The pandemic brought on a
boom in the housing market, with home sales reaching
the highest level since 2006. I know I spent a lot
of time perusing Zillow. And insatiable demand in the
housing. Market right now. Causing sales to skyrocket. That from one prominent
housing expert. As new home sales soar 19%
over last year. People in general looking at
a home that they want to buy or build. Their first
question is not. Do you have sprinklers in
this building? Or do they look around and
see this beautiful forest and say, oh, my God, it's
going to be on fire in two years? 2020 also meant a lot of
natural disasters. It was the worst fire
season in US history and there were over a dozen
severe weather storms that each cost over
$1,000,000,000. We're not going to be able
to create fireproof houses, non ignite fireproof houses
because by and large nobody wants to live in no
building. Towards a resilient nation. Saves money, saves the
environment, saves lives. In 2019, just shy of a
million new people were displaced due to climate
disasters in the US. The good news is that that
number is down from 1.25 million in 2018 and 1.7
million in 2017. We're delivering a very safe
product that is making people's lives so much
better. Could we do it better? Absolutely. We can always
do things better. Cost is a big consideration. I know it was for me when I
was doing my Zillow research, but I'm lucky
enough to be able to afford to rent an apartment with
adequate safety measures, for example, this fire
sprinkler. So America needs to get a
lot of people into homes that can withstand the ever
increasing wrath of natural disasters quickly. But is the US approaching
building homes all wrong? And how should houses be
built in the US? Nearly 1.3 million
privately owned new housing units were finished in
2020. Those should have been
built to the building codes and standards set by local
regulators, usually based on guidelines from the
International Code Council or the ICC. The codes basically say if
you have this kind of function going on within a
building, in this kind of building, you can use these
standards in order to meet our level of safety,
sanitation, etc.. When you build in an area,
one of the first things you do is you acquaint yourself
with the exact code requirements that will
affect the development and building process at that
specific site. Then the specifics, you
also check against the code as you go. Though we at FEMA are active
in that process and engage in promoting these
hazard resistant building and fire codes. It is really down to the
local level to adopt, adopt and implement those new
codes and standards. Industry experts try to keep
up with changes in technology and include
evolving environmental factors when designing
codes. Every three years, they
republish their codes. That goes before a
committee that review these things in a public hearing
format that then goes back out to the entire
membership. A ballot is open to them to
come in and vote on whether they want to see this code
change be introduced. I think one of the biggest
challenges in a code development process is
there are all sorts of competing interests and
needs and it's really important that if you have
a if you're a proponent of a code change and you're
trying to move that code change forward, you you
have to engage in the process. These codes are enforced at
the local level. Punishments could include
revoking permits or holding up construction. And in
construction, time is money. $1,000 added to the price of
a new home. At any time, in any way,
we. Will. Eliminate 153,967 households from being able
to buy that home. Just a $1,000. Increase. A faster build
might help save money in the short term, but be
devastating in the long run. The last hurricane we saw in
Florida with that one house left standing on the beach
was a rather interesting solution. It was an
extremely expensive solution. But it was a lot
less expensive than the solution that all their
neighbors had when they didn't have a house
anymore. Since the first edition of
the codes, the international codes, for example, in 2000
communities that have adopted them, have saved
the nation approximately 1.6 billion. That's a B billion
in average. Analyze losses from
flooding, hurricanes and earthquakes. Building to withstand the
forces of nature can be tricky, especially as our
understanding of the environment changes. If you're looking to buy a
home, the best thing you can do from a flood perspective
is know what your current risk is from the current
environment and then how that will evolve over the
next 30 years. And flood risk isn't a
static one time thing that you need to look at. It is
an ever evolving risk that continues to grow in some
parts of the country at an exponential rate. Since building codes can
change frequently, staying up to code is easier said
than done. For example, depending on
when a home is built in a community, different flood
or fire regulations may be required. If you have a large
community, you can find yourself building under
different code requirements. And what's also quite easy
to evaluate is the increases
in cost. For example. Homeowners may choose to
invest in resiliency measures to stay up to code
as opposed to buying a brand new house. If we work toward addressing
existing structure as well as new homes, what we find
is that at times there's so much focus on the new that
they. Bear. Way out of percentage with
the price tag should actually be. So we can't have that
burden on new homes because we're losing too many first
time buyers, first time move ups. There are examples all over
the country where communities have evaluated
their risk and then adopted resilient current building
codes to address that. For example, a fire may not
cross the street if nothing on the other side of that
road ignites from the embers. Communities that
are flood prone may choose to build trenches in the
street to catch excess rainfall, as opposed to
letting that flood into a home. So what we want to make sure
of is that we eliminate most of the
ignitions and in high density neighborhoods, we
can begin to do that with very limited or no window
exposure between houses. And we can have the the
exterior materials non-flammable, including
our eaves and the boxing. Of our eaves. Using, let's say, fiber
cement. So we can have fiber cement
on the walls. We can have a non flammable
masonry material like a block or something on that
order, and then use a non-flammable material
for effacing and boxing OC non-flammable roof that
will help greatly. Flooding is a little
trickier than fire, but the floodplain map provided by
the National Flood Insurance Program provides some
guidance for stakeholders. I would say it's less about,
from my perspective, whether we're building the houses
incorrectly and more so where are we building these
houses? So when you look at the things from FEMA and
the special flood hazard areas, they come with a
base flood elevation. Those base flood elevations
are built on engineering grade. Amazing studies that
they do at that time. The problem is that about
11% of those studies are from the seventies and
eighties. And if you think how the environment has
changed since the seventies and eighties, to not then
have that incorporated in the new base flood
elevation and where we should be thinking about
building and why you start to see why that can be an
issue. You know, further to that,
there's a whole swath of the country that just doesn't
have any regulation around this within the special
flood hazard area because it's never been mapped. The codes can't solve
everything. A resident's behavior has a
huge role in stopping fire spread. It won't help us if we keep
our firewood on the deck all through the fire season. It won't help us if we have
patio furniture that's ignited from firebrands
next to our our The View Windows. Research like koans can save
lives and billions annually. Being cognizant of where
structures are built is important to. There's lots that the
individual homeowner can do to help prevent a fire from
actually spreading further across. Causing more damage
than if you just didn't take any action or maintaining
your yard and other items like that in a very similar
way to flood where you can raise your home or you can
put in backflow preventers or you can have sandbags
and other things like that ready for those flooding
events when you know they're coming. The good news is that
displacement due to natural disasters is on the
decline, mostly because of better research and
innovations to address the issue. Our perception of the
wildfire rolling through the community like some tsunami
of hot gases, that is not what happens in reality. We've also had significant
success in improving fire safety in the past. I don't know about your
apartment. I think I see sprinkler head in the
background that's why and that has been incorporated
into the model codes in. Some degree. I wish it were
stronger, but there are those who think that's a
burden. It's a cost impact issue. It's difficult in some
communities because of water supply issues. There are problems with it. It's not perfect, but it's
certainly better than not doing anything. We created a national flood
model across the entire contiguous United States
that can be applied to an individual property parcel. So based on the building
type, the elevation of the building, the value of the
structure and our flood model, we're able to
leverage the Army Corps of Engineers, what are called
depth damage curves, to know how much water would equate
to what damage to that structure, and then
calculate that on the fly and give it to you as the
user. So now not only do you know
how much risk you have, but what that will likely cost
you if that event does take place. They plan to move to fire
next. Cohen is collaborating with
federal and local officials to better inform builders
to stop the spread of wildfires through his home
ignition zone research. Fundamentally, we need to
define the problem as a structural ignition
problem, not a wildfire control problem. We have a lot of decisions
we can make effectively in changing the local
conditions of the House and its immediate surroundings. And we have zero
opportunity to control extreme wildfire. This effort is also
supported extensively at the federal level by FEMA. I really want to encourage
people to go to the FEMA website, download the app,
go to the United States Fire Administration's website,
download the information. There is a tremendous
amount of great information there for individuals to
help them be resilient before, during and after a
disaster. Architects and builders
suggest that consumers like me need to adjust our
mindsets to include safety as a top consideration. This will allow people to
make the necessary adjustments to stay in
their homes longer and therefore slow the flow of
climate migration and have better financial
investments. People see the. Events occur the wildfires,
the floods, the daily news that somebody
died in a house fire. But it doesn't stick. It doesn't change their
perceptions. And that's to a certain
degree why architects are there to guide their
thinking, to say, yeah, you could have that. But, you
know, for the same price, you could put a sprinkler
system in this entire building and be relatively
assured that your family is going to be safe in it for
the next 50 years. The homeless crisis in
America is worsening again. The COVID pandemic caused a
surge in housing costs and a rise in unemployment,
leaving nearly 600,000 Americans unhoused in 2020. We have to shut down a piece
of our own humanity to be able to walk past another
human being that is in such difficult situation. And being homeless. Your
days and we're spent from where I'm going to lay my
head at tonight, where I'm getting my next bite of
food. And what people don't
typically realize when they walk past a person who is
homeless is that this person is costing taxpayers a lot
of money. Cities across America are
spending more than ever to combat the crisis. In 2019, New York spent a
record breaking $3 billion to support its homeless
population. California is also expected
to break its record, allocating $4.8 billion of
its budget to the same issue over the next two years. And areas like that just
don't seem to be getting any better, despite the fact
that every politician claims that this is a top priority
of theirs and the budgets keep going up. Overall, homelessness in
America has only improved 10% compared to 2007. It's even worse for certain
subgroups, such as individual homelessness,
which dropped only a percent in the same period. On the contrary, 2020 saw a
30% increase in the unsheltered homeless,
erasing over half a decade of work since its dramatic
rise in 2015. Right now we are trending in
the wrong direction, so the state of homelessness right
now is pretty tenuous and there are some small
increases that are taking place across the board. So how is the US addressing
the homeless crisis and can it ever be solved? Homelessness is known to
prey on some of the most vulnerable populations in
America. In 2020, 20% of those who
were unhoused suffered from severe mental disorders,
while 16% suffered from chronic substance abuse. In response, the US has
long relied on a housing ready approach to
homelessness, where those who are unhoused had to
meet specific requirements such as sobriety or
completion of treatment in order to qualify for a
home. That was until this man,
Dr. Sam Sam Barris, pioneered
the Housing First Initiative. At some point, myself and
the people we were working with realized that really
insisting that people change, get sober, take
medication. Get your life together in
order to earn or be awarded. Housing was not working. You just know people
couldn't. People were on the street. They couldn't stay sober. They couldn't they were not
interested in medication. They were interested in
being somewhere safe and secure. The Housing First Initiative
follows two tenets. First, the most effective
solution to homelessness is permanent housing. And second, all housing for
the homeless should be provided immediately
without any preconditions. Putting people in housing
first, which is what they were desperate to do. Combs that survival thing. People are safe, secure,
and then they're saying to us, I need more help here. So then rather than having
it us pushing or coercing people to get to treatment,
people get housing and then they want to treat. Them under the George W Bush
administration. The Housing First
Initiative gained the spotlight as the key to
ending homelessness. Related programs soon
received billions of dollars in support from government
agencies such as the United States Interagency Council
on Homelessness and the Department of Housing and
Urban Development. Housing first rise really
begins in the nineties, especially the late
nineties, and I think it really gained traction as
the philosophy that should dominate these dedicated
homeless services agencies and programs. And so we we're in a
situation now where you meet people who work at HUD on
homelessness or in major agencies, and California
and New York, it's relatively rare to not find
them be committed to housing first. If you really look at it
this year, it will give the federal government will
give about 2.7 billion to housing and service
providers and housing and and cities across the
across the country. For decades, the Housing
First Policy has successfully housed
individuals that need it the most. Shannon McGee is one
of them. A nonprofit organization,
Pathways to Housing, helped Shannon move into his
support of housing in 2020 after staying unhoused for
four years. Starting started in 2008. Losing my mom to lung
cancer and then not having a strong support system to
support me. Throughout the process, I
ended up losing the family house. They sold the family
house and didn't have anywhere to go. And that
started to the extent of being homeless from being
housed to now being unhoused. The shelter for
me was very hard to it was a cultural shock. It was very
hard to adjust to the environment, the living
standards. I finally got connected to
the Veteran Affairs and social worker with them,
connected me to pathways and sense of being connected to
pathways. Everything has turned around 360 degrees. I'm housed, I'm gainfully
I'm looking for gainful employment. I'm in school
now, so not without having pathways there to kind of
be that support and that coach to guide me into
housing. I wouldn't be where I'm at now. A study in 2004 discovered
that when individuals were provided with stable,
affordable housing, with services under their
control, 79% remained stably housed at the end of six
months. Another study in 2000 found
it to be more effective than traditional programs. 88% of the participants in
Housing First programs remain housed, compared to
just 47% in the city's residential treatment
program. And it's not just in the
United States. A similar study conducted
in Canada revealed similar results showing
participants of Housing First programs obtaining
and retaining housing at a much higher rate. The evidence is shown that
by getting people housed immediately and eliminating
the chaos of homelessness created a space where
people would be more successful that don't have
to be in that environment anymore. Where I'm
subjected to using drugs or to doing things for money
that I didn't want to do, I can change my my. My focus is now I can say,
hey, your house, how can we get you to your next level
of finding gainful employment? What steps can
we work on now? Housing First not only
supports those in need with housing, but the assistance
they need to get back on their feet again. It's housing first, not
housing only because there are very rich services. Like there's a team of
people really, whether they're social workers or
social workers and nurses and psychiatrists, people
with lived experience, it's like a support services
team. And then the team says to
you, How can I help you? They provide wraparound
support for me. So if I need assistance in
getting things such as my ID or birth certificate, they
can help with that. They support me through
that process. If I need to make
appointments at the VA hospital, they support me
through that process. What any and everything
that I pretty much need done. I have support
through pathways to housing. Supporters of housing first
also argue that it's cost efficient. A comprehensive
study in 2015 concluded that shelter in emergency
department costs decreased with Housing First
policies. What people don't typically
realize when they walk past the person who was homeless
is that this person is costing taxpayers a lot of
money. People get very sick when
they're homeless. They have to be taken to
the hospital. Sometimes they they steal
food. They have no money. They
get arrested. Court costs police time. Jail time. When you tally up the
annual costs of people who are homeless and very
vulnerable, it turns out we're actually spending
sometimes $50,000 a year or $100,000 a year in some
cases, and the person is still homeless. But perhaps the biggest
advantage to Housing First is the improvement in the
quality of life it provides. Being homeless and being a
parent, I kind of didn't want my child to see being
in that situation, so it made it kind of put a wedge
in our relationship for a little bit. But once I got
housed now I could provide a space where we can interact
together. And she wouldn't have to be
subjected to that, that, that lifestyle. Being able
to have my housing first, I know that I'm in control of
my environment now. What happens here? It's all about what I
create. But Housing First also comes
with its own set of criticisms. Experts like
Stephen Eide from the Manhattan Institute believe
that Housing First hasn't shown any real results. When the public is told that
this particular policy is going to end homelessness,
what they're expecting is that they're going to see
fewer homeless people around, that homelessness
numbers will significantly drop as a result of the
implementation of this policy. And I don't think
that we've seen that in the case of Housing First. Critics also point out that
Housing First might not be as cost effective as it
looks. Research in 2015 discovered
that while permanent housing intervention was more
successful in achieving housing stability, it was
also more expensive than temporary housing. A 2018 survey by the
National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and
Medicine also concluded that there is no published
evidence to prove that permanent supportive
housing improves health outcomes or reduces health
care costs. No government that I'm aware
of has saved money by investing in homeless
services through a Housing First approach. You can talk about
potential cost offsets. That is, if you invest
$1,000,000 in housing first, that will trim some of the
budgets and some other service systems. You're not going to
actually save money, reduce the cost of government to
the point where you could be talking about, let's say, a
tax reduction as a result of investing in housing first. So I think that there was
there has been some misleading of the public
with respect to that concern. There is also the question
of whether the need for housing actually triumphs
over the need for treatment. If we want more from people,
we have to be talking about far more than just housing. But in the Housing First
era, there's a way in which housing just continues to
suck all the air out of the room. And all we keep
coming back to is, are we doing enough to expand the
stock of subsidized housing to help the homeless? Meanwhile, Dr. Chambers argues that the
criticisms towards Housing First are designed to blame
those who are unhoused rather than to assist them. They want to go back to
treatment and sobriety first and then housing, maybe
because that changes the entire narrative. Back to homelessness is the
fault of the individual. You know, anybody who fails
in a capitalist society like ours with no taxation and
no government is only because it's their fault. Housing First hit its first
bump under the Trump administration that sought
to replace it with programs, focus more on treatment and
sobriety. They were talking about
housing fourth as a policy, housing fourth. And that was very
deliberate because it's housing first and they were
like, no, housing fourth, you know, treatment,
sobriety, employment and housing, maybe, you know,
that's there was a very, very targeted attack. The Biden administration,
however, showed a return to Housing First. The American
Rescue Plan Act of 2021 included 70,000 emergency
housing vouchers and a staggering $350 Billion in
state and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds in an effort
to aid homelessness and housing instability. The Biden administration
absolutely supports a Housing First approach. They feel that and a
society as ours that housing should be a right and not a
privilege, that every American deserves a safe
and stable place to call home. So they are providing
the resources and the support. Critics of Housing First
believe that lawmakers need to be giving more
alternative policies a chance and approach the
homeless crisis in a more structured manner. We need to have them invest
in a broad range of programs, residential
programs that can benefit the homeless population in
all its variety, because the homeless population is very
diverse within that framework. Housing first
like programs would have a place, low barrier programs
would have a place, but they would not rule the roost
and the way that they currently do. Those in support of Housing
First believe that more resources and support from
the government are needed to truly end the crisis once
and for all. Well, if you don't have the
resources in the program to deliver a place to live,
then you're listening and your promise to them is
hollow. You need to have the
listening. Let's call that the policy,
which is housing first person first, but then you
need the resources behind the policy apartments,
subsidy support services in order to actually make the
package viable. We're nowhere near where we
need to be in investment, either of building public
housing or affordable housing, having the
capacity to address the homeless homeless problem,
we're nowhere near. What's important is that
homelessness is a crisis that can be solved as long
as there is enough attention, care and
resources to support the cause. It's just very disgraceful
that in a country that's so blessed, so wealthy, that
has done some things right in the past, if not
everything, that we can't do something to to fix this
problem or at least get it, make it smaller, ameliorate
it. So there's a lot of good
work going on. So that's what gives me
hope that we can actually turn the nighttime stars
into a daytime where we just turn up the lights enough
to really end it for all. Because the other thing
gives me hope is we know how to do it. We have the cure. We have good examples of
how it's done. We need to take it to
scale. The affordable housing
crisis in the United States continues to be a problem,
and it's only getting worse. Nationally, there's a
shortage of about 7 million affordable homes for our
nation's more than 11 million extremely low
income families. We have a multitrillion
dollar shortfall in the United. States in providing housing. For nurses, schoolteachers,
bus drivers like my. Father. This is a critical
issue that affects all communities. And some areas are hit
particularly hard. The cost of affordable
housing kept climbing about 10% a year, to the point
where it hit $800,000 of construction cost. To house a family in San
Francisco, that's just construction costs. The pandemic and the loss of
jobs. And so the affordable
housing problem is going to get worse in the short run. One solution that's gaining
traction are factory built modular homes and tecra
blue homes and block able are a few companies using
this building technique to connect homes, which is led
by a former Apple exec, has raised $27 million to do
the same. Google and Facebook have
invested in another company, factory house, which is
building affordable homes in the Bay Area. The company
says it can reduce the cost of construction by 20 to
40%. We build apartments very
much like we build cars. We stack them like Legos on
the building site and then you have it completed
building. The cost of construction has
soared. And in San Francisco, it's
some of the highest in the world. The construction industry in
general is really slow to change and its adoption of
technology is much slower than other industries. But they're starting to
realize that isn't going to work. Traditional construction is
no longer sustainable cost wise. Now, the biggest tech
companies are offering support to the problem that
they helped cause. Both Google and Facebook
have pledged $1,000,000,000 and Apple has committed 2.5
billion. The technology community is,
in some regards, responsible for our housing problem
because they've created almost 800,000 jobs and we
haven't been able to keep up with the housing. If you. Move to these modular
methods, not only are you driving down the cost,
you're making it easier to assemble them on site so
you can stand them up quickly with less
disruption to the. Neighborhood. If you use
volumetric construction, you're going to save
anywhere from 35 to 40% of your construction time. We've got to start using the
technological resources available to building
housing differently. The big issue is
productivity of how housing is being built, 60 to 75%,
depending on what kind of project it is, is in the
hard construction costs. Construction costs have
steadily been rising nationwide. Prices have
gone up about 5% annually for the past three years. Construction, the AEC
industry is one of the most inefficient industries out
there. It wastes more money
materials. It wastes more time than
any other industry. We need to get the entire
building community to reform itself, and that is very
hard to do because there are so many special interests. The industry is also faced
with a labor shortage. According to the US Chamber
of Commerce, 83% of contractors reported
moderate to high levels of difficulty in finding
skilled workers in 2020. We have been losing
construction workers because millennials aren't going
into the business. The immigration policy
squeezed out a lot of the workers and then there's
retirement of people that are sort of boomers that
we're feeding the industry. Contributing to these
inefficiencies is a lack of standardized workflow
between the different construction teams. It has to get a lot more
like manufacturing, where you have kind of these
unified supply chains that come together and work. However, new approaches and
technologies used in factory built homes are providing
much needed efficiency gains. As these industries become
more and more dependent on technology and they start
to see less waste, faster time to build, they can
build before they actually break any ground because
they do it digitally first. We can put a building
together in a computer and understand its cost. All of the potential
logjams that oftentimes don't find themselves a
problem until you're building. Modular is a big part of
lowering the cost of that construction piece. Also known as prefab. Modular construction is
when a builder constructs units in a factory and then
delivers them to the site where they are assembled
into the whole structure. There are some very large
companies in Europe and even in Japan that have proven
out prefabrication and modular construction
methods at scale. The concept of modular
construction isn't new. It was a popular building
method in the U.S. and U.K. following World
War Two. It's a growing trend. I would say it's pretty
incremental. And there have been some
startup companies that haven't been successful. Some companies have
attempted to build this way in the past, but have
struggled. In 2016, California based Zeta
communities closed after running out of funding, and
Katara recently received a bailout from SoftBank to
avoid bankruptcy. They struggled because they
were trying to Uber ize it. In some respects, let's
just shove our our approach into the system. You can't do that with
construction. It's too complicated. Advances in technology and
building have caused a number of new startups to
pop up. Factory US builds modular
homes in an old Navy submarine factory and has
raised $77.7 million so far from companies like Google,
Facebook, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Autodesk. Google placed an order for
us to build some apartments. Facebook is really helping
us with their very ambitious communications strategy to
educate people. The whole modules are built
in an assembly line. We have 33 stations through
the building. You need to think of it a
great deal like automobile manufacturing. You start
with the chassis and you start building the parts on
it as it goes through the line and then it comes out
as a finished product. The first part of building
the house is really the floor of station two. It gets moved up to about
six feet above grade. People can work above and
below it, so you can be doing electrical work that
needs to be on the floor venting insulation. Compared to a typical
project factory, OWS says this method is more
efficient with labor and materials. If you and I were at a
conventional construction site, you would see an
enormous amount of downtime with workers standing
around waiting for instructions. Once we start fabrication,
we've already done our own time space management to
understand the labor that's required to make sure that
we're adequately staffed to be able to perform the
tasks. It takes about 14 days for a
module to be constructed in the factory. Once complete,
it's transported to the construction site and
assembled into structures of up to five stories tall. We can build one bedroom
studios, two bedrooms, three bedrooms. We can nest our
volumes. Just think of it like
Legos. They can be 244 square feet or they can be
2000 square feet. If you're a neighbor of that
construction activity, it gets erected practically
overnight. There's very little
disruption. So far, factory OWS has built projects
ranging from homeless housing to market rate
apartments. We have probably now $200
million of orders for our units on the books we did
during this year. Actually get another
factory that sits behind the factory that we're in right
now, up and operating because our demand is so
high. If modular construction can
offer the time and cost savings it claims it could
transform affordable housing. We have big aspirations that
we can be producing housing that was costing 800,000
down to 200,000. Besides making these
projects more affordable, there could be some
benefits for the construction industry as
well. It's about a third of our
workers weren't in construction a year ago. We're paying them twice
what they were paid in their previous jobs. We're giving
second chance workers a big part of an opportunity
here. Roughly 50% of all the
tradespeople here, we trained ourselves. The working environment can
be better for laborers. It's a hard job lifting
sheetrock on the fifth floor of a building and doing a
ceiling. And when you see how we do a ceiling in the
factory, it's a lot easier on the worker than it is on
a conventional site. There are environmental
benefits for those workers. There's family benefits. They're not commuting the
same distance they're working, whether it's
raining or whether it's snowing or whatever. Climate condition. As factory OWS looks to
expand, it could be helping Los Angeles next, another
area in desperate need of affordable housing. Southern California is twice
the market of Northern California, and we've
already had a very serious inquiry from LA for us to
build a large order of supportive housing that
they need. And while California might
get the most attention for its housing crisis, there's
opportunity in almost every city. The market potential is
beyond enormous, even even with my crazy imagination. We're a small market share
right now. I think over the next five
years you're going to see that we're going to have a
much larger market share because it's faster, it's
more economical, and it's more predictable. Teachers and nurses and
baristas, the whole nine yards, they need to be
located in an ecosystem that has a full range of incomes
and employs just like every community. But in order to
make meaningful change, more needs to be done. It's important that we do
disruptive new build. In fact. Us is a. Part of that. Fight, but. It is insufficient to
actually address the. Problem. And in fairness,
this problem won't be solved in our lifetime. It is that
profound. The winners in the industry
ten years from now are going to be the ones that adopt
these methods. But we need the governments
and municipalities behind it too, and they need to open
up the land where the people want to live. The biggest bottleneck is
the process of getting planning approvals and
getting permission to build. At the end of the day, it
doesn't help the Shorten the entire process. If you can't have the
certainty about when you'll be able to start based on
your planning. Approvals, we've. Demonstrated and are
continuing to demonstrate that we can make a huge
dent in the affordable and supportive housing arena so
that we can get people off the streets and give people
beautiful homes to live in at a far more economically
reasonable value.
