could see this at the job site. It
21:01
Speaker 2: was very different from the many that I'd been on
21:04
Speaker 2: in my life. One difference there's no wood framing, it's
21:07
Speaker 2: all steel studs, and also the ceiling is steel. I've
21:12
Speaker 2: never seen that on a job site before steel ceiling. Yeah,
21:14
Speaker 2: people people who.
21:15
Speaker 5: Are familiar with conventional construction, they kind of they kind
21:18
Speaker 5: of walk into here and they're like, this is this
21:19
Speaker 5: is some you know, alien alien system. Yeah, it's very unusual.
21:25
Speaker 2: To be clear, this is gonna look like a nice house.
21:28
Speaker 2: It's gonna look like something you'd see in an architectural magazine.
21:31
Speaker 2: But it isn't built like most houses. It's built mostly
21:34
Speaker 2: in the factory, one panel at a time.
21:38
Speaker 5: As wall panels, floor panels, ceiling panels, so you can
21:40
Speaker 5: think of it like life sized Lego blocks. And then
21:43
Speaker 5: we take those panels, we deliver them to site on
21:45
Speaker 5: a regular truck, no big crane, no big equipment, and
21:48
Speaker 5: then we assemble them into the.
21:49
Speaker 1: Homes those panels or flat It's not like shipping you know,
21:53
Speaker 1: half a house that you have to put on the
21:55
Speaker 1: back of a truck and install with the crane. So
21:57
Speaker 1: they solve a lot of that expensive to ship transportation
22:01
Speaker 1: problem that other factory built houses have.
22:03
Speaker 2: Alexis's company isn't the first to build houses with prefab panels,
22:07
Speaker 2: but they're trying to build a lot into those panels
22:10
Speaker 2: before they leave the factory. Alexis gets down on his
22:13
Speaker 2: knee and shows me an interior panel that already has
22:17
Speaker 2: wiring built into it.
22:18
Speaker 5: Is that you've got the Uh, you know what I'm
22:21
Speaker 5: doing here is I'm pulling out one of the electrical connections.
22:25
Speaker 5: But you can see here there's an electrical connection. This
22:26
Speaker 5: comes pre wired from the factory, and then there's this
22:28
Speaker 5: quick connect that you just plug in, uh, and then
22:31
Speaker 5: that makes the electrical connection.
22:33
Speaker 2: So this is one way they're trying to make home
22:35
Speaker 2: building more efficient. Rather than spend a few days wiring
22:38
Speaker 2: up the house on site, they pre cut the wires
22:41
Speaker 2: at the factory to the right legs, They put connectors
22:44
Speaker 2: on them, and they install them in some of the panels,
22:46
Speaker 2: and then when they get to the site, they just
22:48
Speaker 2: click the connectors together. Yep, I've never heard of that before.
22:52
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean the idea is and this is so
22:54
Speaker 5: it's very unusual to do this kind of thing in construction.
22:58
Speaker 5: But in the automotive world, for example, right, it's called
23:00
Speaker 5: an electrical harness. You've got you've got the you know,
23:03
Speaker 5: there's there's hundreds of sensors in a car, right, and
23:06
Speaker 5: they have these these all these wires pre made in
23:08
Speaker 5: a factory shipped to you know, the main line and
23:11
Speaker 5: they have these connectors on the end, and then you know,
23:13
Speaker 5: you just plug it all together. So it's taking kind
23:16
Speaker 5: of an automotive approach to electrical and bringing that to
23:18
Speaker 5: home building.
23:19
Speaker 1: Again with the automotive industry, but this time it's not
23:23
Speaker 1: just a metaphor. Alexis company hired people from Tesla and
23:27
Speaker 1: other car companies to help them figure out mass production,
23:31
Speaker 1: but they have not really figured it out yet. They're
23:34
Speaker 1: still making houses one by one, which is part of
23:37
Speaker 1: the reason the houses they're selling cost a lot.
23:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, the house I saw being built is a two bad,
23:42
Speaker 2: two bath, fancy house with high end appliances, and it's
23:47
Speaker 2: going to cost more than four hundred thousand dollars, a
23:49
Speaker 2: lot of money.
23:50
Speaker 1: They are not solving the housing affordability crisis with this house.
24:00
Speaker 2: The classic home depot bucket, you haven't innovated on that yet.
24:04
Speaker 5: No, We've got to prioritize my bucket.
24:09
Speaker 2: What shouldname? My name is? Gus? When I was on
24:12
Speaker 2: the job site, I got to spend a little time
24:13
Speaker 2: with Gus Contreras. What's your title?
24:17
Speaker 4: Is my title?
24:18
Speaker 5: Now?
24:19
Speaker 2: Are are you like the everything is my title?
24:22
Speaker 1: Magician?
24:23
Speaker 2: Gus was installing the bathroom, and talking with him helped
24:26
Speaker 2: me understand how this company might possibly be able to
24:29
Speaker 2: bring down the still very high costs of their houses.
24:33
Speaker 2: Four minutes and you guys already have the shower installed.
24:35
Speaker 6: Yeah, four minutes was fast, but it still takes Gus
24:41
Speaker 6: and five other experienced construction workers about a month to
24:45
Speaker 6: put the house together on site, and that month of
24:47
Speaker 6: skilled work makes the house cost more.
24:50
Speaker 2: So maybe the most important part of Gus's job is
24:53
Speaker 2: figuring out how to make it faster and easier to
24:55
Speaker 2: put together these houses. Gus says, plumbing the bathroom used
24:59
Speaker 2: to take like a whole day. Now it's just thirty minutes.
25:02
Speaker 2: And that's because Gus and his coworkers were constantly sending
25:05
Speaker 2: feedback to engineers at HQ, saying, Hey, try tweaking this
25:09
Speaker 2: one little thing at the factory before you ship it
25:12
Speaker 2: to us. Are you taking meetings from inside these these buildings?
25:17
Speaker 1: Baby zoom zoom, Google Meet or whatever I can log into.
25:21
Speaker 5: Do you know what I mean, We'll do it.
25:23
Speaker 2: That's that's pretty rare for the construction industry, being on
25:27
Speaker 2: a zoom at a job site.
25:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I used to get yell that from
25:29
Speaker 3: being on my phone on praise for it.
25:30
Speaker 1: So, I mean, this is it. One zoom call from
25:35
Speaker 1: Gus at a time. This is the thing happening. They're
25:38
Speaker 1: trying to reduce the need for expensive, time consuming skilled
25:43
Speaker 1: labor of people like Gus, trying to mass produce the
25:46
Speaker 1: panels in the factory so that when those panels get
25:49
Speaker 1: to the job site, it doesn't take a team of
25:51
Speaker 1: skilled workers a month to put it all together. The
25:55
Speaker 1: goal is to make it so easy that almost anybody
25:58
Speaker 1: can put together a house in a few weeks. Think
26:01
Speaker 1: of it like a really big piece of Ikea furniture.
26:04
Speaker 1: Not quite that easy and somewhat fancier, but ikia s
26:09
Speaker 1: that is the dream anyway.
26:12
Speaker 2: This is the way we make things cheaper in the world.
26:14
Speaker 2: We figure out how to mass produce them in factories.
26:17
Speaker 2: We've done it over and over again for a long
26:20
Speaker 2: time now, and yet after one hundred years of trying,
26:23
Speaker 2: we still can't do it with houses and Jacob I
26:37
Speaker 2: have listened to the whole Alexis interview. There is a
26:40
Speaker 2: lot more about his backstory and the nitty gritty of
26:43
Speaker 2: what he needs to figure out to make own instruction
26:46
Speaker 2: really cheap. His goal, it's a great interview. It's a
26:49
Speaker 2: great show. It's called What's Your Problem with Jacob golds
26:52
Speaker 2: And you can find it where you can.
26:55
Speaker 1: Find it wherever. Thanks for the shout out, Mick. We'd
26:58
Speaker 1: like to thank James Schmidt's of the Minneapolis Fed, who
27:01
Speaker 1: talked to us about mobile homes. Also the late Ted Kennedy.
27:04
Speaker 1: I poached a line from one of his speeches for
27:06
Speaker 1: the title of chapter three. Thanks also to Emma Peasley
27:10
Speaker 1: for producing today's show, Molly Messick for editing the show,
27:14
Speaker 1: Sierra Juadez for fact checking it, and Brian Jarbo for engineering.
27:18
Speaker 2: If you or someone you know might be considering suicide
27:21
Speaker 2: or is in a crisis, you can call or text
27:23
Speaker 2: nine to eight eight to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
27:27
Speaker 2: That's nine eight eight. I'm Nick Fountain, I'm Jacob Goldstein.
27:32
Speaker 2: This is NPR.
27:33
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.