We know housing has become hard for many in the US to afford, but why? Ivan Rupnik, PhD ’15, architect, professor at Northeastern University, and founding partner of Mod X, says it’s because outdated regulations make it nearly impossible to build homes more affordably. The solution? Create a faster approval process and update codes to focus on what a home needs to do rather than dictating exactly how it must be built. Then, manufacturers can innovate, doing for homes what automakers do for cars: designing them in a repeatable way, manufacturing major components offsite in controlled settings like factories, and assembling them onsite quickly and efficiently. Countries like Sweden and Japan successfully adopted this model decades ago. Rupnik says the current housing crisis makes it critical for the US to do the same.
