A 24-hour hackathon shouldn’t produce a nationally scalable housing model, but this year’s Hack-A-House with Ivory Innovations did. Allison LaForgia speaks with Harvard’s One Block Away team about the solution that came together so quickly, it felt “too good to be true,”, and why its elegance lies in policy alignment, not wishful thinking. Their solution consolidates unit construction, enabling fast approvals and hybrid on-site/off-site construction that reduces costs without cutting out local trade.
Designed to reflect neighborhood aesthetics rather than impose factory uniformity, the model allows for multiple configurations around the core, adapting to household types that now outnumber the traditional nuclear family. As zoning reform accelerates across the U.S., the team’s approach offers a realistic path to attainable housing that communities can actually welcome, and policymakers can quickly green-light.
#HousingInnovation #AffordableHousing #Harvard #HackAHouse
Designed to reflect neighborhood aesthetics rather than impose factory uniformity, the model allows for multiple configurations around the core, adapting to household types that now outnumber the traditional nuclear family. As zoning reform accelerates across the U.S., the team’s approach offers a realistic path to attainable housing that communities can actually welcome, and policymakers can quickly green-light.
#HousingInnovation #AffordableHousing #Harvard #HackAHouse
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00:00I'm Allison LaForgia, Managing Editor of HousingWire's Content Studio, and today I have a special episode of 10 Minute Talks where I'm sitting down with the recent winners of Ivory Innovation's 2025 Hack a House competition, the one block away team from Harvard University.
00:15And I want to start by saying congratulations to y'all. This is such an interesting competition. It's so exciting to see students get interested in housing and look at affordability.
00:29And I'm excited to talk to each of y'all about how you got into the competition and your idea. So let's start with some introductions.
00:36Hi, everyone. Thanks for having us. My name is Justin. I'm at the Harvard University's Master in Real Estate program currently.
00:44I've been working as an architect for the past three years in Boston and have a strong interest in real estate development.
00:51Hey, everyone. My name is Tejas. I'm also a Master's in Real Estate student at the GSD currently.
00:58Before this, I was doing three years as a consultant at McKinsey, mostly working in the Middle East on urban design and national housing projects.
01:10And my background educationally before that, I have a Master's in Humanities, but my focus was on urban studies.
01:21And hi, I'm Noah Garcia, also in the MRE program with Tejas and Justin and Marco.
01:28I have a background in undergrad in architecture, worked as an architect for a number of years, and then pursued data science and tech innovation.
01:35I'm Pranav. I'm studying the Master's of Design at Harvard.
01:39I have a background in architecture for the past three years in the San Francisco Bay Area, both in the for-profit and non-profit space.
01:47And I'm really interested in kind of the intersection of design and development innovation.
01:52Marco Velasquez, background in real estate private equity, going back to investment banking all the way up to now, I have a big interest in development and affordability.
02:07All right. So you are a very talented group of people, and it sounds like you all come from very different backgrounds.
02:18So how did you guys come together as a group?
02:22I think, you know, first of all, a few of us were, I think, interested in the prompts and the hackathon itself because of the affordable housing component and obviously our various interests in real estate development.
02:38So we sort of came together with interests in a few different realms of skill sets and specifically like design, finance, instruction, data science.
02:51So coming together, I think, was pretty natural for us.
02:54A lot of us obviously are in the same program here at Harvard, and Renaud is also in a lot of our real estate and other classes.
03:00So I think it was natural that when we came together, it made sense that all of us coming from these different backgrounds could work together to come up with sort of new innovative solutions for affordability.
03:12Yeah, I would add that, you know, Harvard does a really good job of, you know, our class set, you know, revolving around sustainability and affordability.
03:26Like, you know, what, how can we solve a problem today?
03:31And that's really at the forefront of, like, how our classes are formed.
03:37And so we are of the same mindset, you know, technically as we're going through this process.
03:45And so, you know, finding sort of that interdisciplinary approach where, you know, each one of us has a very distinct background, but, you know, coming together can be very powerful.
03:58It was very natural for us to converge and start coming up with ideas really quick.
04:05And we almost surprised ourselves in a way, right?
04:07You know, as we came together and we started talking, it was like one of those moments where it's like, wow, like as a group coming from different backgrounds, different nationalities, right?
04:22Different areas of the world coming together on a single topic was kind of amazing, honestly.
04:30And I think each one of us, even to the point that we got to today, is very proud and happy about that, that moment.
04:41Totally agree.
04:41And I also think that something about like personality types has something to do with it, because I do think that the nature of our programs is very like, if you want to stay on kind of the investment side of things, like the entire time throughout your career, like you can totally, totally do that.
04:55But I think we were all kind of interested in seeking out kind of like multidisciplinary holistic solutions.
05:01And that was kind of what, that shared interest kind of helped our pitch.
05:07Yeah.
05:07A couple more things I'd like to like call out.
05:09I think number one, like the Joint Center for Housing Studies here.
05:13I think we got to know about the Hacker House from them, from David Luberoff, and they were pretty generous.
05:21And they offered us space for the initial few hours when we started kind of hashing out our idea.
05:27And yeah, like Marco said, I think it's been unexpectedly kind of easy to kind of come up with this idea and kind of work together.
05:35Because I think we were good with our idea in like an hour, and we were mostly done with it by midnight, kind of putting it together, which was, I don't want to let our secrets out.
05:53But yeah, like, I don't think it was like, we didn't have to stay up overnight, we didn't have to kill ourselves.
05:58I think it was, it was really lovely.
06:02But then we were also happy with the result that we had in terms of its sophistication, given the time constraints, and also just the fact that it was a solid idea.
06:13I feel like Marco and I, we had a second like where I asked Marco, are you sure this works?
06:18This is just, this looks too good to be true.
06:21And, you know, like, the others you can tell, you can say if this, this wants to be, this has to be cut out.
06:27But yeah, I feel like that was like quite interesting to me.
06:31Like, we ended up on a solution, which for me, at least was like, too good to believe in a way.
06:36But then over the next few hours, I was like, oh, this actually makes sense.
06:40That's great.
06:41So that was, which kind of goes to the point, Alison, where it's like, you know, the ideas are there, and they're really great.
06:49So how do you get, like, policy to agree to the ideas, right?
06:55The fact that, you know, they just are saying it didn't take us, you know, too long to conceptualize what we wanted to do and bring it all together, right?
07:06I mean, obviously, talented group of people, but it's, it's not rocket science, right?
07:13North State is not rocket science.
07:15It's how do they let us do this?
07:18You know, like, that's, that's the thing, right?
07:21And so that's, that's what we got to figure out.
07:23And Texas, as a case study, you know, allowed us to think about it a little bit further.
07:30And so that's why kind of we chose that market.
07:33Because they do have some density, you know, policies that they've been passing to at least contemplate what could happen in the new typology that we're, we were thinking of.
07:44So, so let's take two steps back here.
07:48So the One Block Away team won the construction design prompt of the Ivory Innovations 2025 Hacker House competition.
07:58Let's talk to the audience about what your actual solution is.
08:03Just so that we can understand, I mean, now that we've gone through the how it came together, the how the team came together, and what the different perspectives bring.
08:13Let's talk a little bit about that and dig a little bit more into the Texas case study and a couple other things about how, how do we actually do this?
08:24How do we let the regulation let us do this?
08:27Let's talk about the idea of more.
08:28Well, I'll frame it first, then you guys can talk about the solution.
08:32So the idea really came from the understanding that there's a ubiquity in the current housing stock that's available in that, you know, there's a single family home.
08:43It's, it's, it's, it's occupied by what you think is a nuclear family, but we recognize that the nuclear family structure is no longer the most prevalent housing, housing arrangement that you find throughout America.
08:59And so we looked at the data, and so we looked at the data, that was a big part of it as well.
09:02And we saw that, you know, many people are living in multi-generational households or, or solo households or, you know, some other scenario aside from the nuclear family.
09:13Um, so through that, we, we looked at a solution that would satisfy different living arrangements to offer to fill a gap in the market, um, one, and then, um, we also looked at prototypes, uh, pets to the design guys, um, for, for how to increase, reduce construction costs and increase, um, construction time.
09:33Yeah, and so our design takes essentially the envelope and footprint and even like construction material character of a typical Texas two-story single family home and instead squeezes four different smaller, like one bedroom, one living room unit that's designed a little bit more for those kind of underserved types like Noah was talking about.
09:57Maybe you're like empty nesters, like maybe you're like, uh, single residents, couples, no kids, like those types of households and, uh, kind of brings it together over our, uh, maybe like our secret sauce.
10:08That's our prefabricated core that's developed to reduce construction costs.
10:12And maybe Justin can talk a little bit more about that.
10:15Yeah, definitely.
10:16I think for us, you know, we wanted to come up with a solution that was really feasible and scalable.
10:21So we came up with this, like Pranav said, a prefabricated core that basically houses a lot of the more essential and more expensive components of construction in single family homes, like circulation, the stairs, plumbing, um, the bathrooms, washer and dryer.
10:38So some of the essentials that are often more expensive to route within a home itself.
10:44We sort of consolidated that all within a core, and I think a major driver for that core size was the ability for it to be transported on just a very typical flatbed truck.
10:54So we had sort of a set of dimensions that we had to adhere to, to make work.
10:59And with that sort of element, we wanted to bridge both offsite and onsite construction.
11:05So this core would be prefab in a factory.
11:08It could go through the sort of approvals process, pass all the inspections and be brought onsite.
11:14And from there we could still involve, you know, the unions and laborers to actually build out the rest of the house.
11:20And I think that was something that was very important to us.
11:22A lot of innovation tries to really just disrupt the market fully.
11:26And we wanted to do something that was a little bit, maybe more palatable to the communities and the laborers and the workers of those regions and try to combine something with affordability, but not fully flip the script that could really not be approved or enacted on a sort of larger scale.
11:46I want to take a second to pause there, because I think that's a really interesting consideration that gets lost in these conversations often.
11:55And that I truly think it's really special and important when you look at different geographical areas, especially when we talk about that regulation piece that Goh mentioned on a different state by state or even occasionally county by county area.
12:16area is the idea that you can still have this idea and have the local community still have not only access to affordable housing, but also the economic uplift of building it is truly something that I think is a standout benefit to this solution.
12:38Yeah, 100%, I think that was at the forefront of our thinking, right?
12:48We have a class, a few of us are in this class where we talk about stakeholders in different areas of development, right?
12:56Tejas is nodding his head because he knows exactly what I'm talking about, but leaving out the labor union, being completely disruptive is not really conducive to making progress, right?
13:10And so we chose Texas, obviously as a case study, but if you look at areas like Chicago or even Cambridge where we're at today, you're going to have to involve all these stakeholders and you're going to have to involve the public as well, right?
13:24Because if you're doing a project at scale, it's going to gain some media attention and you're going to want to balance that media attention to your advantage.
13:33And so how do you do that?
13:36A lot of people we felt would probably bring up concepts or thoughts that were just way too innovative, way too far out in the future that may happen 20 years from now.
13:49But something that can actually get done today, we need to have a very, very careful balance because we've sat in on meetings.
13:59We've sat in on public meetings as part of our course requirements.
14:05We've sat on and we've listened to the public of Cambridge talking to us about what they hate about new developments, right?
14:12So we've heard the union speak about issues that they've had with new developments and affordable housing and all these things.
14:21So we took all of that into consideration and say, well, let's just take this back to a small town in Texas.
14:27But still you have all these stakeholders that are surrounding that you have to make sure are little by little, you know, getting on board with what you're trying to do.
14:40So if you don't completely cut them out, you're in a good space.
14:44Right. So if we create a core, the prefab that helps our costs, but then have the wings sort of be built on site, we can still bring on union labor.
14:55We can still have the trades, you know, on the ground on site that can contribute to that, you know, density building.
15:04I think it's a good thing. Right. So not only do you have to think about the financial aspect of it. Right.
15:12When you're modeling, it's not just purely IRR.
15:16There's also a public IRR that you have to think about when you're when you're thinking through this.
15:22And that's where the design and the other ideation between this group of people becomes really important.
15:28It's not just a spreadsheet. Also.
15:31You've managed to get community buy in in the process, which is no small feat.
15:39Not just community buy in, but I think city buy in as well.
15:43To Marco's point, another stakeholder that we have to deal with is the actual like city officials themselves.
15:50And Dallas City had recently passed legislation that are zoning up to their sorry residential construction up to eight units can follow the Dallas residential building code as opposed to the international building code, which makes it much easier to build kind of like duplexes and four plexes and those kinds of projects, which is exactly what we fit into.
16:17To kind of going to show that the attitude of Dallas as a whole towards densification is kind of like we want to get there.
16:24We need to get there. We need to get there, but small steps at a time.
16:27And that's kind of where our solution fits in.
16:29Small palatable steps at a time, right?
16:31Where you get as Marco and you just touched on the buy in from stakeholders across the solution.
16:41But I think the regulatory piece is always one piece of it, but the actual community buy in and the people where you're hoping where love the solution or embrace the solution wholly for the people who end up in the units.
16:56It's also really important, right?
16:59Right. There's one more factor, which is about just the flexibility that this offer also offers you like we have the core, but then we can also what what is built around the core is not defined, like not not strictly defined.
17:16We have like four or five options for like how what the orientation of those houses might look like, how they kind of they kind of orient to each other to the plot of land which they are situated on.
17:26So the idea is that you can you don't have to repeat this exact same unit if you're building in like one community, but you can have variations and you can also have variations which fit into the existing kind of personalization of that particular community.
17:45And yeah, all of this to say, I think just to Marco's point, I think you don't want to be an innovator just on technology and like innovate to an extent that like then to actually get your product built, you want to you'll have to go like get like 50,000 clearances and then just you're just doing something entirely new.
18:09But you want to do something which can get done now, because like the crisis, I think, is ultimately how fast can you build and how much can you build.
18:18So when you guys intentionally went through the solution, you mentioned that you guys came up with it pretty quickly, that you use Texas as the key study.
18:26But was the intention when you went through the actual execution of the idea that this would be something that you could see account for different geographies, budgets, regulatory environments to make this feasible at scale nationally?
18:44Was that the thought process that you guys went through so that it wasn't just applicable in this one context, it was a national potential solution?
18:51Yeah, definitely. I think that was one of the biggest drivers for us.
18:56So one thing I would say that I think Marco and Nav and Tejas have already touched on is basically working with policy and progressive policy rather than working against it.
19:05So I think for us, like this idea of increased by ride zoning across the country is clearly like a policy that is taking hold in various regions.
19:17So we wanted to work with that and come up with an idea that really basically builds on existing policy and new progressive policy that is currently happening today.
19:27So for us, I think that sort of prefabricated core was a great solution to bringing costs down while introducing a new typology.
19:34And I think more importantly than that for us, it's not really about providing one design that fits, for example, in Texas, but rather providing a product.
19:46So our product is really that core.
19:48And Tejas sort of talked about how you could build around it in different ways.
19:53And that will allow builders across the country to sort of build the house in a way that fits into the fabric of their neighborhood, fits into the scale of a single family residential neighborhood.
20:04So we really want this to be a product that could support this new typology.
20:09And that obviously can translate into different neighborhoods across the country, different aesthetics that these neighborhoods have.
20:15So we're not trying to prescribe an exact design, if that makes sense.
20:19Yeah, and that's huge, Allison, because, again, if you think about what's out there today and like you can pre-order something, like if you can pre-order a fabricated, you know, two bedroom or something like that, it's going to come with a very specific design.
20:36I mean, you're going to get it may not fit into your neighborhood.
20:38But what Justin is saying is that we're creating the core as a product, but the wings are then designed around the aesthetic of the neighborhood.
20:52So when you're walking down, you know, you have your kid on a stroller or you're walking your dog, you're not like, oh, that's an affordable housing building.
21:01Like, that's ugly.
21:02Like, no, it's just another home.
21:04Right.
21:04You're just walking past it as if it's normal.
21:07And that was very important to us because what we've seen in the market, people that are trying to be extremely disruptive and creating products out of a factory, you get what you see.
21:21You don't have the ability to really customize.
21:23And so we want we wanted to leave a little hang or ability there to use aesthetics that are consistent with the with the environment.
21:35And that was important for us as well.
21:37The social impact of that is just absolutely massive.
21:41And I think not just from an approval standpoint, from a community standpoint, from the people who are going to live in units.
21:49And I think that seeing that end user placement so often gets lost in these conversations.
21:57And that's why I was so excited ages ago when I first talked to Diana and the Ivory Innovations team about how the house is that it takes brain tests like y'all to come up with these ideas and just sit down and say, OK, we're going to not just look at the financial piece of this.
22:16We're going to look at the design piece of this.
22:18We're going to look at implementation, not just in one area where we think this is going to work, but we see that this policy changing, this policy is changing across different states.
22:29And we're going to continue to see this be something that's changed in different environments.
22:35So this makes this applicable in multiple locations at scale, which I think is so interesting.
22:42But the social and the social perspective of the actual solutions and the people who are living in these units sometimes isn't a piece of the conversation.
22:50And I have to say, I just think it's so impressive that you guys have so thoroughly considered that and what how all of this actually impacts the people who will live in them.
23:03And I'm just honestly so impressed.
23:06So I have to ask, what's next?
23:09What's next?
23:09I know you guys have to go to the next phase of the competition for the overall winner, but what's next for that?
23:15What's next for y'all to first put a first put a bow on what Allison said, though?
23:19I think the diversity and comprehensiveness of the solution came from the diversity of the team.
23:24And so the fact that we all have these different expertise, we were able to tackle the problem from every angle, you know, find the weak spots.
23:33Ted just was great at poking holes, like, you know, questioning things.
23:36And so, yeah, the what next, that's us, again, poking holes, saying, OK, where can this be improved?
23:45Pranab is spearheading a survey to understand people's needs and desires relating to what we're doing to see, like, OK, is this what people are actually looking for?
23:55Is there a market demand on the ground level that we can respond to?
24:00So that's something that we'll look at.
24:03But, yeah, in two weeks or so, we're doing our presentations in Utah against the other two teams, which have different prompts.
24:12So that'll be interesting to see how that all pans out.
24:14But I think in the end, yeah, we're looking forward to developing this a little further.
24:18You know, this is less than 24 hours of thought.
24:21And so we can kind of take a bigger view of it to see where it can be improved.
24:27So, Allison, we're getting actually a landing page together that Pranab is kind of spearheading.
24:36So maybe we can post that with you guys, but we'd like to get an understanding of what people feel about this more social type of living, right?
24:49I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about, like, multi-generational, you know, co-living, like what we thought about, you know, older wisdom, reaching younger kids, you know, young professionals meeting together in our sort of central space.
25:04And, you know, how we sort of thought about that as a movement moving forward.
25:09But long story short, Allison, is we want to conduct some surveys and we do want to beta test this, like, in real life in Texas.
25:19So we're actively looking at different sites to try and do number one, you know, and hopefully that will be very soon.
25:28And Texas allows for it.
25:31The laws are in place policy-wise.
25:34So, you know, I would say in the next, you know, 12 months, we may have, you know, number one of NeighborCore up and running.
25:44So, I'll also say, I think, you know, today, right now, I think we're kind of at the point of being our own biggest critics.
25:55We put something together in 24 hours and we're all happy with how it went down.
25:59And, you know, of course, we can, like, look at each other all day and be like, we're so smart.
26:02We came up with a great idea.
26:03But at the end of the day, I think getting feedback from pretty much anybody who can be, like, I think it can be improved in X, Y, and Z way.
26:12I think that's really important to us.
26:13And that's part of why we want to gauge, like, public interest for who would actually live here.
26:18But I also think kind of bouncing ideas off of our peers, our faculty, like industry professionals, like, that's really important to us as well.
26:28Because at the end of the day, it's coming from an egoless perspective of, like, how can we increase the housing supply?
26:33How can we solve this housing affordability problem happening, not only in Texas, but all around the country?
26:40All right.
26:41Well, I think we're going to wrap phase one there.
26:44And it sounds like I'm going to have to have more conversations with you guys as we get through, not just where we land for the actual conversation that you guys have coming up in two weeks in Utah.
26:54But there's more to come from this team.
26:58So, Justin, Pranav, Noah, Deas, Marco, thank you so much for talking to me.
27:05And for the Housing Wire audience, we're going to put all of the links that Marco and Pranav just mentioned down below in this episode, I think.
27:11And we're going to continue to update the story as we get more information.
27:14So, make sure you turn in to future episodes.
27:17Thank you all for joining me today.
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