WSJ Your Money Briefing - Could New Ways of Building Make Housing More Affordable?

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

America needs more homes, but labor shortages and rising construction costs are making them harder to build. What's News host Luke Vargas talks to WSJ housing reporter Nicole Friedman about whether factory-built housing, modular construction and other innovations could ease the housing shortage. Listen to all episodes in our series on ideas for fixing the housing crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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housing shortage, do we need to throw out the old blueprint? From new designs and new materials to even shift in construction off-site. Today we're looking at the outside-of-the-box approaches some developers are turning to to get more homes built. What's news host Luke Vargas spoke with WSJ Housing reporter Nicole Friedman about the future of home building and whether cheaper construction will be enough to make housing more affordable. That's right after the break. Searching for a home, the real commute tool from Realtor.com, lets you find homes right where you need to be. Find a home 10 minutes from work, 15 from school, and 20 from grandmas. With over half a million new listings every month, you're just minutes from finding your perfect home on Realtor.com.

Trust the number one site Real Estate Professionals Trust. Search now on Realtor.com. Based on average new for sale and rental listings July 2024 through June 2025. Number one trusted based on August 2025 proprietary survey among real estate professionals. To tackle the U.S. housing shortage, a Goldman Sachs report last year concluded start with fixing zoning. We talked about that in the first installment of our housing series. But with the construction industry facing a major shortage of skilled workers, Goldman made it clear that zoning challenges are just the first hurdle facing business. builders. A trend on full display on both sides of the Atlantic.

Labor's a big challenge. Labor shortages in the UK are concerned. Getting skilled labor, like Breck East, for instance, is really difficult. Touring the UK Construction Week and future build conferences last month, it's clear that the industry is trying to adapt to worker shortages by rethinking how things are built, especially by embracing modular construction. Imagine assembling everything from concrete floors to wall segments far away from where projects eventually go up in a bid to make the job more attractive.

So we have teams of skilled brinkies in our factory environment. It controlled temperature, no rain, etc., as opposed to doing it 15 stories up in the driving rain on a building site somewhere in the winter, you know. We can give somebody close to where they live, good, steady income, in a really nice environment, consistency of work, not transient, not living away from old. which is a big problem in the construction industry in the UK. Modular homes aren't new, and they can introduce their own quality or aesthetic issues, but with lengthy building times making many traditional projects more expensive

and forcing developers to pass on costs to already strap consumers, maybe a rethink of what housing looks like and how it's built is in order, both in the UK and beyond. It's 30 stories that we did it in 36 weeks. You might look at being weathertight within 8 weeks. instead of 20 weeks. So it's a great solution for customers, particularly when building at scale. The overall project itself will probably say at least 40, 50%. You've got all the prelim costs on site. So for instance, toilet facilities, canteen facilities, the security, the shorter that lifecycle of that site, the cheaper is for the building to build.

So could some creativity around what a home looks like or how it's built be what's needed to solve the US housing shortage? Journal reporter Nicole Friedman covers the U.S. housing market and home building industries for us. Nicole, with this flood of new ideas out there, I wanted to ask you sort of which construction-related innovations are actually worth paying attention to. I'm sure your inbox is bombarded with pitches about this all the time. Yes, I do get a lot of pitches about construction innovation, and there's lots of variations, whether it's building homes entirely in factories and then transporting them or building part of a structure. in a factory and then kind of putting it together on the site or different materials or technologies. And I think really it just boils down to, you know, does it save cost both for the builder, the developer, but also for the end user, whether that's the owner or the renter, does it save them

money? And then does it save time? And then how is the quality and how does it compare to traditionally built structures and does it hold up, you know, over the long term? I mean, have you found anything that kind of hits that sweet spot? I mean, that's the center of the Venn diagram that pretty much everyone, I guess, whether you're building multifamily or single family homes would be wanting to unlock. Yeah, there are lots of technologies that people are experimenting with, are using on small scale. I think we have yet to see any new emerging technology really kind of catch on in terms of making a huge change to the industry and being widely adopted. But that's not to say that that couldn't happen in the coming years.

think it's just still an era of experimentation and figuring out, you know, how to apply these technologies. And the truth is a lot of large builders are super efficient already, even though they're using more traditional techniques. They have the economies of scale. They have, you know, the ability to really kind of go from one site to another very quickly and use the same labor force across a large construction site. And so to really beat that level of efficiency, you know, a new technology really has to prove itself over time. You know, this sort of modularity, Nicole, often comes up in the context of multi-family homes, big developments. And yet, you know, when I was out in the Bay Area recently,

there's a number of 3D printing homes, startups that are kind of trying to say, this is the future. We bring on basically a home-sized, car-sized robot that helps fuse all these elements of the home together in a speedy, you know, revolutionary fashion. And yet, could that not introduce its own issues if construction is no longer boards and nails. Yeah, I think with any of these new technologies, you know, a potential issue is what happens when something goes wrong and how do you fix it? Who do I call, is there even a repair person who knows how to fix this issue when the construction of the house is so innovative and new? And so definitely these technologies, we haven't necessarily seen how they hold up, you know, in the coming decades. Ideally, a home. You want

to be standing in good condition for many, many years to come. All right, repairability questions, longevity questions. Are there other potential drawbacks of this rethink of how houses are built? Well, I think it's really just a question of upfront cost, right? If you have to build an entire factory or multiple factories to get these sorts of technologies, you know, underway, that's a big investment. And then, you know, again, who's going to work in these factories, you know, what is the kind of cost savings and time savings?

And then there are questions of what the end user wants. You know, if these buildings look different than traditional buildings or they operate differently, you know, is that going to appeal to homeowners or to renters? So often we're seeing new technologies be adopted in scenarios like after a natural disaster where there's, you know, a huge need to rebuild in, you know, fast way all at once where there's typically a labor shortage and a material shortage because there's been a lot of destruction. And that's when we tend to see a lot of innovation and creativity because there's just such a big need. Nicole, I guess so just beyond those disaster-ridden environments, though, you know, you have housing consumers that are maybe a bit choosier. And that is where I imagine there's maybe a bit of a rethink going on in the industry, given present economic circumstance for so many people. Well, definitely housing affordability is a huge challenge right now. You know, home prices are near record highs.

mortgage rates have been high for several years now. And so buyers are largely on the sidelines. They're not even willing to buy at this current price and rate level. And the ones who are in the market are typically being picky. And they're really looking for that perfect home, that dream home. They want a home that is moving ready that has, you know, very little kind of repair or renovation needs. And they want the home that they can live in for a long time. And so if a, a developer is offering something that's maybe untested or a more unusual product that could cause some of these buyers to think twice. Even if Nicole, you know, losing the formal dining room, for instance, helps get square

footage down to a price point where people might actually be able to close a sale. In this environment where the affordability is really poor, it's very difficult to convince buyers to kind of make that purchase, that big purchase of a home, you know, I think developers are a little bit more willing to, you know, try new things or take chances or find ways to bring that cost down. And we are seeing that builders are building smaller homes. They're trying to take out, you know, features maybe like a traditional dining room that can kind of keep the home smaller and keep it more affordable for that consumer. And so definitely maybe experimenting, you know, with alternate building techniques or alternate materials is another way that they can

hope to appeal to that cost-conscious buyer right now. I mean, covering single-family homes, Nicole, it seems like you're really kind of at the front line of a really emotional issue for so many people, that kind of collision of a product that has represented truly the American dream with the reality of what is financially feasible right now. Yeah, absolutely. A home purchase, it is an investment, but it's so much more than that. You know, it's really, it's your home.

It's where you're going to live for many people where they want to raise their families or retire. or get married. And so this is much more a lifestyle decision, an emotional decision, and money is a big part of it, but it is definitely not the only consideration. Journal reporter Nicole Friedman covers the U.S. housing market and homebuilding industries for us. Nicole, thank you so much for the time. Thank you for having me. And that's it for this special edition of Your Money Briefing.

This episode was produced by Hattie Moyer with sound design by Michael LaValle. Our supervising producer was Sandra Kilhoff. and I'm Luke Vargas. Tune in tomorrow as we look at proposals from Washington to alleviate pain points in housing and why the real estate industry is pushing back. That'll be in your feed. Same time tomorrow.

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