David Brancaccio

I'm David Brancaccio, host of the Marketplace Morning Report, and I've been working with This Old House Radio Hour on a special podcast episode that explores how Americans are reimagining housing in this changing world.

It's called Building Tomorrow.

From wildfire-resistant houses in California to tiny home communities in Texas to a super-duper energy-efficient house in the Northeast, this special blends innovation, new business models, and personal stories to explore how resilience, affordability, and our climate reality are redefining what home looks like.

To listen, go to Marketplace Morning Report in your podcast app.

This is David Brancaccio.

I'm excited now to share a special collaboration between Marketplace and this Old House Radio Hour.

Normally, this Old House focuses on the everyday questions of home, repairs, projects, how to take better care of the place you live.

But for this episode, Marketplace has joined forces as we step back and look at something especially urgent.

How do we build for the next hundred years at a time of climate and weather-fed disasters?

I've been facing this as one of the many thousands who lost a home in the Southern California fires a year ago.

What does it really mean to build homes that are resilient, affordable, and ready for the future?

All of this is playing out at a time when experts estimate that the U.S.

needs to build between two and five million new places to live to ease the crisis in affordability.

This hour asks a simple but urgent question, not just how we build houses, but how we build enough of them fast enough, resilient enough, comfortable enough for our changing times.

Welcome to Building Tomorrow.

And I'm Marketplace's David Brancaccio.

This hour explores how new materials, new methods, and new expectations are reshaping how homes are built and the way we live in them.

And a research facility in South Carolina where engineers destroy full-scale houses to learn how to save them.

Some people would say we crash test houses here.

How a wave of material innovation is reshaping home construction.