Opinion | Tom Steyer’s Plan to Fix Modular Housing

For us to drive down the cost per square foot of housing to a place where we can afford to build these houses and people can afford to buy them, we’re going to have to make some real changes in the way we’re going about this. We are building houses and we are building apartment buildings the way we have been doing it for 100 years. And there is new technology to do this, where you basically construct, manufacture the parts of the house off-site, the way you’d construct or manufacture a car, and then you assemble it on-site. And the estimates that people have, both from the real world of having done it but also projecting what they think they could do, start at 20 percent, and they go up from there. And these are real things. And these are companies that are, like, manufacturing companies. So therefore they need revenues and orders. And the State of California can do that, and it can change the building codes. But I want to jump in on modular for a minute. Modular housing has been promised and hoped for a long time. A lot of politicians have hyped it up. Investors have invested in it and been disappointed. The big companies in the space have often failed. Katerra raised $2 billion in private capital, went bankrupt. Veev failed. Integra failed. Factory OS, which is the biggest one in California, was recently rebranded and recapitalized. So this is pretty central to the way you think about housing. Why do you think it will be different? Why do you think they failed, actually? And what have you learned that would make it different now? Well, let me say this. There is a reason they failed. And there’s a reason that most start-ups fail, Ezra, which is they don’t have revenues and they don’t have orders. And the answer is the State of California can change the building codes, the State of California can give those orders, and we can actually drive this business so that, in fact, not only do they do what they say they can do, but they can get economies of scale, going forward, to get the kind of size that it needs so that we can really get what they say they can do, because the estimates right now are we can drive down the cost per square foot by 20 percent. But I can tell you, because I’ve talked to them, that the people who run these companies see that as a first step, and they can think they can go much further than that. And let me say this: There are 40,000 units in San Francisco, Calif., that are permitted, that are zoned, that are not being built because they can’t afford to build them to a price that people can afford to buy them. So it’s really — getting this right is a critical part of the mix.