David Brancaccio

speaker

2,652 appearances 78 recordings 2 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 5 May

David Brancaccio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 78 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 37.

Appearances

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Marketplace All-in-One · Building Tomorrow: A Special Look at the Future of Housing · 21 Feb 2026 podcast

That's Ivan Rupnik, an architect and housing historian who uncovered the forgotten story of Operation Breakthrough.

In the late 1960s, Washington was grappling with a housing crunch that feels eerily familiar today.

They very quickly built 4,000 units, but learned that they were facing a different problem than they anticipated.

It was a systems problem.

Operation Breakthrough stopped, not because the idea failed, because the system wasn't ready to support it.

But the lesson didn't disappear.

Today, we're back in a housing crisis, short on homes and short on labor.

That pressure is pushing builders toward a new wave of industrialized housing.

I want to go back just briefly to what used to stand on our property, that picture of my house, because when I look at it now, I don't see some sort of failure.

I see a house that did exactly what it was designed to do for the last hundred years.

Yeah, or whether we take advantage of what has changed, new knowledge that's been taken aboard, new materials that have come our way.

So just a couple blocks away, my new friend Heidi is building with something called ICF, insulated concrete forms.

It looks like styrofoam from a cup, but flattened into Lego bricks that click together.

You pour concrete in between, Jen, and you end up with an insulated concrete house.

And what do we know about concrete?

Whatever happens, it's not going to burn down.

Edith Bunker.

So Heidi, tell me your whole name.

Too bad we can't just paint a backdrop of our houses and call it a day, but that doesn't quite work.

We can't live in those.

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