Jenn Largesse

speaker

192 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 21 Feb

Jenn Largesse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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

It feels really good.

Prefab housing has long promised a way to build faster, cheaper, and at scale, especially in moments of crisis.

And yet every time the country has tried to push factory-built housing nationwide, it's stalled or it's failed.

The question isn't whether prefab can work, it's why it hasn't, at least not yet.

And it's happening now, led by builders like Steve Glenn inside facilities like Plant Prefab outside of Bakersfield, California, where the future of factory-built housing is already on the floor.

Inside, building a home becomes a coordinated process, where walls, floors, roofs, and entire rooms are made in parallel, then assembled with precision.

At the end of the assembly line, the module is completely finished and ready to ship.

Steve Glenn is convinced prefabrication won't sit at the margins of American housing for long.

It will soon define it.

What we're seeing here is factory-built housing working the way it's supposed to.

Faster timelines, consistent quality, and fewer surprises.

If zoning and financing rules evolve to match, prefab could shift from a niche approach to a more practical tool for building housing at scale.

Coming up next, a new wave of building materials and processes are radically changing how houses are being built to last.

This Old House Radio Hour is supported by The Home Depot, how doers get more done.

This is Building Tomorrow, a special look at the future of housing from Marketplace and This Old House Radio Hour.

I'm Jen Largess.

We're back in Altadena, California, where Marketplace host David Brancaccio's home used to be.

Yeah, and the question is whether we keep building that same house.

And what's really striking is that you don't have to go far to see how different neighbors are answering that question.

So this is one answer to how we might build in the future, but this is not the way that you're leaning.

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