00:00The annual housing expo on the National Mall was more relevant than ever this year, with the cost of housing skyrocketing.
00:07In just the last five years, the average home price has gone up 38 percent from $329,000 to $410,000.
00:17This year's expo included builders who are trying to create affordable workforce housing, or homes focused on the middle class.
00:24Those who have jobs essential to keeping society running, but can't necessarily afford to live where they work, like teachers, police officers, firefighters, and service workers.
00:34The displays include the eco-dwelling units from Evolve Green Solutions.
00:38What makes these units unique is their structural insulated panel construction.
00:43The prefabricated panels are made of magnesium ceramic sheathing that have insulation in between.
00:49Because they're structural, there's no framing and no sheetrock, the panels are joined together to form the unit.
00:56So what we try to do is, whether it's us working directly with the cities, these churches, things that people who own land or have land, or sometimes we know that we have to provide it, we want to build developments.
01:07The units cost approximately $175 per square foot, with a base model designed for single occupants between 240 and 300 square feet.
01:16They can build as big as needed and go up to four stories high.
01:19Well, we'd like to focus on homeless for our smaller units, and then we have workforce housing.
01:26You know, there's such a crisis across the country for workforce housing, and you know, for years they've been building custom homes across the country, and the common American has been left out of the American dream of home ownership, and we'd like to make that affordable to them.
01:44Next is a home style aptly named origami.
01:47The house arrives packed and flat.
01:49They unfold the walls, slide the roof in, and then add the kitchen and bathroom, which are built in a factory.
01:55The interior walls are left open for the local building inspectors to view the plumbing and electric.
02:00Once it's approved, everything is finished off.
02:02The house on display at the National Mall was built by three people in three days.
02:06The builders are based in Asheville, North Carolina, and they were inspired by a desperate need to get resident shelter after Hurricane Helene destroyed or damaged more than 100,000 homes in the area.
02:17And after the storm hit, Helene, you know, Helene hit us, we had to kind of rethink how we build housing.
02:23And our whole goal was how do we, how can we build a house in seven days?
02:27So what we designed is a site-built house that we can get a building permit and move someone in within seven days.
02:33The turnkey house costs $105,000.
02:36It's $80,000 for a kit that can be shipped anywhere, plus about $25,000 for local labor to put it together.
02:44Fialik believes these are perfect as accessory dwelling units, which can be built in backyards or on private property with another structure already in place.
02:52But he hopes cities will take it a step further and allow them to be sold, not just rented.
02:57So we've pushed more for like the smaller lots for smaller houses motto, which allows rather than just like financing for an ADU, creating backyard lots that can be individual owned that are designed for smaller house product.
03:12Finally, there's the apartment units built by Connect Housing Blocks based in Columbus, Ohio.
03:17The company's name pretty much sums it up.
03:20The units are built in a 630,000 square foot factory and then lifted on a crane and put together like blocks.
03:27What makes them unique is each section of the house is a separate block.
03:31For instance, the one bedroom apartment is two blocks.
03:34One is the living room, dining area and kitchen.
03:37The other is the bedroom, closet and bathroom.
03:40They are perfectly aligned to come together and form doorways between the two.
03:44So building all of this in a factory, steel, the drywall, it leaves the factory just like this and gets connected together.
03:50And then that door over there is where the hallway would be.
03:53So we can connect all the utilities that way, build it up.
03:56This was done in about 10 months.
03:57Normally this would take about two years to do with traditional construction methods.
04:01The unit costs about $138 per square foot.
04:04They range in size from studio to three bedrooms and are stackable up to 11 stories.
04:09The key to affordability is efficiency.
04:12They use robots to help with building, including sanding, painting and mudding.
04:16Their workers focus on specific tasks that they specialize in.
04:19So our people know exactly where they're drilling, how they're going to create the wall structure, the ceiling structure, the utility structure and then things can get built.
04:27So we're doing about almost four of these a day right now.
04:30The three companies we show today have one thing in common.
04:33They're relatively new and want to scale up.
04:36To make that happen, there are roadblocks that need to be addressed.
04:39Regulations, zoning, public utilities and financing.
04:43Each will need to be a collaborative effort between companies like these and local, state and federal government to make it happen.
04:50I'm Ray Bogan for Straight Hour news.
04:52For more unbiased reporting, download the SAN app.
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