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
We have been talking about prefabricated and modular buildings for so long that it's easy to think it might never happen. (Here's a related post that I wrote back in 2015.) There are also lots of groups that have tried and failed. Perhaps the most high profile is the bankruptcy of off-site construction company Katerra, which had raised some $2 billion in funding, but for whatever reason(s) couldn't figure things out.
That said, I'm starting to get the feeling that change might actually be underway in our industry. Over the last few months we've been talking about startups like Nabr. But there are many others, including Factory OS, which has been quietly building affordable housing in California (presumably far away from here). To date, they have completed 10 buildings and over 1,200 units, and they have another 24 or so buildings in the pipeline.
This feels promising to me. And I think it's being aided by our current environment -- costs are way up and people are desperately searching for efficiencies. But if this is really going to transform our industry, I think we're going to need to be willing to make some sacrifices. Standardization and efficiency likely means making some concessions around design and overall specificity. Not every project can be custom, as is generally the case today.
That likely means that cities and communities will also need to become more forgiving when it comes to urban design guidelines. Could you please step your building back right here and follow this oblique angle that lines up with this important historic datum line? Nope, sorry, can't. Our production line can't accommodate that sort of change. Would you like the most affordable housing possible with today's means or would you like a custom design?
I don’t have a lot to say today. I had a busy day and then this evening I set up some new shelving in my apartment. Here’s what it looks like:
There’s a bulkhead directly above it (that you can’t see in this picture) and so I’ve been wanting to put shelving in this corner ever since I moved in almost 2 years ago. I haven’t really organized the contents yet, but I did get some wine into the bottom of it. First things first.
Initially I thought about getting built-in shelves. But custom millwork is expensive and, to do something even remotely interesting, the pricing got stupid. So I searched and searched and eventually stumbled upon the Muuto stacked shelf system designed by JDS Architects.
This is the picture that sold me:
My setup doesn’t look nearly as impressive, but I’m still thrilled with it.
The way it works is really simple. You stack up the boxes however you would like and then, once you’re satisfied, you just clip them together. That’s what those yellow things are in my picture. You can hide them at the back if you want, but I purposely ordered yellow ones in order to highlight how the system actually goes together.
It wasn’t the cheapest option out there, but I’d rather have fewer things of higher quality. I already have too many things.
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
We have been talking about prefabricated and modular buildings for so long that it's easy to think it might never happen. (Here's a related post that I wrote back in 2015.) There are also lots of groups that have tried and failed. Perhaps the most high profile is the bankruptcy of off-site construction company Katerra, which had raised some $2 billion in funding, but for whatever reason(s) couldn't figure things out.
That said, I'm starting to get the feeling that change might actually be underway in our industry. Over the last few months we've been talking about startups like Nabr. But there are many others, including Factory OS, which has been quietly building affordable housing in California (presumably far away from here). To date, they have completed 10 buildings and over 1,200 units, and they have another 24 or so buildings in the pipeline.
This feels promising to me. And I think it's being aided by our current environment -- costs are way up and people are desperately searching for efficiencies. But if this is really going to transform our industry, I think we're going to need to be willing to make some sacrifices. Standardization and efficiency likely means making some concessions around design and overall specificity. Not every project can be custom, as is generally the case today.
That likely means that cities and communities will also need to become more forgiving when it comes to urban design guidelines. Could you please step your building back right here and follow this oblique angle that lines up with this important historic datum line? Nope, sorry, can't. Our production line can't accommodate that sort of change. Would you like the most affordable housing possible with today's means or would you like a custom design?
I don’t have a lot to say today. I had a busy day and then this evening I set up some new shelving in my apartment. Here’s what it looks like:
There’s a bulkhead directly above it (that you can’t see in this picture) and so I’ve been wanting to put shelving in this corner ever since I moved in almost 2 years ago. I haven’t really organized the contents yet, but I did get some wine into the bottom of it. First things first.
Initially I thought about getting built-in shelves. But custom millwork is expensive and, to do something even remotely interesting, the pricing got stupid. So I searched and searched and eventually stumbled upon the Muuto stacked shelf system designed by JDS Architects.
This is the picture that sold me:
My setup doesn’t look nearly as impressive, but I’m still thrilled with it.
The way it works is really simple. You stack up the boxes however you would like and then, once you’re satisfied, you just clip them together. That’s what those yellow things are in my picture. You can hide them at the back if you want, but I purposely ordered yellow ones in order to highlight how the system actually goes together.
It wasn’t the cheapest option out there, but I’d rather have fewer things of higher quality. I already have too many things.
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