25 innovative solutions to the housing affordability crisis

Today, Ivory Innovations introduced the Top 25 Finalists for the 2024 Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability. Finalist organizations demonstrated dedication to housing innovation with possible, scalable, and impressive approaches to essential challenges confronted by builders, residents, and communities throughout the nation. This yr’s finalists be a part of 122 others in Ivory Innovations’ community of innovators devoted to advancing housing affordability.

“We spoke with greater than 200 organizations for the sixth annual Ivory Prize, a report since we launched the Ivory Prize in 2018. This illustrates the rising variety of innovators throughout the nation engaged on vital efforts to improve affordability,” mentioned Abby Ivory, President at Ivory Innovations and Program Manager at the University of Utah’s Ivory Boyer Real Estate Center. “We are keen about growing the affect and scale of latest concepts with the potential to enhance the housing ecosystem. These innovators are notable for the energy of their improvements, deal with affordability, and optimism to construct solutions that may make an actual distinction for the nation.”

The Ivory Prize is one in all the longest standing and most prestigious awards of its variety in the United States, culminating in $300,000 of grants to winners in three classes: Construction & Design, Finance, and Policy & Regulatory Reform. This yr’s competitors marks the sixth yr of Ivory Innovations’ effort to shine a light-weight on the most promising housing solutions. All finalists are included in the Ivory Innovations Housing Innovation Database, a complete overview of greater than 500 promising housing organizations throughout the nation.

Today’s announcement welcomes 25 thrilling organizations to the Ivory Prize portfolio. Their new standing as portfolio members offers them entry to Ivory’s community of innovators, capital companions, and capability builders and unlocks in-kind assist resembling sponsored scholar interns and professional bono consulting providers. Finalists for the Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability are chosen by the Ivory Innovations’ Advisory Board, which consists of the prime minds in housing throughout the U.S.

Here are the 2024 Ivory Prize Top 25 Finalists (listed by class and alphabetical order):

Construction & Design

Apis Cor – Melbourne, FL

Apis Cor develops extremely cell 3D printers and building supplies for homebuilding. Their robotic is smaller than most others on the market, and is prepared to work inside half-hour of arriving at the job web site, driving down the transportation and set-up prices related to a undertaking.

Capsule – Anaheim, CA

Capsule exists to carry a brand new streamlined building workforce on-line. Their crew of engineers, machines, and meeting technicians manufacture buildings as parts to improve the variety of models of housing accessible. In every part, Capsule does extra with much less.

Canvas – San Francisco, CA

Canvas helps contractors construct in daring new methods by placing higher instruments in the palms of expert staff. With Canvas’s worker-controlled robotic machine, contractors are in a position to make drywall ending safer and extra engaging to a shrinking pool of expert labor, whereas realizing unmatched metrics for schedule, price, high quality and security.

Onx – (*25*), TX

Onx is accelerating a brand new period of houses and neighborhoods, combining proprietary X+ Construction expertise, design, and superior materials science experience in concrete. Onx’s solutions—scaled at velocity—ship extra worth at each step of the house owner journey.

On3 – Madison, WI

On3 is an award-winning AI/Mobile Based Learning Application for fieldworkers in building, commerce contractor, and manufacturing industries. On3 permits corporations to seamlessly seize their essential work processes in video, create multilingual video-based studying modules, and rework their groups through the use of synthetic intelligence (AI) to confirm retention of essential data amongst frontline personnel.

PathHouse – Portland, OR

The PathHouse modular housing resolution is the first-ever utility of true Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA) methods to our nation’s housing drawback. By combining carbon-sequestering mass-timber merchandise along with our SmartCassette, the end result will probably be the manufacturing of over 50,000 housing modules per yr inside 4 years.

Revalue.io – Oakland, CA

Revalue.io prepares communities for the transition to clear vitality by eradicating house well being hazards and fossil gasoline primarily based techniques. Leveraging sources from utilities, authorities and neighborhood applications, Revalue.io offers native minority contractors entry to a sustainable pipeline of initiatives to improve the expert labor workforce and variety inside the building and vitality trade.

TANGOBuilder – San Francisco, CA

TANGOBuilder makes use of AI to automate buildings’ structural design by remodeling architectural sketches into construction-ready blueprints in seconds. The platform reveals constant financial savings of up to 50% on engineering time and quicker approval time by the metropolis, permitting building to begin up to 3 months earlier.

Villa – San Francisco, CA

Villa is a homebuilding platform that focuses on constructing prefab houses in “lacking center” infill places. Villa makes use of an asset-light strategy by partnering with factories to construct houses primarily based on Villa’s designs; with a deal with expertise, fashionable design, high quality building, and affordability, Villa is making a scalable resolution that may meet the wants for extra attainable housing manufacturing throughout America.

Finance

Foyer – New York, NY

Foyer is designed to be the entryway to homeownership for the subsequent era of first time homebuyers – offering confidence at a time when homeownership has by no means been tougher. Foyer presents members customized monetary planning along with a First Time Homebuyer Savings Account geared toward serving to them attain their homeownership objectives quicker and extra responsibly.

HIAS: Housing Guarantee Fund – Silver Spring, MD

The HIAS Housing Guarantee Fund (HGF) is an environment friendly and sustainable mechanism for mitigating rental market forces that exclude newly arrived refugees from housing alternatives and expose them to homelessness. By offering monetary backstopping for refugees’ first leases in the U.S., the HGF reduces threat to housing suppliers and will increase housing entry, affordability, and stability for not too long ago arrived refugees.

Home Lending Pal – Orlando, FL

Home Lending Pal transforms the means of figuring out eligibility for HUD vouchers to pay for a mortgage and different home-buying help applications, making it scalable, environment friendly, and user-friendly. By automating the complicated evaluation required to assess eligibility standards, their AI-driven platform swiftly identifies potential beneficiaries, considerably lowering the time and guide effort historically concerned in supporting underserved communities.

HON Partners – Dallas, TX

High Opportunity Neighborhood Partners is a full-service actual property firm that acquires high quality houses in High Opportunity Neighborhoods. They present these houses together with supportive providers (Services Enriched Housing) to Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher holders so as to break the cycle of poverty.

Montgomery County Housing Production Fund – Kensington, MD

The Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC) of Montgomery County, Maryland partnered with Montgomery County to create the Housing Production Fund (HPF) in 2021. The HPF is now anticipated to produce as many as 2,000 new housing models in the county by the finish of the decade, of which at the very least 30% will probably be inexpensive. The HPF is a $100 million revolving fund that gives low-cost building financing for the growth of publicly owned, mixed-income housing. Jurisdictions throughout the nation at the moment are exploring how they will adapt this mannequin as explored in current tales in Vox and the New York Times.

Rent Butter – Chicago, IL

Rent Butter goals to create a resident screening resolution that provides useful and unbiased insights to housing suppliers whereas increasing housing choices for people with less-than-ideal credit score histories.

Roam – New York City, NY

With rates of interest at their highest level in 20 years and housing affordability at its lowest level in historical past, Roam presents a singular resolution to assist homebuyers wind again the clock on rates of interest by buying a house with a low-rate assumable mortgage, saving them up to 50% on month-to-month funds in contrast to shopping for with a conventional mortgage. Roam’s platform makes it simple for consumers to search listings with assumable mortgages, and Roam streamlines all steps in the assumption course of, working with the mortgage servicer on behalf of purchaser, vendor and brokers to guarantee the transaction closes on time.

US Modular Capital – Chicago, IL

Volumetric building is a scalable and sustainable resolution to the inexpensive housing crisis. US Modular Capital is the solely lender solely devoted to financing volumetric building. They present builders with versatile and innovative financing solutions required for volumetric initiatives.

Policy & Regulatory Reform

City of Detroit: Land Value Tax Plan – Detroit, MI

For too lengthy, an outdated property tax code has unfairly burdened owners and inexpensive housing builders in Detroit whereas rewarding land speculators and inspiring blight. Detroit is proposing a Land Value Tax plan, which would supply long-overdue reduction to owners by lowering property taxes whereas encouraging progress and reinvestment; the plan shifts the tax burden from property enhancements and buildings to land.

City of San Diego: ADU Bonus program – San Diego, CA

The City of San Diego has carried out a Bonus Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) Program that enables for elevated density for Affordable ADUs. This incentive has led to the building of deed restricted ADUs and naturally inexpensive ADUs all through the City.

Compass Working Capital – Boston, MA

Compass Working Capital (Compass) companions with households with low incomes – primarily households led by Black and/or Latina ladies – to construct financial savings and belongings as a pathway out of poverty. Since 2010, Compass has developed and carried out a collection of improvements to broaden the scope and affect of the Family Self-Sufficiency program, the nation’s largest wealth-building program for households with low incomes, made accessible in HUD-assisted housing.

First Repair – Evanston, IL

First Repair has taken a local-to-national strategy in the centuries-long motion for Black reparations. Localities nationwide, like Evanston, IL, are prioritizing housing-related redress as a primary tangible step to restore the legacies of slavery in the United States.

FwdSlash – East Brunswick, NJ

FwdSlash is bringing the healthcare trade into housing. Through novel contracts with managed Medicaid that generates up to $30 billion yearly in well being price financial savings at scale, FwdSlash is enabling communities to information the healthcare funding of those financial savings to improve housing provide and providers for individuals experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness.

Minneapolis Public Housing Authority: Family Housing Expansion Project – Minneapolis-Saint Paul, MN

Minneapolis Public Housing Authority helps present 26,000 individuals with high quality, secure, and inexpensive housing via its varied housing help applications. In 2023, the company introduced 84 new, deeply inexpensive household houses to 16 websites in Minneapolis by leveraging upzoning, modular building, and monetary partnerships.

Placemate – Truckee, CA

Placemate helps tourism-based communities thrive by unlocking new inexpensive rental housing for the native workforce. Through their innovative public-private partnerships, they’ve designed and carried out incentive applications to convert underutilized housing inventory into new long-term leases.

Pronto Housing – New York, NY

Pronto Housing offers software program to streamline inexpensive housing resident qualification so property groups can fill models quicker and enhance the resident expertise. The software program is configurable for any inexpensive program to replicate the myriad of regulatory companies and financing permutations for properties throughout the US.

The 2024 Top 10 Ivory Prize Finalists will probably be introduced in April, and the closing 2024 Ivory Prize Winners will probably be introduced on May 16. To study extra, go to www.ivoryinnovations.org.