For a lift, a playbook page for your firm’s near-term future, and an energizing glimpse at better times ahead for housing, register here for the Thursday, April 16, unveiling of winners in the 2020 Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability. National housing innovators in finance, construction and design, and public policy and regulatory reform will get their moment to shine, at 1 pm EDT.
As violently bumpy, difficult, and stressful as the next stretch ahead will be for those whose livelihoods orbit around housing development and construction, nothing could be more critical now for the community’s leaders than clarity of purpose.
Crisis, you see, works as a smithy. It fuses separate raw materials into something else. It fires contagion and character into a new essence, melding something special. This piece, from Nancy Koehn in the Harvard Business Review, notes, “Real Leaders Are Forged in Crisis.”
Our English term, forge, came from Old French, with roots in the Latin “fabricare” and “fabrica,” which for all intents and purposes, suggests that leaders are made, not born. Koehn writes:
‘Leaders become “real” when they practice a few key behaviors that gird and inspire people through difficult times. As Covid-19 tears its way through country after country, town after town, neighborhood after neighborhood, here’s what we can learn from how some of history’s iconic leaders acted in the face of great uncertainty, real danger, and collective fear.’
First among ways a desperate situation workshops an individual into a leaders is in the ability to reckon in a genuine way with fear, and at the same time, spark a no-quit attitude that, in the end, will win. Here’s how Koehn explains:
“Your job, as a leader today, is to provide both brutal honesty — a clear accounting of the challenges your locality, company, non-profit, or team faces — and credible hope that collectively you and your people have the resources needed to meet the threats you face each day: determination, solidarity, strength, shared purpose, humanity, kindness, and resilience.”
Resolve. When we feel resolve, and act on its power, little can stop us, nor slow our momentum and direction. Resolve, at its essence, loosens the normal bounds of fear and hesitation, and frees people from gravity, from depression, from the tug of low morale. Resolve spurs us.
This is where what, in better times, we called “innovation” now serves a whole new normal purpose. Innovation in housing, a few months ago, and for the decade or so leading into 2020, meant something then. It means something different now.
Innovation in housing, especially as it offers, as Koehn beautifully phrases it, “credible hope that collectively you and your people have the resources needed to meet the threats you face, ” pivots from being a luxury to being a necessity.
Here’s what I mean. April 1, 2020 will likely go down as the entry date of the nation’s and likely the world’s single worst, most horrific quarter in modern economic history by any measure of productivity, household activity, and value creation.
What the Covid-19 pandemic will have exposed is an economy that has locked-and-loaded itself as a services and experience-based economic platform that is eminently vulnerable to pandemics, which evidence shows are probably going to recur with at least the frequency that they have done for all of time.
What the novel coronavirus Covid-19 outbreak–blowing through populations, geographies, venues, and every other stratum of society we can define–also exposes to a harsher, more accountable degree, is our most vulnerable people.
People whom our housing and real estate development complex–for all its value creation, its economic multiplier effects, its community impact, and its social benefits–has priced out.
It’s for this reason that focus, now, on housing innovation–technological and data breakthroughs that meld sensors, microprocessors, algorithms, social matching, etc. into cost-bending, friction-removing, process-improving systems and solutions–is neither tone-deaf, nor financially suspect.
In the current priority set, two really matter above all else: health and safety, for one, and livelihoods, or jobs, for another. Housing, particularly decent, healthy, safe housing for those who’re our cities’, our rural areas’, our counties’, our states’, and our society’s most vulnerable–ones who can not, based on their current means, attain a place to call home–is literally, the nexus of those two priorities.
Our resolve, then, our shared purpose, as the investors, the developers and designers, the manufacturers, the fabricators, the builders, and the distributors in housing’s broad-sweeping community, is simple. Unleash innovation now. No more “good idea.” No more, “let’s study this.” No more, “we’ll see how this might look after this quarter’s performance.” It’s now. Or else.
Come the onset of the next calendar quarter, July 1, 2020, if we’re trying to apply maps, models, and methods that succeeded in times past as our go-to housing recovery playbook, America’s most vulnerable–by then–will be suffering an unspeakable plight, as safety nets, backstops, and bail-outs will all have begun to run toward their sunset.
We’ll have needed to creatively tear-apart businesses and business models, reassembling them in ways that truly leverage logic, exponential advances in machine learning, data, and the marriage of microprocessing and radio-frequency sensors to produce places people can access, attain, and sustain as their homes.
What is affordable and how that will touch the lives of all people living in America’s communities, and what it means to the people and organizations that make those communities … all of these matters fundamentally pivot as 2020’s first calendar quarter swung disastrously into the second.
The moment will define us as individuals, as organizations, as communities, as economic sectors, as societies, and as a culture. Housing affordability is no longer what it was a few months ago. Nor is innovation. Crisis has forged both of them in its workshop into newly significant, defining, force factors in our lives.
This is why you should take time, at 1 pm EDT, on Thursday, April 16, for an uplifting, 20-20 vision view of 10 examples of innovation that have, can, and will change both cost structures and mindsets around what shared purpose, entrepreneurial resolve, and applied brilliance can do for housing when housing needs it most.
Here’s a preview of the 10 Ivory Prize for Housing Innovation Finalists:
“The Top 10 Finalists represent the best of the best in the housing sector,” said Kent Colton, Chair of the Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability Advisory Board. “Whether it’s improving the financial situation of both homeowners and renters, making it cheaper to build housing, or enabling more housing of all kinds in their communities, these finalists are setting the standard for how we solve the national housing crisis. I look forward to honoring the finalists and winners in April.”
In the Finance category, finalists have created platforms to help renters save and build credit, and for homeowners to build equity. One nonprofit is providing an opportunity for residents in manufactured homes to collectively purchase the communities and the land on which their homes sit. This community ownership provides means for the residents to build equity in their homes and keep rental prices low.
Finalists in Construction and Design are developing new techniques for modular and off-site building. One finalist is sharing its research and breakthroughs in lowering the cost of home building to help other communities to combat homelessness and drive down home prices.
In Policy and Regulatory Reform, a West Coast state and Midwest city are national examples for leadership in housing as they have both taken steps to increase housing choices and promote density. One finalist has a new computational law platform that has great potential to shape regulatory processes by making it easier for homeowners to build accessory dwelling units and for governments to process inbound requests.
Finance
DIGS – CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Digs is a financial platform that empowers a consumer to build wealth through their home. Digs’ educational product allows renters to set and track savings goals leading up to buying their first home and existing homeowners to monitor their equity and optimize their mortgage. The company works with mortgage lenders as a way to help them build a relationship with their customers outside of the transaction.
RHINO – NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Rhino works with landlords to eliminate costly security deposits and replace them with a small monthly insurance payment, helping users avoid cutting into their savings when they need to move.
ROC USA – CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE
ROC USA is a nonprofit social venture that partners with homeowners in Manufactured (“Mobile”) Home Communities who want to purchase and operate their communities as Resident Owned Communities (“ROCs”). ROC USA serves its currently 253 ROCs in 17 states through a national Network of regional nonprofits for training and a national Treasury-certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) for financing.
ESUSU – NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Esusu is a digital platform that helps renters save and build credit. Users report their rent payments, which increases their credit score, and join online communities that help create accountability for saving.
Construction and Design
FULLSTACK MODULAR – NEW YORK, NEW YORK
FullStack Modular merges modular building with new construction technologies to bring a higher level of control, predictability, and scalability to development. Fullstack is the first fully integrated modular solution, allowing the company to innovate modular building in the areas of design, manufacturing, and construction. FullStack Modular built the modules for 461 Dean Street in Brooklyn, NY, which currently is the tallest modular building in the world.
ENTEKRA – MODESTO, CALIFORNIA
Entekra is implementing a fully integrated off-site building technique that streamlines its panelized building process from permitting to assembly so that it can be completed in just a couple of days.
NEW STORY CHARITY – SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
New Story Charity is a Y Combinator-backed nonprofit that pioneers solutions to end global homelessness. New Story creates breakthrough tools, drives innovations, and identifies best practices to share with other nonprofits, governments, and businesses that are working towards building communities for the over 1.6 billion people in need of shelter.
Policy and Regulatory Reform
CITY OF MINNEAPOLIS – MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
The City of Minneapolis is “upzoning” nearly the entire city, which will allow more units to be built in areas that previously only contained single-family homes, while promoting transit-oriented development and inclusionary zoning. The so-called Minneapolis 2040 Plan is unprecedented and transformative, providing a model for other cities to broadly address affordability challenges associated with single-family-only zoning.
THE STATE OF OREGON – SALEM, OREGON
The State of Oregon expanded affordable housing options through the passage of HB 2001 in 2019. The law requires all Oregon cities with populations over 10,000 to allow duplexes on all residential lots on which a single-family home is allowed. Cities over 25,000 and Portland Metro jurisdictions must also allow triplexes, fourplexes, townhomes, and cottage clusters in areas where single family homes are allowed.
SYMBIUM – SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
Symbium is a computational law platform that mechanizes the rules and regulations of planning codes to help homeowners, design professionals, and planners quickly determine if an ADU is allowed on a property, what the development standards are, and processes needed to build these units.
