Steve Glenn

speaker

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

Steve Glenn’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 — 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

This door is amazing.

So Operation Breakthrough was a major HUD research project from the early 70s to run a large scale experiment using new housing technologies.

Housing supply wasn't keeping up with demand, construction productivity was lagging, and then the costs of labor, lumber, and land were all rising.

And at the same time, we knew how to scale complex products through industrial policy.

Policymakers compared not just housing to automobiles and airplanes, but to the policies that had helped those industries scale.

So that logic shaped the decision from the Nixon administration to appoint an auto executive, George Romney, to head Operation Breakthrough.

The real bottleneck isn't can we build in a factory?

It's can we approve?

Can we finance?

Can we permit consistently across jurisdictions technologies that are not familiar to us?

The built environment is by layered systems, codes, zoning, inspection, financing, all involved around conventional on-site construction.

What's amazing is that after 50 years of what I would call an extinction event of our prefab sector, we have had real innovators, companies coming back, improving technologies, improving outcomes, despite of the fact that really our framework is not set up for it.

But we can lead with evidence so that homeowners, builders, and developers make choices that withstand what Mother Nature is going to send our way.

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