Mitchell Hartman

It is a way to build more homes quicker, given the thousands of different sets of rules governing how you build, rules which vary by county and town.

This is one of the companies we discovered reporting a one-hour special called Building Tomorrow.

It's from Marketplace and this old house, Radio Hour.

At Reframe Systems in Andover, Massachusetts, they can dial in local building codes when making houses in factories.

Reframe's co-founder is Felipe Polito.

Reframe is trying to scale housing by spreading a network of small factories across the country, keeping labor local while standardizing everything else.

The philosophy goes beyond automation.

It's about structuring work by turning construction into a clear step-by-step process, almost paint-by-numbers.

By shifting the work into a controlled factory and guiding each step with software, ReFrame streamlines requirements so more people can do precision work without sacrificing quality.

Felipe Polito of Reframe Systems.

We have lots of new ways to build houses in faster, more resilient, energy-efficient ways.

In our special called Building Tomorrow, the Future of American Housing, which I co-host with Jen Largess from This Old House Radio Hour, it's at the top of This Old House's feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

In Los Angeles, I'm David Brancaccio.

This is the Marketplace Morning Report.

From APM American Public Media.

Jim Piper runs a sheet metal fabrication company, Kell Air Dampers, outside Chicago.

He's more worried about bringing in enough work.

Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum are pushing up the prices he pays suppliers.

Meanwhile, customers aren't ordering as much of the airflow control equipment that the company makes because regulation of factory emissions is being rolled back.

Over the last year, as a few employees have voluntarily left the company... We're simply not backfilling those positions.