Housing affordability is on of the most pressing challenges facing Americans today, and Ivory Innovations believes that the next generation has the creativity to spark change. In this episode of Ten Minute Talks, Allison LaForgia sits down with Jenna Louie, Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer and Ian Cahoon, Director of Innovations to discuss Hack-A-House 2025. The virtual competition, held September 26-27, challenges college and graduate students across the country to propose bold new ideas for tackling the housing crisis — in just 24 hrs.
With teams representing top universities like Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, and the University of North Carolina, Hack-A-House brings together a diverse group of students from varied backgrounds and disciplines. From new approaches in construction and design to policy reform and financing models, the competition showcases how fresh perspectives can accelerate housing innovation.
#HousingInnovation #AffordableHousing #HackAHouse #StudentInnovation
With teams representing top universities like Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, and the University of North Carolina, Hack-A-House brings together a diverse group of students from varied backgrounds and disciplines. From new approaches in construction and design to policy reform and financing models, the competition showcases how fresh perspectives can accelerate housing innovation.
#HousingInnovation #AffordableHousing #HackAHouse #StudentInnovation
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NewsTranscript
00:00I'm Allison LaForgia, Managing Editor of the Content Studio at HousingWire, and today I'm
00:12really excited to welcome two people from Ivory Innovations to talk about their 2025
00:18Hack a House competition, which runs virtually from September 26th through the 27th, challenging
00:26college and graduate students nationwide to develop innovative solutions for America's
00:32housing affordability crisis in just 24 hours. So with that, I'm going to introduce Ian Cahoon,
00:38the Director of Innovations, and Jenna Louie, the Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer. Jenna,
00:44Ian, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having us. Glad to be here. I am really
00:51excited to talk to you guys. This is, affordability is one of the most pressing issues facing Americans
00:59today, and I want to talk a little bit about why Ivory Innovations was founded and why this is such
01:05a difficult problem to solve. Yeah, Ivory Innovations was founded about eight years ago. We're an academic
01:14center based at the University of Utah, but with a national reach, and really our mission is to
01:18catalyze innovation and housing affordability. I think you can sum this up by saying we can't build
01:23the way we've always built and hope to get different results. The housing crisis that we have today has
01:28been decades in the making, and we know that we need to find new approaches in order to get us out of
01:33the situation that we've built for ourselves. One of the things that I love most about Hack a House is that
01:38we're challenging students, right? Students who are in university and the next generation to help solve this
01:45challenge that they uniquely face. We talk a lot about the people facing housing issues, and many of
01:51these folks working on the issue are themselves in the industry, and that's great. We want all people
01:58solving this. We also want to bring the people who are most susceptible to actually the ills of the
02:03housing crisis, those that are graduating with student debt, those that are trying to find their first
02:08apartment that maybe in another two, three years, or five years, or ten years, are really going to have a
02:13challenge buying a house. We want to bring them into the solution and into the industry to be part
02:17of what we dream up and what comes next. And so that's really the basis of Hack a House is how can
02:23we bring new ideas, a fresh perspective into what is by all means a very, very difficult set of issues.
02:32So talk to me a little bit about how you think college students are uniquely positioned to present
02:38some fresh solutions and ideas. I will say for the HousingWire audience, this is different for us,
02:45and it's a really exciting, I think, opportunity to talk about their perspective.
02:49So during the course of Hack a House, as we've done this competition, we've had about 1,600 students
02:55participate from over 150 universities. So we've been able to see a lot of perspectives and a lot of great
03:03ideas from many different types of students. It's not just a LIHTC competition that's targeting one
03:10aspect of the housing crisis, but is really looking for any perspective and any ideas and tying them to
03:16the current problems that both students will be facing, as well as what we're facing right now.
03:23So you just mentioned a pretty big number of schools. So talk to me about how the competition,
03:32not only attracts students from top universities, but a whole range of students. How do you think
03:37that national scope helps contribute to the diversity of some of the solutions presented?
03:42As students from different perspectives and different regions have different expectations of
03:49housing, right? If you're looking at small rural communities, they're going to have different
03:55expectations of housing and have different solutions for what works for them. Whereas if you have a student
04:01from New York, they're going to have a different expectation of housing, and there's going to be
04:05different solutions that they've seen and that they want to try to apply from their perspective.
04:10As you're able to combine these groups of students, you're able to start to get an idea of
04:15what are housing solutions that are not just area specific, but that can be applied across the nation.
04:22That's fantastic. So I'm really curious about the idea of a 24-hour competition.
04:29What do you think this kind of ultra-fast-paced environment brings out in the innovation process?
04:37One of the things that's best about the 24-hour competition, you know, when we got this started
04:41about eight years ago, it was really a test. It was to see how many students are curious about this,
04:46right? No one necessarily goes into college or university saying, I'm going to major in housing.
04:50You know, that's not really a thing. They might say, I'm majoring in finance or in real estate
04:54or in information systems or in architecture and business. And so bringing together a
04:59multidisciplinary set of students was really the first goal. And by making it a short competition,
05:04we were trying to lower barriers to entry. I think over the last eight years, we've seen that having
05:08a shorter competition as opposed to something weeks-long, like more like a design charrette that
05:12architecture students would be familiar with, that really short-form competition allows students to
05:18iterate really, really rapidly and doesn't hold people back from working on kind of crazy ideas.
05:24There are a lot of passive missions that we've seen that, you know, quite honestly, wouldn't hold
05:29water as a true business model. And that's fine, right? We don't expect anyone to come out of this
05:34with a fully baked, foundable startup after 24 hours. The whole idea is to bring people's energy
05:39and motivation and momentum to addressing this housing challenge. And so the first 20 or the
05:45first couple of hours of the 24 hours are really set aside for students to learn more about the
05:50issues. We have a whole bunch of industry experts, probably folks at the Housing Wire community will
05:55know about if you're to look at our website. And those industry sessions and industry expert sessions
06:00are designed to help students better understand the issue. And then the next, let's say, 21 hours of the
06:05competition are really designed for students to kind of go wild and free and iterate on some of those
06:10ideas. And we've seen everything from new ideas around mass timber and students proposing how they
06:16might address supply chain issues to new concepts of how you can use technology to address the
06:22homelessness crisis, to fully new policies proposed that city governments might adapt. And so there's a
06:27whole range of ideas that comes out of that really short-form competition and leaving it really open-ended
06:32that we love because we're here for creativity and to engage that next generation. We're not
06:37necessarily here to say it has to be perfectly baked by the time you pitch it.
06:42Well, I love the idea and the concept of it because I think college campuses are really meant to be a
06:46place where new ideas are forged and then those ideas are honed and maybe they turn into something
06:52absolutely brilliant. But you're sort of putting, I think, what this competition is so interesting to me
06:57about and what it captures is that you're putting all of these really bright, excited ideas and minds
07:04in a place where they can throw something on the board and say, okay, like maybe this will work.
07:09Maybe this has this application and you have a whole range of different perspectives. So I'm so curious,
07:16what are some of the most exciting or even unexpected ideas that you've seen come out of the competition so
07:20far? Yeah, a couple of them have been really, really fun. I'll say that over time, the two
07:27favorites that stick out to me for just how different they are. One is actually a company
07:32these days. So a group called Kitswitch that came out of some engineering students at Stanford in 2021.
07:38Of course, this was in the middle of the COVID pandemic and they were thinking about what can we do
07:44to make housing more affordable and adaptive reuse was a really big issue then, right? How can you
07:50convert maybe some of these unused office buildings into housing? They came up with a panelized solution
07:55for doing quick kitchen and bathroom modules that they actually founded a company upon graduating from
08:01their graduate program. And so they're doing awesome. It's kitswitch.com if you're curious.
08:06And then the other couple of ideas that I want to mention, we've seen everything from ADU financing
08:12using CRA, which is impressive for a student group that didn't know anything about CRA coming into the
08:18competition 24 hours later, they're experts. That's a dream. Another idea was to take cruise ships back
08:26also during the COVID pandemic. And could you turn those into temporary housing? And again, this is a
08:31really interesting concept, right? In 24 hours, you would say, I don't know if that's actually going to
08:35work. But the creativity of students coming into the competition and saying, what do I know? What do I see
08:40around me? And what might I propose in order to think of new ideas? That's the dream that we have
08:46of bringing students in. Ian, I want to tag you in. What have been some of your favorite or even
08:52exciting solutions that you've seen come out of the competition? Yeah, the best thing is, I mean,
08:56we have three prompts that we do every year. And so historically, those have been around policy and
09:02regulatory reform, construction and design, and then finance. And so it's really interesting to get
09:10different approaches. I know, when I was an undergrad, I actually competed in the construction
09:16and design category. And so my group proposed a home that was built to expand. So you're able to tie
09:23the utilities at the end, and have separate entrances. So once a family, you know, had more people in it,
09:30or had more money, they were able to expand that home and use that first phase to rent it out to
09:36help cover some of those costs. So as a bias perspective, that was one of my favorite ideas.
09:42But as Jenna mentioned, everything from unique financing and shared equity models to new materials
09:48to policies to increase supply, to promote new and first time homebuyer abilities and options.
09:58So talk to me a little bit. I know that you mentioned, Jenna, that the competition's been
10:04around for approximately eight years. So what are we excited about for this year's? What are we excited
10:10about for the 2025 version? Well, the 2025 competition was amazing. We had hundreds of
10:16students participate. We gave out another several thousand dollars in prize money. And we're inviting
10:23those category winners to participate with us for a grand prize, the ivory prize summit held on October
10:2929th in Utah, where we're going to be bringing national innovators and our students together for
10:35a day of talking about the best solutions that we've seen across the country to help solve the housing
10:40crisis. And I think that that's what I would leave the housing wire audience with is really,
10:45how can we not think in silos? That's really the core mission of Ivory Innovations is whether you're
10:52thinking about housing innovation, whether you're an industry professional that's already in the
10:57industry, or if you're a new student trying to get into it, how do we put those different groups
11:01together to be inspired by one another? And so at our summit, we'll be bringing together academics,
11:06experts, innovators, students, stakeholders, builders, you name it, to try to think of these new
11:11ideas. And by having those collisions, right, of people who don't necessarily always get together,
11:17I would say that's, that's the real thing that always excites me about Hackahouse this year, and
11:20particularly this year, because we're going to have those students doing a grand prize pitch.
11:25That is so exciting. So to wrap up this interview, and I know that we might even have the opportunity
11:30to talk to one of the winners coming out of this year's competition. So I'm very excited to get that on
11:36the books and to talk to some of these young, bright minds who are really have the potential to mix up
11:43some of the outcomes of the industry. And which I think is so funny, because whenever we have some of
11:49these interviews, we talk about how people got into mortgage, nobody actually means to get into
11:54mortgage. It's sort of like you fall into it accidentally at some point. So I think it's, it's very
12:00interesting to hear that how some of the students come across the competition and how they are
12:06looking at solving different things, because I think that's very emblematic or also seen pattern
12:11wise in the actual mortgage industry itself. But talking about the future, where do you see some
12:16of the biggest opportunities for innovating affordable housing solutions? And most importantly,
12:21how does Hackahouse potentially contribute to them?
12:26I think a big thing is these students are, as you mentioned at the beginning, they're going into
12:31these prompts or these problems without a lot of context. And so they don't have all these pre
12:38set notions of this is why it doesn't work. And so instead of just assuming, oh, you know,
12:44this doesn't work because X, Y, Z, they can actually reask those questions and say, hey, based on the
12:51technology that's advanced, why don't we do it this way? And part of that industry experts is to get
12:58some of that technical expertise of, hey, you're identifying the problems, you're asking the right
13:03questions, let's fill in a little bit of these gaps. But you're right. Why is it that way? Go and see what
13:09you can do to really solve this problem through that angle.
13:13Well, Jenna, Ian, thank you so much for talking to me about ivory innovations and Hackahouse 2025. I'm so
13:19excited to hear about some of the solutions that came out of this year's competition and to find
13:25out more about how those different winners potentially partner at the upcoming summit.
13:31That's right. And for anyone listening, if you're curious to see what came out of this year's
13:35competition, you can visit us at hackahouse.org. We have all of the submissions this year and we are
13:41thrilled to highlight those students and bring them into the industry and connect them with
13:45professionals who want to be part of that next generation making change.
13:49Thank you so much for joining me today. And for our audience, we'll have all of the links that
13:54Jenna and Ian mentioned below this episode.
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