Building Tomorrow: A Special Look at the Future of Housing

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 2 and 5 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 LAS and APM, American Public Media. I'm Jen Larges. 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. 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 Larges. 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've got to live in it. And I want it to look nice and be comfortable. Your wife, Mary Brancaccio, I think she said a line that summed it up quite perfectly. Yeah, 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 100 years. When we rebuild, we need to build a house for the next 100 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. Think about it, Jen. And just on this little street, 15 houses burned to the ground. In the community, 5,000. In all of Southern California in those fires, 12,000 houses. But across the country, right, we have an affordability crisis. We need to build houses. And I think it's useful that we're in Altadena. It's a community known not for a cookie-cutter approach to anything. Altadena, California, I think is a laboratory for ways to rebuild. And your idea of how will we build for the next hundred years, or are we going to just keep repeating the last? That's a question that really anchors everything we're exploring today. So we can just go on foot, actually, Jen. We can walk to a bunch of places where people are trying it, not the old-fashioned way, where a crew shows up with a bunch of sticks and sheets of plywood and nails it together piece by piece, to see what are just some of the options for doing it for the next century. So where are we headed now? This is a neighbor I'm jealous about. This gentleman has almost a finished house. Wow. How is he able to move so quickly here? I want to know more about it, but he's prefabricated in a factory. Large sections were built elsewhere and assembled here. I've never met Aloe Black, who happens to be a well-known musical artist, but when I saw the prefab, I wanted to know more, and we'll be shaking hands for the first time. We didn't get to meet before the fire, but one of the things about the fire is I get to meet the neighbors. Howdy, neighbor. You're the Aloe Black, aren't you? Yeah, I'm a singer and a songwriter, entertainer, lucky enough to be part of this beautiful community and help restore it in the way that I can. Every time I was coming up with what I could put on the property, I couldn't make a decision about what kind of design. And I thought, well, if there's something that's already made I could just purchase and place, that would really help me out. When I saw the showroom, I knew that this was a solution that I should really consider. When I learned how quickly they could manufacture and deliver, this was far and above the rest. Five months from the time I signed the contract to the time they put these buildings on site. It felt like an apartment that I had stayed in in Germany. A modern, high-quality dwelling. So five months from contract signing to having something here. It's not something. I mean, there's lighting. Are you near completion or are you complete? It's near completion. What's it look like on the inside? Can we peer in? It's really nice on the inside. I'd be happy to show you guys. Wow, this is like Euro. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. The door is amazing. So this half that you're standing in was on a shipping container and it was brought in by a crane and dropped here. As we progressed to the other half they were just joined together. You can see how wide the wall is. That's joining two halves together. It was awesome to see them just bring it on a big truck, back it in and plop it down. Look at the length of these windows. The windows offer so much lighting. Everything looks really clean and new and modern. 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, wide, 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. Every day in testing laboratories throughout the country, men and women are working to develop new ways to build better and cheaper living units. For more than a century, the U.S. has turned to factory-built homes in moments of urgency, from Gold Rush-era kit houses shipped west, to Sears catalog homes delivered by rail, to post-war efforts to house millions of returning GIs. Again and again, the idea made sense on paper, but a truly national prefab housing system never quite took hold. To understand why, we need to revisit one of the boldest housing experiments in American history, a federal program called Operation Breakthrough. Much of our basic supply of housing is growing older and less than adequate. So Operation Breakthrough was a major HUD research project from the early 70s to run a large-scale experiment using new housing technologies. That's Ivan Rupnik, an architect and housing historian who uncovered the forgotten story of Operation Breakthrough. A new way of doing things. A housing breakthrough. In the late 1960s, Washington was grappling with a housing crunch that feels eerily familiar today. The 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. Because I believe that working together, we can build a new America. I will work toward this goal with all my heart, mind, and spirit. They very quickly built 4,000 units, but learned that they were facing a different problem than they anticipated. The real bottleneck isn't, can we build in a factory? It's, can we approve? Can we finance? can be permitted consistently across jurisdictions, technologies that are not familiar to us. It was a systems problem. The built environment is by layered systems, codes, zoning, inspection, financing, all involved around conventional on-site construction. Operation Breakthrough stopped, not because the idea failed, because the system wasn't ready to support it. But the lesson didn't disappear. 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. Today we're back in a housing crisis, short on homes and short on labor. That pressure is pushing builders toward a new wave of industrialized housing. 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. Let me orient you. This is a 270,000 square foot facility. It was actually built for us, size of four football fields. This is the only facility in the U.S. built to do both panels and modules, two major building systems in prefab. Inside, building a home becomes a coordinated process where walls, floors, roofs, and entire rooms are made in parallel, then assembled with precision. So what you're seeing here is a piece of equipment called a Hundiger. Every piece of wood we use is cut here. You start with 40-foot lengths of KDDF. It's a kind of lumber. That machine model tells this what to do. It labels it. So it's saying the project and the part in the project and all this gets batched together and then taken to the appropriate panel stations. So no plumber or electrician measures anything in there. It's all done here including gravity drops. It all part of that machine model and that equipment does it And by the way it can do very complex cuts It nails every stud and joist and it makes sure it the right nail the right paddle Does that automatically And then the frames roll down the line here. At the end of the assembly line, the module is completely finished and ready to ship. This is a 60-unit affordable housing project, 400 square feet. This is how it ships. The flooring is in. The millwork is in. The appliances are installed. Here's the washer and dryer. A Murphy bed. The bathroom is fully finished. Tiles are in. The toilet. The shower is in. Steve Glenn is convinced prefabrication won't sit at the margins of American housing for long. It will soon define it. We will see more single and multifamily projects built off-site. It is easier in any manufacturing environment to build the same thing again and again. 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 Larges. We're back in Altadena, California, where Marketplace host David Brancaccio's home used to be. I want to go back just briefly to what used to stand on our property, that picture of my house, because when I look at it now, I don't see some sort of failure. I see a house that did exactly what it was designed to do for the last hundred years. Yeah, and the question is whether we keep building that same house. Yeah, or whether we take advantage of what has changed, new knowledge that's been taken aboard, new materials that have come our way. And what's really striking is that you don't have to go far to see how different neighbors are answering that question. So just a couple blocks away, my new friend Heidi is building with something called ICF, insulated concrete forms. It looks like styrofoam from a cup, but flattened into Lego bricks that click together. You pour concrete in between, Jan, and you end up with an insulated concrete house. and what do we know about concrete? Whatever happens, it's not going to burn down. I'm not building a house, I'm building a bunker. So I decided to name my house Edith. Edith Bunker. I figured as long as I have a house and it's going to be strong and sturdy, why not give her a name? So Heidi, tell me your whole name. Heidi Lust. I'm pretty much a scenic artist. I've done a lot of backdrops for the movie and music industry. Katy Perry's Super Bowl halftime show. Props for Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney. A coffin for Motley Crue. Too bad we can't just paint a backdrop of our houses and call it a day, but that doesn't quite work. We can't live in those. No. How long are you here? Almost 25 years. My house is almost 100. So I'm sad it's gone, but at least something's coming back. I've got to say more than something. You're using an unusual construction technique. Give me a sense of it. So it's ICF blocks. It's 2-inch foam, 6-inch concrete, another 2-inch foam. You put rebar in the center, and you pour concrete in it. The outside's going to have 1-inch stucco and then drywall on the inside. It's like a Lego. It's got the tongue and groove, and they snap together. And then you have rebar going horizontally and vertically with the concrete inside, so the walls are going to be about a foot thick. It can take up to 250-mile-an-hour winds. It's going to give me a four- to six-hour firewall, and I probably won't need any heating or cooling because it's that much insulated. I don't want to jinx anything, but when do you think you might be able to spend your first night in here? Cinco de Mayo. I'm hoping. So early spring, not even late spring. Yes. So this is one answer to how we might build in the future, but this is not the way that you're leaning. No, I love what Heidi's doing, but it's a lot of concrete for my own tastes. Concrete requires a lot of carbon dioxide to be spilled to make the stuff. And I'm looking for something that actually sucks in carbon dioxide. It's called cross-laminated timber. We're going to rebuild from wood. You said wood. That's surprising. I know, given the fact that all the wood was consumed on my property. This is big, thick wood pressed together. It can be harvested from sustainable forests. You can get the wood from culling smaller trees to allow the bigger trees to thrive and also to reduce the chance of forest fires. There's a prefab angle to CLT. And a small crew can frame in your house, including the ceiling, they say in a week. So we're going to travel north to Washington State, where architect Susan Jones has been building with mass timber, including CLT. And she's asking some of the same questions we're asking here. How do we build homes that are stronger, smarter, and better suited to the next century? My name is Susan Jones. I'm principal architect of Atelier Jones, an architectural firm in Seattle, a pioneering front runner in the world of mass timber in the U.S. I'm here to learn about this thing called cross laminated timber or CLT. Let me make sure I got this right. It's basically regular wood stacked and glued together in crisscross layers. So it acts more like concrete forming these big solid panels you could use for walls, floors and ceilings. I think tilt-up concrete only made out of a really low carbon material that's actually replacing the higher content carbon of concrete. There's a prefab piece of this, not prefab in the sense of standardization, but a prefab in the sense of a lot of the work gets done in the factory setting. And then I guess it shows up on a truck? Exactly. And that's what I loved about mass timber was that it had so much freedom. It's not prefabricated as like, okay, we're making 20,000 cookie cutter pieces. No, we're making actually, every building can be a custom building, which to me, the designer loves that, right? But it's also very precise. Do you think I'm crazy for trying to use cross laminated timber to build a small single family home in the fire zone? I'm just bummed we didn't talk earlier because we've already built four of these in the middle of a fire zone in Greenville, California. Wood burns. That's the obvious concern. But what researchers have found is that thick mass timber behaves very differently under extreme heat. When CLT is exposed to fire, the outer layer chars and burns away first, forming a blackened crust. That char layer actually protects what's underneath, slowing the fire and insulating the remaining wood. When I designed my house, I covered it with a material called Shao Shogiban. It's an ancient Japanese exterior wood treatment of natural Douglas fir that's burned. And the Japanese did that to protect the houses from burning in the future. What's it like to live in your CLT house? I was just there this morning. It's just a beautiful experience every day. It's a very immersive experience. The acoustics are even different. Yes, we have some beautiful triple-glazed windows, which also add to the silence of the house, the quiet of the house. But it's a rich, natural, immersive experience that when I finished, I felt, this is so beautiful, I want to give it to other people. Susan decided to build her own house as a living case study, small, urban, and experimental. Just 1,500 square feet, it's a proof point for how this material can work, not just in big buildings, but in homes. So, first of all, we see some beautiful surfaces. These are CLT panels I'm looking at? These are CLT panels. They are the structure for the house. And all of the wall panels are going up. They're three ply. You can see that side cut of the panel up there where you have one piece of wood and then another going perpendicular and then another one going the other way. And that's the structural strength. You can see the cross-section of your CLT behind you really clearly right here. It's interesting you mention this, David. This is a piece of timber that was from a tree that had been killed by a beetle that took over so much of the Western Canadian forest stock, and they killed the tree by infesting in it. And as they die, they secrete a certain fungus that stains the tree, and it turns the wood a slight blue. And so the history of this panel, the history of this forest, is embodied in this four-inch wide panel that's facing my dining room, as you might notice. It's not exactly covered up. It's not a fancy place. It's a warm, hospitable place. Beautiful. Walking these few blocks, Jen, what stands out is how many different answers there are to the same question. Not whether to rebuild, but how, especially in a more extreme climate. In the building trade, they call that resiliency. How do we build homes that actually hold up against whatever Mother Nature can throw at them? That's the question being tested at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, or IBHS, on 90 acres in Richburg, South Carolina. The IVHS runs one of the most extreme building research facilities in the world. Their engineers build full-scale houses and push them to the breaking point. Some people would say we crash test houses here. Roy Wright is the president and CEO of IVHS. We're not going to stop the storms. We're not going to stop the ignitions, 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. The six-story facility feels less like a laboratory and more like a Hollywood soundstage for blockbuster movies. Inside engineers position massive fans capable of generating 130 mile-per-hour winds directly at whatever they're about to test. 3, 2, 1, start. We destroy all these buildings. Literally burn them down or shoot them with hail or throw a Category 3 hurricane at them so that we can figure out how to make them better. That's Ann Cope, the chief engineer for IBHS. Their ability to test full-scale homes really changes what researchers can see and understand. We can recreate hurricanes, driving rain. We can manufacture hail and shoot the hail at the buildings. We recreate wildfire conditions. 20 seconds to ignition The front walls look like they starting to lean in and may fall at any time be aware We have ember generators that create this ember flow that you see in real wildfire events so that we can study how things start and how to prevent the level of devastation that we have seen in the past. What researchers are watching isn't just the storm. It's the house itself. How every part of the structure reacts once the wind hits. How do those small shingles flutter? What about the vinyl siding that's on the side? How does the wind move around the corner and get up into the attic vent and then into the attic? To understand wildfire risk, researchers look closely at the smallest moments. How fire actually reaches a house and what happens when it does. We have this series of smokers that you might have in a barbecue that creates all of the small burning embers that then attack the home. And then we can figure out how do we prevent those embers from igniting the houses. We literally light buildings on fire and destroy them all the way down to the ground in the name of science so that we can study how bad is it if your neighbor's house is burning 10, 15, 20 feet away. What does that mean as we plan our neighborhoods? What they learn here doesn't stay in the lab. In many cases, it can change how homes are built and how people prepare before a storm. Specific changes that have come out of our research here at the lab, we've had a direct impact on the test standards for vinyl siding, on the pressure loads that are within the building codes. Direct correlation. Research right into the code. We figured out closing all the interior doors actually makes a difference. The question at IBHS isn't what they know about safer building. It's how to get more communities to put that knowledge into practice. Here in the United States, we have some of the best building codes. We have some of the best building science. We have great mitigation techniques. And so the mission is that we can use the safety information that we have to protect more of our homes, more of our businesses, more of our towns, more of our communities. Because we have the knowledge. We have to use the knowledge. This isn't about creating fear or retreating from the world. It's about agency. The good news, we know what choices to make. The pieces are out there and consumers can choose. It can feel overwhelming. You are not powerless. When you're ready to take a step, do one thing at a time. We've been looking at what homes are made of, which materials hold up and which ones fail under pressure. But materials alone really don't determine how many homes actually get built. In this case, the innovation isn't a new material, but a new way of building. The challenge isn't just resilience, it's how to build better homes at scale in a country with thousands of different local codes. At Reframe Systems in Andover, Massachusetts, the answer is to standardize the process instead of the house, using software and small factories to adapt each build address by address. My name is Felipe Polito. I am one of the co-founders and I lead the technology teams at Reframe Systems. that do manufacturing, factory software, and robotics across our production process. Building homes like cars makes economic sense, but in the U.S. it breaks down fast. Housing rules change from place to place, forcing the same home to be redesigned thousands of times. In the United States, there are over 30,000 zoning jurisdictions. Every single project has to be built custom to meet the demands for that site. You cannot build a single product repeatedly in a factory because you need to get this variation outcome. Reframe is trying to scale housing by spreading a network of small factories across the country, keeping labor local while standardizing everything else. What it lets us do is have the local labor work on the houses in their communities. So our electrician, our plumber who are working in the factory, are the same ones that are wrapping up the work on site, which means that we as Reframe are going all the way to the finish and delivering that home from end to end. So imagine a world where you can type in an address and get a house that is compliant to that local with already price and time frame for it to be built. The philosophy goes beyond automation. It's about structuring work by turning construction into a clear step-by-step process, almost paint-by-numbers. Behind you over here is a smart saw. This machine feeds lumber and cuts it automatically while printing onto the material. And what we got here then is that this is a kit that then will be assembled into a wall. But as somebody assembling it, all you need to know is that 18 goes to 18, 16 goes to 16, 14 goes to 14. And very much like an IKEA kit, you're just assembling it the way it's supposed to be. 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. What is interesting is that today actually we have a much quieter pool of operators than you would get on the field. We can have folks that otherwise would not be doing construction actually doing these tasks. We have six high school students from Lawrence Technical, and they come in every other week, and they're just as effective as our master carpenters, master plumbers, because they are operating in an environment that guides them through that different information, but also lets them do the work without requiring a lot of the skills that you would require to do it on site. The idea behind ReFrame's microfactories borrows from a model people already know, small distributed hubs coordinated by software designed to move fast. It's an approach Polito says he helped build long before housing was the focus. One thing my co-founders and I were doing at Amazon was building fulfillment centers within 100 days. Once a lease was signed, within 100 days from that lease, we had first artifact coming out of that facility. And we intend to do something very similar here, signing on demand and building a factory to deliver on that demand. We have a thesis to build 1 million homes by 2040 and we're on track to get to that world and it's really going to drive costs and outcomes to a lot of people in need. Coming up, the house of the future is over 100 years old. That's next on Building Tomorrow from Marketplace and This Old House Radio Hour. Welcome back to Building Tomorrow, a special look at the future of housing from Marketplace and This Old House Radio Hour. I'm Jen Larges with David Brancaccio. We're back in Altadena, California, where Marketplace host David Brancaccio's home used to be. So we've been talking about how homes get built and what they're built with. New materials, new processes, new ways to make houses stronger, faster, more resilient. But there's really one part of the equation we haven't touched on, which is how people actually want to live. Yeah, and I think it's the most important one. I want to look at that picture of my old house. Just one more time, Jen. Yeah, the house that was here before. Yeah, and what I see clearly now, it's not just a structure that needs replacement. I see a place where life actually happened. The house shaped how we lived, often in ways that we don't consciously choose. So when you imagine your next house, what do you really hope for? I mean, at my age, it's a place that we'll grow old in. I think it's our forever house when we rebuild again. A place where my family can orbit each other and thrive without colliding with each other. Where there's room to be together and, frankly, room to be quiet apart. A house that supports daily life instead of tugging against it. Gosh, and that question of how you want to live, that really isn't unique to you. Not at all. All around the country, people are rethinking what a home actually means. And it's not just how strong that shelter is, but how it works for the lives inside it. Yeah, I think the idea of a single-purpose house is really starting to break down, actually. Yeah, homes are becoming places where people, I mean, certainly work, right? That's the world we live in now. But also, at different levels to heal from whatever life throws at us, in our case, to age. I think most importantly to connect. And that requires different layouts, different systems, and I think different assumptions. This isn't just a housing shift. No, let's call it a cultural one. We're being forced, maybe for the first time in a long time, to ask what we want our homes to do for us as humans. And that question really sits underneath everything else that we've talked about today. Yeah, because no matter how advanced the building materials are, A home only succeeds if it supports the lives of the people within. So next we'll look at how these new ways of living are reshaping design and energy use and community. Houses are not just a shelter machine. They're supposed to be something that helps us thrive, helps us prosper. In one place that shift is showing up is energy. How much homes use, how directly they're tied to it. And for some homeowners, that's really changing how they think about the house itself. Not just as something that consumes energy, Jen, but something designed to produce it. It's called net zero. Less a technical target than a way of designing homes to meet their own energy needs. Building for tomorrow doesn't always require new construction. Sometimes it means rethinking what already exists. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Zeynep Magavi has spent nearly two decades retrofitting her 100-year-old house, turning it into a net-zero experiment and extending its life well into the next century. Come on in. Hi. Are you a game of dogs? This is Nanu. So the irony of there being geothermal drillers is not lost on me, but I'm hoping the sound's OK. That sound is actually the guys banging the pipes on the geothermal well as they pull out their casing. When McGavey bought this house in 2007, it was constructed for another era. Straight from 1925. They had steam radiators. There was a boiler in the basement. There was a place to burn your trash, which was traditional back then. This kind of retrofit isn't about tearing everything out at once. It's about sequencing, making the changes that are hardest to undo first and leaving room for what comes later. Anything you're putting in the walls, you do it up front. So, for example, I put an air distribution system into the walls but didn't install AC at the time. Didn't really need it. Now, with the geothermal coming on and also with much hotter summers since we began this, the stuff's in the walls already and all we have to do is install the equipment. We have a house built for these future energy systems. As we walk through the house, it's not just the big systems that stand out, but how much thought went into the parts that you don't actually see but feel every day. We can start all the way up here. This used to be a sleeping porch. We enclosed it fully and insulated it. it. So it is now much more energy efficient and you can see there's a guava tree and a whole bunch of orchids. So it's a very comfortable house and room. The piano actually came with the house. It's one of the things we didn't move. Oh, I tried to use all materials that were local. If you go and you want like a granite countertop almost all of it is coming from Brazil or India or somewhere somewhere far away And it turns out we have really cool rocks around here I mean New England a rocky place And so this is from Vermont the countertop from a quarry in Vermont that is still operating Let me grab my shoes. We're going to go to the basement stairs. As we step outside the home's envelope, the shell that separates living space from everything else, we come face to face with the mechanical systems that quietly keep this house running. Yeah, we're in the basement next to the mechanicals for the hot water distribution system, currently providing hot water which gets pumped through these radiators. the same hot water and radiators will work equally well with the geothermal heat pumps swapped out for the gas boiler. Geothermal is the final step in McGavey's 18-year experiment in future-proofing an old house. Crews drill deep into the ground to reach the Earth's constant temperature, then pipe that steady heat to the basement where a heat pump replaces the gas boiler, heating and cooling the home while the pipes and radiators inside remain the same. The best moment of a gas boiler approaches 98, 99 percent efficiency. With a geothermal heat pump for a single building, it's four or five times. So it's like a 400 or 500 percent efficiency. There's just such a large conversation about affordability in this moment. And the cost on a monthly basis of heating and cooling is the lowest cost. The energy itself is nearly free. It's worth noting that Magavi also leads a non-profit advocating for geothermal heating and cooling. But more than a demonstration home, this house is about thinking in generations. I certainly approached this home as a forever home, as a place I wanted to invest in, not just for myself, for my kids, for the community. and I was really trying intentionally to build a home for the future. Zainab Magavi shows what's possible when we rethink the buildings we already have, how much longer they can last and how much less energy they can use. Every experiment in building for the future isn't necessarily high-tech. It's how people choose to live together. In Cumbie, Texas, a small community is offering a window into how some Americans are choosing to live out their golden years. The Bird's Nest was founded by Robin Urien, a 70-year-old retiree who cashed out her 401k, bought five acres of raw land, and built a tiny house community. I'm Robin Urien. I founded The Bird's Nest. I knew I wanted to have a 55 and over community. I didn't start out to be all women. Never was my intention. But the statistics are that 85% of people that live in tiny houses are retired women. Women, baby boomers, we didn't make as much money. You all still don't. Husbands leave with all their money at the last minute. They're gone. men die before women. And there we are. I did not set out to be this great person that, oh, I'm going to provide for older women. It just is what it is. Women are lost out there. They don't have the funds. They don't have the community. We're just 11 tiny houses on two and a half acres. Back in 2019, I found raw land and put all the infrastructure in. And I didn't need amenities. My amenity was going to be my community. We know our neighbors. And I chose my neighbors. I don't do background checks. I don't do credit checks. You have to face-to-face. And you have to meet with me and whoever is here and sit and talk to us. And I have several people that are from out of state. They flew in, spent a couple days, and that's really how I've been able to get the people that I have. It's very easygoing. There's no structure. It gives me built-in friendships. You're never alone, but you are alone. We've had several people have surgeries and things, so we take them, pick them up from physical therapy, go pick up their medications. We take care of them as much as they need. I think it's nice to know that you have people that actually care enough about you that they're going to watch out for you. And we've all had the discussions on, hey, we're not going to get younger. And when you come here, you need to be able-bodied and self-sufficient. But maintaining that, hey, that may not happen. And we've all vowed, hey, we'll keep each other out of nursing homes or facilities as long as we can. We talked about maybe one day renting out a tiny to a health care nurse. She's got built in people right here. You don't need to get in your car. But, you know, we don't know how that works, but we have it in our head. That's comforting. We don't have to bug our kids. If our car breaks down, I'll use my car. The women that come in here, I try to pump them up. I can't do that. Yeah, you can. You can crawl underneath there and you can do it. And that's why I came up with empowering women, empowering women. And that's what I like it to be out here. We tackle everything on our own and no one's around to say, oh, you're not doing that right. Or let me do it. If it doesn't work, we do it a different way. A lot of times, a lot of stuff works, but it would not be what someone else would think was appropriate. So there's all that. I never thought of it as a risk. I always knew people would come. There is so much need out there for women. I'm not getting rich. It's not like you can have exorbitant rent. These women are all on fixed incomes, too. You know, I sat down with pen and paper, said, this is what would be comfortable for me. I'm sticking to those guns because the situation we're in now has made it a lot worse. You know, women enjoy each other's company. But when you were a kid, you thought, oh, yeah, you know, we're going to grow up and we're going to live in the same neighborhood. Now I do. But I would never have crossed paths with any of the people that are here in any part of my life. And now here I am. They're my built-in best friends. Home is home, and I can make a home anywhere that I choose. When we get older, our husbands are gone, our children are grown, and yes, you see your children, but it's not like it was. Now home is with my girlfriends, and my kids love them just like I do. They're happy. Their moms are here. because they don't have to worry because they're busy. You know, our kids are in their late 30s working hard to get up to the pinnacle wherever they can get. We keep thinking that the dream is to have that big house. And a house used to be an investment. It's not an investment. Nobody's ever going to pay off their homes anymore and live comfortably. And I think that for women, even if they can't open up a community, go find a community, take that 401k money and have a tiny house built, own it free and clear and live in a community. Women are sitting in their houses lonely and depressed. We're out here, you can't get depressed. If you come outside, you're going to start laughing. They say laughter is the best medicine. We're going to live forever out here. So we've talked about housing from just about every angle, why people are being asked to build, how homes are being built differently, and how all that really changes the way we live inside them. Yeah, what's striking, Jen, is that none of those questions stand on their own. They're all connected. I keep coming back to this burnt, empty property here and thinking about the house that used to be, not as something to dwell on about, but really as a reminder that a house shapes the way we live, often in ways that we don't even realize. The rooms had us gather in certain ways. The kitchen would allow us to create beautiful things to share. The systems that would tell us what's comfortable, what's not. The building materials would show us what was really possible. And what we've heard today is that people all over the country are being asked to make those choices consciously now. We no longer are just taking the home we were handed by fate. But we're, if we can, designing our futures by figuring out how it is that we want to live through materials that are more resilient, given everything that's outside, through systems that use less energy, through layouts that reflect how families actually look today. Yeah, we heard about new ways of building too. You know, microfactories, mass timber, concrete systems, not as abstract innovations, but really as tools that people are using right now. And we heard something I think just as important, that better building is not about chasing square footage or chasing some kind of perfection. It's in a way about alignment between climate considerations and cost considerations. between resilience and comfort, between the house and the human life that's inside the house. At the end of the day, a home isn't a product. No, I mean, can we say it? It's a relationship, really, one that can unfold over decades. Ours unfolded over two months, but we hope the next one will be many decades. One that has to hold change and stress and healing, growth and care. Yeah, so when we talk about building for the next hundred years. You're really talking about how we want to live together for the next decades or even hundreds of years. What do we value? What do we want to hold on to? What do we choose to pass on? That's the work in front of us, definitely. Yeah, not just rebuilding homes, but building lives so that they can thrive inside those homes. And that's really what building for the future comes down to. making deliberate choices about how we want to live, not just what we want to build. If we get that right, the homes can change, the systems can evolve, but the lives inside them have a chance to truly thrive. Thanks for listening. I'm Jen Larges. And I'm David Brancaccio. Thank you. Thank you. 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.