Author: Emily Badger / Source: New York Times
Billions have been flowing into a corner of the tech industry focused on the housing market. And now there are start-ups to help landlords manage properties, or homeowners manage sales, or tenants manage their packages.
But hardly any of it touches the central problem of housing: For many people, it costs too much.
“None of that investment, nor the solutions that those companies are offering, will fundamentally change the dynamic of the housing market in a way that increases housing affordability,” said Matt Hoffman, the vice president for innovation at the national housing nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners, surveying what venture capitalists have come to call “proptech.
”Policymakers warn that the housing crisis isn’t a problem technology can solve. Yet it’s intriguing to think what might happen if investors threw money more directly at this goal.
Mr. Hoffman believes that the right ideas could help change the market. And so Enterprise recently began to invest in early-stage tech start-ups itself.
Clara Brenner, a managing partner at a venture capital firm, the Urban Innovation Fund, hears weekly from people hoping she will do the same: When are you going to invest in a company, they ask her, that will solve the housing crisis or the homeless problem?
“This looking for a tech solution — I understand why people want it,” Ms. Brenner said. But she doesn’t believe it exists. The housing crisis is a policy problem, she says, one that Nimbyism, zoning laws, land use restrictions and tax policies have made worse. She fears that the dream of a tech fix will distract voters and politicians from those culprits.
“They’re waiting for some tech company to come in and sweep up this mess,” she said, “when in fact this is all of our messes, and we’re going to have to deal with it.”
The existing start-ups that have attracted the most attention for their potential to improve affordability are the ones trying to revive the decades-old dream of prefab construction. The California company Katerra has been valued at more than $4 billion by investors, who see potential in wringing efficiencies from a construction industry that has had few productivity gains in decades.
The Seattle-based Blokable began delivering its first stackable units last year. And Factory OS, founded by a developer of affordable housing, is now producing housing in a factory in Vallejo, Calif.
“I definitely think innovation in how we build has a significant role to getting to affordability,” said Carol Galante, the faculty director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “I can see it coming. I see it happening.”
It now costs as much as $500,000 per unit to build low-income housing in the most expensive markets. Savings in the cost of construction could help developers of such housing stretch subsidies further. Cheaper construction could also change the math in markets where developers say it’s also not profitable to build middle-class housing.
But Mr. Hoffman is skeptical that construction tech can fundamentally change affordability; market-rate developers…
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