Atif Z. Qadir 00:03
Welcome to American Building. I'm your host Atif Qadir. Join me as we explore the skylines and strip malls, the crosswalks and rail crossings, the balconies, the buildings and the burrows shaping the next generation of real estate. Let's build common ground.
Atif Z. Qadir 00:22
I want to go down that path of the production of these units. So volumetric is a certain way that modular is done, and there's other versions of that, and that is very importantly tied to how the actual units are manufactured. So just give our listeners a brief explanation of volumetric versus other types of modular and then the experience that you had in assembling this vast supply chain of people and anything that surprised you in the process of building that supply chain together.
Jordan Rogove 01:01
So the different types of modular Wayne alluded to volumetric is probably the most predominant right that imagine those kind of wide loads that you see on the highway, something that goes beyond what is considered a standard flatbed, which has a dimension about eight and a half feet. So as you go beyond that, eight and a half feet. For every kind of foot you go beyond that, there's a different set of Department of Transportation considerations, and I think the maximum is about 16 feet. Once you go beyond that, you limit the number of roads, and it becomes prohibitively expensive. So there's increments between eight and a half and 16 feet. And so when we were starting Liv-Connected, we said, what are the impediments to the success of modular companies? In our mind, modular companies, or modular was always this the next great thing that that's about to explode and like, be our solution, but it never came to fruition. So, like, what? What are those issues?
Jordan Rogove 02:04
One of them is that is the cost of volumetric in that you can compare a standard flatbed tractor trailer being somewhere in the two to $3 a mile cost for transportation. So it's a it's not a huge cost to be able to ship one of those cross country, but if you're doing volumetric that cost can go up to upwards of, like $18 a mile. So you're talking about a factor of like between six and eight times. So we saw a lot of modular companies come out of the gates and say, All right, we need to have a plant every four or 500 miles to be able to build our modular so they have this big capital investment, they build the factories, and then when they don't have the demand immediately, then they go under. So we didn't want to do that. And we said, All right, to get through this impediment, let's try to get it on a standard flatbed and take advantage of the smallest shipping expense.
Jordan Rogove 03:04
So our solution to that was to make what we would call a hybrid system, where pieces of it are volumetric, but none of them exceeds that eight and a half foot width. As Wayne mentioned, the bathroom is probably the largest module, and that has kind of the brains of the operation, the MEP, all the point of entries for utilities, all of that stuff. And then the rest can be flat packed, the roof, panels, the floors. And so we kind of engineered this with our manufacturing partners and the and our partners, in particular Joe Wheeler from Virginia Tech that we could fit this on onto one truck and build it in four hours. And that's like a standard setting connectivity period for a volumetric too. So we saw no negatives when it came to the ability to deploy and install and be moving ready, frankly, so we pursued that way, and so kind of we're in the middle, and then there's a lot of guys that will just do like a panelized system, where every part is flat packed, but then that often requires that the interior finishes be done by kind of local staff. So our idea for that system was that it could be completely finished interiors, exteriors and everything and a day or less. So that that's kind of what steered that.
Atif Z. Qadir 04:31
And for folks that are interested in more details, or the differences that Jordan just described, we're gonna include in the show notes an article on modular construction from thesis driven that I wrote last year. So feel free to take a look and take advantage of the learning that's there. So we talked earlier about the risks for housing that's manufactured to look institutional, and you talked about the design choices that you made in terms of the daylight, the height and the clear space. Are there any like material choices that you wanted to mention? Because, for example, formaldehyde was an issue with the more standard, prototypical versions of this type of construction, and those tend to have relatively short or that's not great for people. And also linoleum and other materials have shorter lifespans. What were some of those finished choices that you were using within this space that helped to make it transition to permanent housing much more clearly?
Wayne Norbeck 05:30
Yeah, along those lines, to sort of zoom out a bit, the sort of institutional nature of a lot of the disaster relief, you know, it's important when you think of designing a home, like a custom home, for example, you know you're going to spend sort of six to 12 months in a design process. And in these disaster relief situations, the cards are kind of stacked against you, because you have almost no time at all. You have to kind of immediately be able to deploy. And with the way that housing is shipped out, things like a peaked roof, which we often identify with the sort of house as a kind of archetype is difficult or almost seems superfluous in that kind of manufacturing process and shipping and stacking of units and and that sort of thing. And so from a sort of building form point of view and overall design, because we were thinking about it differently, with this kind of click approach, and being able to stack things on the on the truck, we were able to kind of hold on to a lot of great design moves, like the peak roof, also like the front porch, like a sense of community and so forth.
Wayne Norbeck 06:36
And then material wise, we had to think through materials in terms of how that would work with that system. So in particular, on the on the interior, you know, we're using sort of a wooden plywood, a birch plywood or a maple plywood that is pre finished. So when the different components come together, there's just a very simple seam between the materials, but there's no sort of taping and painting and finishing like you would have in a normal house, the drywall doesn't transport well over several 100 miles. So just thinking about how we can make the whole assembly go faster, and that whole process actually led us to that sort of approach. And then the great sort of result of that is it has this sort of biophilic feel to the house. It's like you're more in touch with kind of natural materials. But then also the volume of the house that's able to be created, and then the amount of natural light, sort of at the end gables, and also with the size and placement of windows through the design process became critically important. And then the sort of other materials that that we use for the kitchen and tile and so forth, that that we're about, sort of controlling costs, but really the overall, that kind of wooden box feel is really one of the great effects of the of the design.
Jordan Rogove 07:56
Yeah, I would add that one of the metrics that's used for a lot of people, government entities, included, is this metric of square footage, right? Like, what does it cost per square foot? And so if you think about that in terms of plan, you're constricting kind of the horizontal plane. And so we saw an opportunity to enhance the quality on the vertical plane, right, like by providing that high ceiling. And, man, if, like, every meeting that we had with manufacturing partners and the contractors involved, the first thing they tried to do is to just chop that off and do a flat roof. And we're just, we had to fight. We had to fight so hard to keep that it just explained and that, you know, there is tremendous value if you go vertically, your square foot number is lower. We can, we can have an ergonomically hyper efficient, if not somewhat modest, floor plan, but make it feel like a castle by increasing that ceiling. By Yes, pay for two more windows. Like, we'll save the money somewhere else, like the additional we have more windows in our unit to bring in more natural light, to reflect off of these wood surfaces Wayne talked about, and to have ceiling fans, because you have enough ceiling height and move air through the place.
Jordan Rogove 09:21
All of these things like, have immeasurable benefits to the experience of being in the place. And those benefits have, you know, their own benefits to the, you know, the well being of the people living in those spaces. So these are long standing concepts that are understood by architects, but like very frequently dismissed by manufacturers and contractors, you know, and so the defense of of those aspects, whereas was one of the biggest kind of battles we had to fight through the process. And then the day that we turn it over to FEMA, and everyone from FEMA is saying. This is the single nicest project we've ever delivered. And then they say, why? Oh, the high ceilings, the windows. And then it's like, huh, we told you so. Tell our partners. So, yeah. I mean, in looking at the quality of some of the other modular responses that have been delivered to Lahaina and across Maui, there are whole like, elevations of the buildings that have no windows on them, or one window on on each side. And it's like, oh my god, we actually had families. When families were moving into our houses. Come over and say, Hey, can we switch? Can we move into one of your houses? It's like, I'm not part of FEMA, but you could ask them, yeah.
Atif Z. Qadir 10:46
Given how much interest there was in these units, and how different they were than what was there before, and the intent for this to become permanent housing, okay, so talk to me about entitlements, approvals, inspections, where whose jurisdiction was this and where was this happening?
Jordan Rogove 11:05
Man, that is a great question. One of the things that was laid bare throughout this experience is that every one of these deployments for FEMA is totally different based upon the preferences of the state. It's essentially a negotiation between FEMA and the state of Hawaii. The process basically gets invented for the specific project. And the way it went was that Maui County, their building department, has a process called the registration process, so we had to go through kind of their long standing registration review, which was about like a six to eight week period where we register our design as a, you know, as a unit, and then that could be replicated for the other 108 houses or so. And so at that point, then the project then falls under the auspices of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. And so they were doing the reviews and inspections, and they were a daily presence coming in and looking at everything we did and asking us to provide documentations on certain things, stamp drawings and other things and and then they did kind of a final inspection, and then FEMA does their own inspection.
Jordan Rogove 12:31
And so there was an occupancy review, like the move in day that would happen, and they would give a list they'd walk with us, and we would actually compile the list. And our prime contractor, dynamic really ran the show with that, that there's a list of things that they'd like us to see, or they would like to see us take care of. And you know, I was just talking to somebody about this process recently, and our team was so strong between dynamic and the local contractor, a group called alpha, who's actually doing a lot of the remedial work to post fire remediation for all of Lahaina that it was a little bit like a NASCAR or Formula One pit stop that, the minute we got that list, it was like the guys with the little air drills and stuff like, popped up and, like started, you know, taking care and, and, I mean, we could that team could bang out that list in an hour or two hours, whatever, with the goal of of getting the kind of final approval from FEMA, so that we could hand the keys to the or FEMA could hand the keys to the families and get them In that very day. So yeah, so the process was very different than it normally happens in Maui and very different than normally happens on a typical FEMA project, but it's a negotiation between state and federal governments essentially.
Atif Z. Qadir 13:54
That sounds really complex, and I think that's the crux of when you zoom out from this project to the bigger picture, what does this mean as a potential larger term solution for housing? Okay, so we've learned that modular can mean many different things. It can be emergency shelters, it can be permanent affordable housing, or it could be market rate solutions for tiny houses, Granny houses, or market rate prefab in jet prefab in general. So which of these do you think is the highest upside or highest impact? Where do you think modular has the biggest ability to shine?
Jordan Rogove 14:37
So right now, you know, I think we talked a little bit earlier about how DXA got started and Haiti project led us to projects in Africa, which has led us to kind of projects all over the world that have a focus on the kind of power of design to fix problems. A lot of them were issues with health. Like eradicating malaria through small architectural interventions in Namibia, and that part of the Liv-Connected idea and gestation was that, hey, man, there's domestic problems too. Like, we don't need to be flying over to all these other countries to solve problems. There's plenty here, and that one of the biggest ones is housing affordability that our current society makes it impossible for about 75% of the population to be able to buy a house that is like, messed up, that's crazy. So I think modular, like the biggest opportunity disaster relief. It's a perfect solution, but that still affects a tiny percentage of the population totally, and it should be used that way, but to rip into that 75% of people that get turned away when they apply for a mortgage and be able to provide housing that can have a dramatic impact in the kind of tools available to us to make housing affordable.
Jordan Rogove 16:05
And so just like we were explaining the impediments to the success of modular, previously one of the biggest hurdles to kind of unlock that potential of modular, to take on affordable housing, is trying to rethink this Byzantine system of building codes across the country, where there's over 2000 of them are partners at fading West, the manufacturer that handled the lion's share of the unit sent to Maui, have shared their dismay at there Being 340 building codes in the state of Colorado alone. So a well intentioned they're all derivative of the ICC building code. But every municipality has made these like little changes that are of like, kind of like, dubious value, got to say, having analyzed a lot of them. But what the unintended consequences of that is that to deploy modular to any of those places then requires a customization and an inability to build something in advance of approval from that municipality. So if you could standardize code in some way, we have friends at the modular building institute that have suggested a regional Building Code, which makes a ton of sense, right? Like one climate, one climate, one climate, try to split into as few building codes as possible. Then, in essence, you could build an inventory of these units and be able to deploy them quickly so that like a house building, house buying experience could be a matter of a few weeks instead of a few years.
Jordan Rogove 17:45
But the real, real benefit, and this is a huge one, is that without all of that nonsense of every house being an individual project, and it's a product that can get delivered, you can mass produce these things, negotiate material costs, negotiate manufacturing prices, and by our calculation, save 30% let's 30 cents on every dollar spent towards housing. Just the driver of that are different codes, again, of like, very questionable value is certainly not enhancing life and safety. And if you can standardize that and save every American 30 cents on $1 towards housing, that 75% might become 30% and would getting Architects like us involved like get over that stigma of, like, modular being associated with manufactured, which is, you know, the double wide trailers and and that, that that's a negative. And then then you can kind of push back on some of the zoning in places that prevent that from happening, because that was from the 70s and 80s. It's vestigial. And now you have a higher quality product, and you're providing affordable housing. So sorry, very long winded answer, but there's a lot to it right to get us there, but I think the tackling affordability is like, just ripe for modular to be the kind of primary tool to fight that
Atif Z. Qadir 19:22
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Wayne Norbeck 20:20
There's also some other interesting permutations as well, like coming out of the pandemic, and first we had material shortages, and then people kind of living more remotely, and working remotely and so forth. We're finding that there's a lot of locations where people want to move now that don't have access to contractors, and it's very difficult, lengthy process. You might get a two year waiting list, and the prices are kind of whatever they are, because the contractors can charge that. And so we've had a number of projects now that are kind of related to this theme where you're tackling this issue of people aren't entering the trades as much, and especially in these remote locations, it's difficult to get somebody there, so that it helps speed that up and reduce costs in those places as well.
Atif Z. Qadir 21:06
I want to ask you a bit more about all of this is in response to structural issues, financially, legally, procedurally, with getting a housing built. What are some of the things that you would change in terms of, specifically, say, building and zoning codes that would make the process of deploying the work that you're doing faster and easier.
Jordan Rogove 21:30
Yeah, I think it's what I just spoke about, where identifying some sort of vehicle to have an approval in place. It could be the regional concept that the MBI, the modular building Institute, has put out there. But it could also be that states do exactly what the state of Texas is doing in California, to some extent that you have a pre approved solution, that even if you haven't built the inventory and are holding it on site for deployment, like the day after disaster, you could identify bid and have the logistics worked out in advance, so that when something does happen, You can start manufacturing the next day. In the case of Lahaina, it took a full year for that RFP, or, I'm sorry, nine, nine months for the paperwork, the legal structure, the negotiation between state and federal government, the process, all of those things to get designed to even reach out to people that could provide it like us, right?
Jordan Rogove 22:44
If you do that work in advance and you cut that nine months out, that's nine months less that families are sitting in hotels or have to leave Hawaii and move to Las Vegas, which a lot of the Lahaina survivors did. To me, that's a tragedy, because the community's gone. Lot of people have given up because of the time it takes and so to keep the vitality of of a place and the community that's developed organically through decades, if not centuries, if faster response is called for. And so you know, to your point, like, how do we do it faster? Well, be prepared, like, just whether it's the regional stuff, so you can get approvals faster and there's already inventory built, or that states know who's building what and give the call as soon as they need it. And eliminate the kind of political, administrative side of things at that time.
Atif Z. Qadir 23:45
I feel like that approach is one that requires a type of forward thinking and proactive approach, which generally large institutions are not built to be able to act that way. But if you think about it, okay, so perhaps this the fire in behind it was unusual and expected because it was down power lines, so that that wasn't really a known thing, but I would imagine the list of the expectations are quite long, which would be California fires and earthquakes, Texas floods, New Jersey floods, Florida, hurricanes, Georgia, South Carolina Hurricanes. So like it's the expectations that you know what will happen. It's just a matter of when, and being able to prepare in advance, sounds like it would take some political heroism, but also some amount of the ability to allocate budgets for things that aren't meant to be used that year, which is also a lot unusual.
Jordan Rogove 24:46
Yeah, 100% I would add that for Lahaina, we had to worry about volcanoes too. So there's a, there's like, a big seismic consideration. There was, you know, hurricane, or, I guess, called typhoons in the Pacific, and then fires, obviously. So it's like there was no horror that wasn't considered in the in the design for the house that you know, the probably the most expedient opportunity that wouldn't require every state to be either this prepared or every state to work in concert to define these regional zones. I mean, we identified the manufactured housing bills that Housing and Urban Development enacted in the mid 1970s because that manufactured housing like has a standard national building code that's recognized by a majority of the states and would supersede local code. That's the IDC. Yeah, it's a form of it. It's tied into the bills that HUD adopted in 1974 but that was really specific to the concept of manufactured housing, which was the double wide trailers. So HUD did this thing called Operation Breakthrough, where they wanted to provide 300 housing, or 300,000 housing units in the early 1970s mid 1970s and they did so successfully by having that code supersede, like they gave basically federal authority to work with states to establish something that that could serve in lieu of of the individual state codes. And so it was a success, so much so that it was never used again.
Jordan Rogove 26:41
So we're like, what? This makes no sense. And so we have actually been lobbying Congress, and we've been on Capitol Hill half a dozen times or so, meeting with over 50 congressional offices on the Senate and House side, and they are all in. Man, it is a bipartisan it's like one of the few bipartisan issues that you know both sides can agree to, which is like astonishing, but the biggest champion has been Tim Scott's office with his roads Act, or the roads bill, which, like, tries to propagate affordable housing in terms of expanding that HUD coverage for manufactured housing into into modular and so it's been a Rocky Run politically, but those bills are drafted. They've gone through markups, and they could hit the Senate floor probably first, and then the house. And if you have something like that, then us modular people like somebody calls us, like we don't have to go to that local building department. We don't have to wait six weeks, six months a year, whatever, for their reviews. We know the building code, we just need to do a zoning review. And so that's, you know, a few weeks or a couple months, and in most cases, and so that is a very valuable tool to try to do that in the absence of like that, the forward thinking that you kind of identified, and the likelihood that each state is going to be that prepared or that willing to work with other states and do all this stuff in advance of disaster.
Atif Z. Qadir 28:16
That sounds like a tall order. So, yeah, easy stuff.
Jordan Rogove 28:20
Yeah. No problem, no problem.
Atif Z. Qadir 28:23
I had a chance to meet with Congresswoman Elon Omar this past weekend. She was in Jersey City. She had put together a housing for All Act in, I think it was 2022, and it didn't, didn't go anywhere at that point. But I would imagine that if there is a change of the majority party in the House, that what you talked about in terms of Tim Scott's bipartisan bill in the Senate could find a partner or a corollary in the house that maybe takes on pieces of what Elon's had, plus what Tim Scott's Act has put forward. So I very much look forward to that. So we talked about the really amazing work that you're doing. Talk to me about the thing that you want more of. So folks that are in the audience that are listening, either say developers that are interested in this type of work for their own projects, either affordable or market rate, any state or federal agency official that are listening. Who do you want to talk to more in relation to the work that you're doing?
Wayne Norbeck 29:25
Yeah, you know, the challenge was with FEMA at the moment, is that you know their their work, is that they're in a challenging time, essentially.
Atif Z. Qadir 29:34
Oh, really, why? I didn't know.
Wayne Norbeck 29:38
So the, I mean, the states are becoming more critically important, like California, North Carolina, Texas and so forth. So state officials, there's a number of nonprofit initiatives that are also happening within those states, like we're participating in a show with UCLA called City Lab. It's coming up soon. And
Atif Z. Qadir 30:00
is that Bloomberg initiative, City Lab, or what? What is City Lab, and how can people learn about it?
Jordan Rogove 30:06
City Lab is like a inequality focused housing think tank at UCLA. It might be Bloomberg. I'm not sure of the origins of the program, but the people working there are really, really thoughtful, and they're committed to showing what they through their research have deemed to be the most kind of appropriate and highest quality alternative housing responses for families, in particular, living in Altadena. So as Wayne mentioned, we're going to be part of a campus of, I think of about seven housing solutions with different price points, different square footage, different immediate availability. And to educate them on these possibilities, and probably help, in some capacity, navigate a pretty tumultuous insurance coverage, you know, strategy, you know, I think that the way in insurers are are responding is it's like the the only way you get insurance money is if you build, you know, a replica of what was lost to the fire.
Jordan Rogove 31:16
So that doesn't open up a lot of opportunity for these alternative options. But the way that we think about it is that the alternative of options, in concert with LA's recent advocacy for what are called accessory dwelling units, that you could essentially take these modular concepts, drop them on the site, rebuild With your insurer, while living on your site, then basically use the Liv-Connected unit, whether a via or Connexus or one of our products, as a income generator to basically either pay back purchase the unit long term, or we can come and buy it back. There's just different ways of thinking outside of the box, in the kind of paradigm of how insurers are willing to cover your property. So we definitely want to talk to people, you know, in the LA and California, you know, state government to just kind of, hey, there are many really innovative ways of handling this and giving a much more dignified response to these survivors, rather than the kind of FEMA paradigm that's there. It's like, hey, we'll put you up in a hotel and Van Nuys or someplace, you know, again, the community dissolves, right? Because you're not back there. Like, how? What is the fastest way to get them back there?
Jordan Rogove 32:42
So this, I think, concept that you drop some of these modular solutions that City Lab has invited and get that community back and alive. Otherwise, it's the rebuild effort. The number of contractors that are required to build over 10,000 lost structures is a decade proposition. And who wants to live on a block where you're the only person there for three years? You know what? I mean? It's like, get everybody back there, like, think outside the box, like, drop one of these houses there, rebuild, and then use that as a net positive, because a lot of a lot of the families at Alta Dean in particular aren't particularly wealthy, even though their house might be worth a few million dollars. They've lived there for three, four generations. So that isn't like liquid wealth. That's wealth that's been lost to the fire. So the kind of narrow definition of what an appropriate response is like, definitely doesn't align with California because of those property values. So it's time to get innovative in the response.
Atif Z. Qadir 33:50
Amazing. For folks that want to reach out to how can they do that? Best,
Wayne Norbeck 33:54
best thing is the website. So we have live connected.com which is L, I, V, connected.com and then on for our architecture studio, it's dx, a studio.com
Atif Z. Qadir 34:06
that is it for today. So thank you so much for being on the show and sharing with us your very thoughtful approach to a very important problem.
Jordan Rogove 34:17
Thank you, Atif. Great talking to you. Appreciate you having us on the on the show.
Wayne Norbeck 34:23
Yeah, pleasure to be here.
Atif Z. Qadir 34:27
I'm Atif Qadir, and thanks for joining me on American building. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe on your favorite listing app and leave a rating and review. America's housing crisis is one of our greatest challenges. But what are the real solutions? Hear from the developers and other industry experts driving meaningful change. Get our exclusive guide housing in America, eight ways we can solve our way out of a crisis at Americanbuildingpodcast.com.