Material science engineering student Zachary Luscher currently interns at a company in Elko, a Northern Nevada town that’s practically a straight-line drawn west from Salt Lake City to Reno, noted for gold mining.
This is a summer opportunity. An undergraduate, Zach will apply already-abundantly-evident gifts as a chemical engineer working for a global mining outfit. Through August, he’ll toil in Elko’s sun- and heat-blasted gold-mining operations before he returns for the school year to continue studies back in Salt Lake, at the University of Utah, where he’s progressing toward an advanced degree in material science engineering.
For purposes of this story, however, builders, investors, developers and other stakeholders vested in housing need to know two things about Zach Luscher.
One, is that he raised his hand a little less than two years ago to join a few dozen other talented University of Utah students in design, architecture, business, policy, and engineering, willing to lock themselves in a room for 24 hours and not emerge until they’d invented their own unaided new approaches to making housing more attainable to more people.
Engaged in an intensive, immersive “Hack-a-House” contest, the sequestered students divided up into teams. Each team took a concept to prototype, and created a presentation model demonstrating value, viability, and scale-ability of their idea. Ideas ranged from design of housing typologies, to financing mechanisms, to policy adaptations, all with an aim to explore how the students might work as problem-solvers for one of America’s most pressing social issues of the moment: a growing housing affordability crisis in more and more metropolitan and rural areas.
Zach Luscher’s material science and engineering chops came into play in the work his team developed during the 24-hour “Hack-a-House” contest. His interest in the objective of the program–more affordable housing–fired up immediately and in a deeply personal way.
Clark Ivory, ceo of Ivory Homes and currently co-chairman of the Real Estate Advisory Board to the David Eccles School of Business as well as serving on the advisory board for the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah, helped launch the Hack-A-House program through donations from his Ivory Innovations and the Sorenson Impact Center. He kicked-off the marathon session with some facts and figures about Utah’s and America’s affordable crisis. After his introductory remarks, he’ll never forget the moment Zach Luscher stood up after Ivory’s introductory statement of the background and challenge underlying the Hack-A-House initiative.
“‘I can relate to that,'” Ivory recalls Zach Luscher saying. “‘As we speak, I’m living in my car, parked on campus. I can’t afford to live anywhere else.'”
The Hack-a-House 24-hour immersion program in September 2018, yielded some great ideas that students–not constrained by the rule of “this is the way we’ve always done it”–brought to the issue at hand. It also galvanized Clark Ivory’s efforts to create, fund, and empower the Ivory Prize for Innovation, with $250,000 in prize money offered to entrepreneurs nationwide who are bringing innovation directly to bear on one of housing’s greatest challenges: affordability and attainability.
We’ve noted earlier in a series of four articles here, here, here, and here, the Ivory Prize process bubbled up more than 200 worthy initiatives, and proved–contrary to widespread thinking that home building and residential development are fully immunized from innovation–that bright spots of impactful, sustainable, and scalable transformation are happening all over the country.
Their stories just need to come to light, and their solutions need to be shared, and their ideas need to be nurtured.
This is why we’re so unashamedly supportive of what Clark Ivory and his team and partners are doing with their Ivory Prize initiative. At our recent Housing Leadership Summit, Clark invited other home building industry power players to join in this commitment and investment in innovative solutions to the scourge of more and more people being priced out of decent, healthy housing. Here’s a resource for you to begin working with start-ups on your own; or better yet, team up with Clark Ivory on expanding the net for the Prize for Housing Innovation.
A fact brought so poignantly to life when young Zack Luscher declared why the issue of housing affordability meant so much to him.
