My internet friend Bobby Fijan is one of the founders of a mission-driven company called The American Housing Corporation. It was founded in 2024. They opened their first factory in Austin in 2025, and they're now actively working on their first collection of modular homes.
The mission is both simple and awesome: The American middle class can no longer afford a family-oriented starter home in the cities they love. This has people leaving cities, abstaining from having kids, and forgoing economic opportunity.
To correct this, they're going back to what they refer to as "the original American urban home" — the rowhome. And they're working to perfect it through vertical integration and a modular approach where prefabricated components are built in a factory and then shipped flat-packed to the site.
They're obviously not the first company to try to reduce the cost of new housing through prefabrication, but they believe that total vertical integration will make them different. And boy, would I like to see them succeed.
If we truly want to bring down the cost of new housing, we need to (1) stop taxing it like we want less of it and (2) think of it in every possible way as a repeatable product and not as a custom prototype.
Good luck, team!
Photos from The American Housing Corporation
My internet friend (and fellow Penn alum), Bobby Fijan, is a strong proponent of more family-friendly housing in urban centers. And by strong proponent, I mean that he is both building more family-friendly housing as a developer and publishing thoughtful research on the topic. His most recent project is this study, which surveyed more than 10,000 people, and looked at what it will take to build more urban homes for young families.
What he and his co-author Lyman Stone found is the following:
People who don't have enough space at home are less likely to have children.
Apartments are a growing share of new housing in the US, but they are becoming increasingly less family friendly.
Americans are willing to pay more in rent per square foot for the same amount of space if there are more bedrooms.
Developers are not properly accounting for the higher vacancy and turnover associated with smaller apartments (especially in the current market environment).
Cities could increase the number of family-friendly apartments if they did things like exempt them from FAR calculations, accelerate approvals/permitting, and so on.
This is a topic that I feel similarly about. I am an urbanist and I believe that cities are at their best when they provide for every generation and demographic segment. It's also not a new topic for cities like Toronto.
But I do think cities like Toronto and Vancouver are a bit unique. If you look at some of the floor plan examples in the report, you'll find one-bedroom apartments at 750 square feet and two-bedroom apartments at 1,100 square feet. Part of the thinking is that these floor plans could accommodate additional bedrooms in order to make them more family friendly (and it would be accretive to developers based on the above finding).
But by Toronto standards, these would be very generous apartments. At 750 sf, it is likely the apartment would already have 2 bedrooms and possibly even a den/office. The reason for this is that affordability has been strained for a long time in this city, and the market responded with shrinkflation. Every square foot has already been optimized.
So if we truly want to encourage more family-friendly apartments, I believe that we are going to need to change the cost structure underpinning the development of these homes. In other words, we need to make them cheaper to build so that more families can afford a bit more space. The way you start to do this is by doing some of the things listed in the last point above and by reducing added taxes and levies.
Everybody wants a 3 bedroom condo or apartment until they see what they cost. We've spoken about this before. We know that the barrier is cost (i.e. affordability) and that many cities have more cost-effective alternatives. The result is that developers have a strong incentive to build smaller 1-bedroom apartments. And by strong incentive, I mean that it might be the only way to pencil a new project.
I think some people believe that developers are only doing this to profit maximize and that they could build more family-sized apartments if only they really wanted to. But it's not that simple. There needs to be a market for it at rental rates that can generate a positive margin for developers.
My internet friend Bobby Fijan is one of the founders of a mission-driven company called The American Housing Corporation. It was founded in 2024. They opened their first factory in Austin in 2025, and they're now actively working on their first collection of modular homes.
The mission is both simple and awesome: The American middle class can no longer afford a family-oriented starter home in the cities they love. This has people leaving cities, abstaining from having kids, and forgoing economic opportunity.
To correct this, they're going back to what they refer to as "the original American urban home" — the rowhome. And they're working to perfect it through vertical integration and a modular approach where prefabricated components are built in a factory and then shipped flat-packed to the site.
They're obviously not the first company to try to reduce the cost of new housing through prefabrication, but they believe that total vertical integration will make them different. And boy, would I like to see them succeed.
If we truly want to bring down the cost of new housing, we need to (1) stop taxing it like we want less of it and (2) think of it in every possible way as a repeatable product and not as a custom prototype.
Good luck, team!
Photos from The American Housing Corporation
My internet friend (and fellow Penn alum), Bobby Fijan, is a strong proponent of more family-friendly housing in urban centers. And by strong proponent, I mean that he is both building more family-friendly housing as a developer and publishing thoughtful research on the topic. His most recent project is this study, which surveyed more than 10,000 people, and looked at what it will take to build more urban homes for young families.
What he and his co-author Lyman Stone found is the following:
People who don't have enough space at home are less likely to have children.
Apartments are a growing share of new housing in the US, but they are becoming increasingly less family friendly.
Americans are willing to pay more in rent per square foot for the same amount of space if there are more bedrooms.
Developers are not properly accounting for the higher vacancy and turnover associated with smaller apartments (especially in the current market environment).
Cities could increase the number of family-friendly apartments if they did things like exempt them from FAR calculations, accelerate approvals/permitting, and so on.
This is a topic that I feel similarly about. I am an urbanist and I believe that cities are at their best when they provide for every generation and demographic segment. It's also not a new topic for cities like Toronto.
But I do think cities like Toronto and Vancouver are a bit unique. If you look at some of the floor plan examples in the report, you'll find one-bedroom apartments at 750 square feet and two-bedroom apartments at 1,100 square feet. Part of the thinking is that these floor plans could accommodate additional bedrooms in order to make them more family friendly (and it would be accretive to developers based on the above finding).
But by Toronto standards, these would be very generous apartments. At 750 sf, it is likely the apartment would already have 2 bedrooms and possibly even a den/office. The reason for this is that affordability has been strained for a long time in this city, and the market responded with shrinkflation. Every square foot has already been optimized.
So if we truly want to encourage more family-friendly apartments, I believe that we are going to need to change the cost structure underpinning the development of these homes. In other words, we need to make them cheaper to build so that more families can afford a bit more space. The way you start to do this is by doing some of the things listed in the last point above and by reducing added taxes and levies.
Everybody wants a 3 bedroom condo or apartment until they see what they cost. We've spoken about this before. We know that the barrier is cost (i.e. affordability) and that many cities have more cost-effective alternatives. The result is that developers have a strong incentive to build smaller 1-bedroom apartments. And by strong incentive, I mean that it might be the only way to pencil a new project.
I think some people believe that developers are only doing this to profit maximize and that they could build more family-sized apartments if only they really wanted to. But it's not that simple. There needs to be a market for it at rental rates that can generate a positive margin for developers.
To show just how strong these market forces are, here's a chart from Bobby Fijan showing how Austin has changed its unit mix over the past 25 years. From 2000 to 2005, more than 50% of new apartments were 2 beds. But from 2021 to 2025, this shared dropped to less than 25%, and studio and 1 beds now make up nearly 80% of the new multi-family market.
This is the new construction market in the vast majority of North American cities today.
Cover photo by Jeremy Doddridge on Unsplash
To show just how strong these market forces are, here's a chart from Bobby Fijan showing how Austin has changed its unit mix over the past 25 years. From 2000 to 2005, more than 50% of new apartments were 2 beds. But from 2021 to 2025, this shared dropped to less than 25%, and studio and 1 beds now make up nearly 80% of the new multi-family market.
This is the new construction market in the vast majority of North American cities today.
Cover photo by Jeremy Doddridge on Unsplash
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