Building Tomorrow: A Special Look at the Future of Housing
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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.
From Marketplace and This Old House Radio Hour, it's Building Tomorrow, a special look at the future of housing, brought to you by LAist and APM, American Public Media. I'm Jen Largess.
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.
We'll visit a factory in California where houses are built like cars on an assembly line.
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.
In East Texas, a tiny house community is rewriting the rules of retirement.
I didn't need amenities. My amenity was going to be my community.
How do we build homes that last for the next hundred years?
How a wave of material innovation is reshaping home construction.
But first, the news, right after this. This Old House Radio Hour is supported by The Home Depot, helping customers with tools and guidance on any project, from installation to inspiration. 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 begin in Altadena, California, where Marketplace host David Brancaccio's home used to be. Hi, David. Thanks for having us.
Thanks for coming up to the property, Jen.
Which at the moment is an empty lot. It's been, what, a year since your home burned down in the California wildfires?
Yeah, here we are on a rectangular suburban lot. There is a square where the house used to be just dug out of the earth, and there's some cactus over there. Not a lot else.
Yeah, but you've got a picture here that shows what used to be here. Tell us what you're looking at.
Yeah, it was small by choice, barely 1,100 square feet, two bedroom, one bath with a detached garage. It was kind of tutory, but it was scaled to what my wife Mary and I needed.
How does it feel to be here right now?
Well, when I see the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance, it's a winter day, but the sun is burning our foreheads. You're like, I want to rebuild here, but I want to do it right. I want to do it right in terms of resilience to the next fire. I want to do it right in terms of energy efficiency and climate change. And I want to do it right because I got to live in it. And I want it to look nice and be comfortable.
Your wife, Mary Brown Caccio, I think she said a line that summed it up quite perfectly.
She was standing right where you're sitting when she said this within moments of us having seen the property burnt down for the first time. And she said, look, it was 99 years old. We had the perfect house for the last hundred years. When we rebuild, we need to build a house for the next hundred years. Well, what is that? What techniques do you use? What building materials? What design choices? I think those are all interesting questions that will be of use after these compounded disasters across the country.
Yeah, and it isn't just about one house or one community, really.
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