Future of Housing. Prosperity Vision

Dozens of millions of people read architectural and design magazines, websites, and Insta/TikTok blogs. Many of them think: "Gosh, only celebrities and Forbes billionaires can live in such beautiful homes!"

Housing has become a real number one issue these days. Almost half of Americans live in the top-20 metro areas, and families with one working spouse having a median local income have to spend 7-15 years only to be able to save money for a down payment for a median-priced 1,500 sf home. And the mortgage payment will eat 50%+ of their income for 30 years after. By the way, here's the median house in San Diego for $1m:

And America is still short of about 8 million homes due to the immigration, COVID pause, fragmented and often strict building codes, labor shortage, and the overall antiquated state of the industry.

There are new materials, but the general techniques of laying the roof or insulating the walls haven't changed for almost a century" (New York Times Real Estate, April 13, 2025, "Trade Secrets")

XXI century has been a burst of technology breakthroughs so far: internet, smartphones, and AI are taking over the world and disrupting industries left and right. But an average construction site looks almost the same as 20 years ago. Mostly manual labor, low levels of automation, outdated communication patterns, delayed deadlines make the industry inefficient and homes - expensive.

On top of that, the enormous demand for homes spoils developers. They can build cookie-cutter carton homes 50 miles away from a tier-2 city in a plain field, with little-to-no infrastructure, and will still sell these homes for $300k+.

Courtesy The New York Times Real Estate

Back in the 1970s, personal computers were like magic. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak literally built first Apple computers manually in a garage. The devices were bulky and expensive, but people bought them anyways because of the big demand and lack of competition.

Today, we can get a fast computer in our pocket for a $100.
Why?
Because the computer industry got automated. The manufacturing approach shifted from manual garage assembly to fully-automated robots-driven factories.

Same with cars. First horse-riding cars were slow, bulku, expensive, hand-made, and customized for every customer.

Then Henry Ford turned it into the conveyor manufacturing, and Model T became an affordable hit. Today, more and more car brands move to fully-robotics production. Buyers can go online, pick a model, color, and wheels, click BUY, and the car will be delivered to the door in a few days. Only for $299/month. So, buying a car turned from luxury magic to an easy process similar to downloading an app.

What if we apply automation to the housing industry to make homes significantly more affordable?

The USSR and Europe in the 1950-60s have been challenged by fast-growing population and enormous demand for housing. So, they developed standarts for panel mid-rise residential buildings, and delivered dozens of millions of units in a decade.

Yes, these early panel homes were not luxurious, but they provided way better housing than people had before. Amazingly, millions of people around the world still live in these buildings. And some of them look quite cozy even in 2025.

(Image: Fertighaus Weiss)

Streamlining and unification of the construction boosted productivity by x1,000 times with no computers and AI. Can we do even better today?

The new generation of productivity increase is based on moving as much manual labor from construction sites to centralized factories. Then, houses are delivered to the site as a few big pieces or a stack of panels for walls and floors. All insulation, waterproofing, internal electrical/plumbing wiring, etc is already built into the walls. And the inside/outside finishing too. So, the only things left are: to setup a foundation, connect the house parts together, and plug into outer communications.

Prefab significantly increases the efficiency:
. Many times less usage of local qualified labor, which is expensive and hard to find.
. Standardized operations at factories enable to increase the speed and avoid budget overspending.
. Weather conditions don't affect the timeline and costs.
. Guaranteed level of quality.
. Wholesale prices for materials lead to better home prices.

The prefab industry is in it's very early stages. Most companies use manual labor on their factories, and there's a lot of research & development going on. But the real numbers speak loud: an average prefab panelized house in the U.S. costs $80-160/sf, while the site-built ones are $250-350/sf (land, taxes, financing, and developer profits are excluded).

Some companies like Dvelve and Plant Prefabe are aiming to set up fully robot-based factories, while their journey is quite early. They aim to deliver approx. 600 homes/year soon, which is a drop in the ocean for the American market. Peikko, a panelized prefab company from Finland, already delivers thousands of houses per year in the Middle East.

One of the major roadbumps for the prefab adoption in the U.S. are fragmented and complicated building codes. But more and more States are focusing on prefab-loyal regulation: Colorado introduced it in 2025, and Utah has started its regulatory development in 2024.

For centuries, people were afraid to adopt new technologies because of the fear of losing jobs. When the progress started moving NYC from horses to cars around 100 years agot, the media was full of panic: "Gosh, we will fire all horse riders!"

By 2025, it's obvious, that the progress in the transportation industry created many benefits:
. The streets became clean from the horse trash and smell better now.
. Millions of new jobs created in the car industry.
. These jobs are paid much more than horse riders.
. The quality and convenience of the workplaces is way better.
. The education level of the workers got higher.
. Users got safer and more convenient rides.

On top of that, there's an extreme labor shortage in the construction industry in the U.S. for years. So, the automation will not steal any jobs, because not a lot of people want to work hard for $20-30/hour. And the prefab/panelized housing industry will need thousands of highly-paid professionals: architects, robotics engineers, software engineers, quality assurance managers, and more.

And all these people will conveniently work in a warm lab instead of swinging hammers under cold rains.

To enable fast and affordable construction of modern homes we will:

1. Set up a research team to analyze modern technologies, markets, and trends. And to distill the knowledge into clear actionable reports for developers, investors, and homebuyers.

2. Build a public open-source repository of technologies of effective automated robot-driven construction.

3. Develop an operating system for housing factories that will enable factory owners around the world to get the latest updates with a tap of a finger, like downloading an iPhone App. New designs, blueprints, technologies, regulations, optimized processes, bug fixes, etc. - will be updated over the internet, and the factory will produce new houses right away.

4. Advocate streamlined regulations with local city administrations.

5. Build a public open-source library of the best practices to make luxury living in prefab-built communities affordable. How to organise modern flexible schools, parks, playgrounds for kids, restaurants, recreational activities, hospitals, etc. How to set up sustainable income streams to keep this infrastructure up to date for years.