To watch a video version of this podcast, click here: https://youtu.be/qaISUXRUJrQ
In this episode of the Structure Talk podcast, hosts Reuben Saltzman and Tessa Murry welcome Sam Rashkin, former Chief Architect for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office and creator of the Energy Star for Homes and Zero Energy Ready Home programs. Sam shares his journey into the housing industry, his passion for sustainable building, and his insights into why the U.S. housing market is fundamentally broken. The conversation dives deep into housing affordability, productivity challenges, regulatory barriers, and the transformative potential of advanced manufacturing in home construction. Sam also discusses the importance of purpose, resilience, and the need for a national roadmap to fix the housing crisis.
Here’s the link to Inspector Empire Builder: https://www.iebcoaching.com/events
Check Sam’s LinkedIn profile here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-rashkin-1684582/
To check his book on Amazon, click here: https://amzn.to/4nhU5nH
Takeaways
Sam Rashkin’s early passion for housing led him to a career in architecture and energy-efficient building.
The U.S. housing market is broken due to a growing disconnect between home prices and median income.
Productivity in the housing industry has declined over the past 150 years, with little innovation in construction methods.
Advanced manufacturing and factory-built homes, as seen in countries like Sweden, offer a model for cost-effective, high-quality housing.
Regulatory complexity and lack of a national building code hinder innovation and scalability in the U.S.
Labor shortages and aging workforce are exacerbating the housing crisis.
Sam advocates for a national attic upgrade program as a low-hanging fruit for energy efficiency improvements.
Emotional connection and simplicity in consumer-facing metrics (e.g., star ratings for home energy scores) can drive better decision-making.
Resilience and disaster preparedness must be prioritized in housing design, especially in high-risk areas.
A collaborative, stakeholder-driven roadmap is essential to transform the housing industry.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction and Sponsors
01:35 – Guest Introduction: Sam Rashkin
04:06 – Sam’s Journey into Housing and Architecture
06:45 – The Power of Purpose and Personal Stories
11:18 – Why the U.S. Housing Market is Broken
15:48 – Housing 2.0 and the Need for Disruption
17:42 – Lack of Innovation in Home Construction
20:43 – Customization vs. Standardization in Homebuilding
23:50 – Lessons from Sweden: Factory-Built Homes
33:05 – Labor Shortages and Immigration Challenges
37:29 – The Future of Home Inspection
41:18 – Creating a National Roadmap for Housing Reform
44:07 – The Role of Building Codes and Regulation
50:11 – Insurance Costs and Resilience
55:06 – Government Programs and Hypocrisy in Efficiency
56:29 – Shifting Perspectives and Asking the Right Questions
57:51 – The Need for Change and Sam’s Call to Action
01:05:21 – Wrapping Up and Where to Find Sam’s Book
TRANSCRIPTION
The following is an AI-generated transcription from an audio recording. Although the transcription is mostly accurate, it will contain some errors due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Reuben Saltzman: Welcome to my house. Welcome to the Structure Talk podcast, a production of Structure Tech Home Inspections. My name is Reuben Saltzman. I’m your host alongside building science geek, Tessa Murry. We help home inspectors up their game through education, and we help homeowners to be better stewards of their houses. We’ve been keeping it real on this podcast since 2019, and we are also the number one home inspection podcast in the world, according to my mom.
Reuben Saltzman (00:00.91)
Welcome back to the show Tessa great to see you today. I you know what we’re gonna we’re gonna skip all the little small talk We’re gonna go right into our show sponsors because we got a fantastic guest on today and I want to get as much of Sam’s time as possible. So shout out to our sponsors IEB inspector Empire builder the latest thing we’re talking about right now is the fall mastermind It’s coming up at the very beginning of November. We got November 4th and 5th is the fall mastermind. It’s happening in Palm Harbor, Florida, and it’s going to be a whole bunch of home inspection company owners getting together to mastermind and talk about what’s working, what’s not. And it’s going to be a planning session for 2026. It’s this is going to be your blueprint for what you’re going to be doing all throughout the of the year. So if you’re at all interested in it. In this check it out you go to the IEB website I will have a link to them in our show notes and I hope to see you there don’t know if I’m going here or not this year but these are always fantastic masterminds so love the folks at IEB Tessa I want to turn it over to you because you found our guest today and you got a whole series lined up that I just I cannot wait for and we were already, it feels like we’re already well into the show. could not stop chatting before I even hit record. Then I just had to stop us. I’m like, this is, this is gold. We need this recorded. So Tessa, please introduce our guest.
Tessa Murry (01:35.956)
Oh my gosh, I am so excited and honored that we have Sam Rashkin on our podcast today. So he’s had a huge impact on how homes are built and how they’re understood. I had the honor of meeting him for the first time at the EBA conference that was in St. Paul a few weeks ago, and it was just blown away. I haven’t had the opportunity to hear him in person before. Sam, I know your work. I’ve heard about you for years, but I was just blown away by your presentation. And I said, we have to have you on the podcast. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I’ll do my best to do a quick little intro for our audience here. So if you’ve ever heard of Energy Star for Homes or Zero Energy Ready Home Program, then you’ve seen Sam’s influence. He’s the former chief architect for the US Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office. And he spent decades helping transform high performance building from a niche idea into a new standard. And what’s great about Sam is that he doesn’t just talk theory, he connects the dots between building science, design, and real world experience of living in home. And we’re really excited to dig into his journey and hear his take on where the housing industry is headed next. So Sam, thank you for coming on the show. It’s great to have you on.
Reuben Saltzman (02:54.414) Welcome.
Sam (02:54.88) Great to be with you, Tessa and Ruben. So look forward to your conversation.
Tessa Murry (03:00.654) Yeah, well, thank you. Okay, so Sam, your work has had such a huge influence on how homes are designed and built in the US from Energy Star to Zero Energy Ready Homes. Although what’s the new name for it now? I think the name has recently changed, hasn’t it?
Sam (03:16.512) eventually you’re fishing home. It’s hard.
Tessa Murry (03:19.924) Okay, we’ll have to.
Sam (03:22.442) So if new energy ready home is energy efficient home as a descriptor, what does Energy Star own? Isn’t that also an energy efficient home? They lost any appropriate distinction between the two labels. But this was kind of the mandate from above. So this is what it is.
Tessa Murry (03:46.11) Okay, so there’s a name change happening in the industry, for listeners who may not know your full story, how did you get into this housing industry? How did you first become passionate about transforming the housing industry?
That’s a big question.
Sam (04:06.27) Yeah, to be, you know, I write about the kind of the getting a sense of self at a very early age, knowing I liked housing. I won’t bore you with the story, but I did know at a very early age, and just by example, making models at a cardboard of home designs for my friend’s parents as if they were clients and starting in I guess it was seventh grade and every grade thereafter in middle school and high school, I drafting and architecture because there was an elective. And so I knew, I knew very young that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t know, it wasn’t like I wanted to impact the entire industry. know your big, your big sense of it at that age is you just want to design homes. But it was in college and taking some courses that I kind of merged the idea of housing and energy renewables and the importance of all that. And then just kept pursuing a career that focused on all of that, those three combined. And it led me to moving from straight architecture to programs and then state programs and national programs. And somehow I got lucky. I got a call one night from a person at US EPA to come do the Energy Star program. So it was a pretty crazy journey.
Tessa Murry (05:32.974) Wow. Wow. Yeah. So, you know, I guess, yeah.
Sam (05:36.82) Quick thing, Quick thing. I think for everyone, finding a lane that you can be passionate about or really excited at least is so important. think maybe the most important role maybe of a parent is to help facilitate and expose children to lots of ideas and just… way things are outside of, in the bigger work environment and so forth. Because it’s such a lucky guess, I think, for so many. And I watched so many people struggle to find a lane. But once you find a lane, life gets a lot easier.
Tessa Murry (06:19.198) Thanks. You know, I was going to say, Sam, it’s clear that this is a passion of yours. And you shared a story during the conference, during your session, about, I think, you having this epiphany moment when your child or your grandchild asks you a specific question about why you do something.
Reuben Saltzman (06:25.698) Yeah, agreed.
Sam (06:26.549) Thank
Sam (06:45.576) Yeah, I think I mentioned that I had a condition that I always had to work on managing. Anytime I take a walk around my neighborhood or any place we visit, if I see non-biodegradable garbage on the ground, I have to pick it up and carry it to a trash can or whatever. So yeah, we were at a beach. And I should mention this really annoys my wife.
Tessa Murry (06:49.748) you
Sam (07:14.784) So we’re on the beach on vacation. I saw some really annoying stuff in the sand. So I knelt down to pretend to kind of fix my sandals and let my wife and kids get ahead. And then when they were ahead, I picked up some glass or garbage or plastic, whatever it was. And my daughter turns around and sees me and says, what are you doing? And I basically just said nothing.
Reuben Saltzman (07:34.091) Hahaha
Sam (07:41.536) And she said, no, what are you doing? I said, OK, look, I’m picking up some garbage, but don’t tell mom. She’ll be really annoyed. She knows I have this condition and I haven’t figured out how to manage it. And she says, well, why do you do it? I said, because I just pick it up. She says, no.
Tessa Murry (07:46.228) you
Sam (07:56.648) Why do you do it? And you have to recognize she’s a, like a, she studied counseling and guidance. She works at a university as an advisor for students. She was not going to let it go. And when I realized that I was lost and that she needed an answer, I had to figure one out. And I just blurted out.
Tessa Murry (08:06.792) you
Sam (08:15.264) I guess I do this because I think I realize I have a power to leave a place better because I’m here. I just blurted that out and it just shocked me because I started thinking that everything I’ve done in my life is, you know, designing a house, that piece of property would be better because you were there and you can figure that hopefully in a really thoughtful, great way, working on the environment, climate issues, making…making housing as an entire industry better. Everything is about trying to make some place, make something better just cause you’re there. Purpose, right? Now, if you look at the blue zones where people look to a hundred, they’re happy, they’re healthy. Probably purpose may be the, maybe one of the most single biggest of the four factors that I think are attributed to such long, healthy lives. So I realized I had purpose.
Tessa Murry (08:52.635)
Mm-hmm.
Tessa Murry (09:09.822) Thank you.
Sam (09:10.656) That was the epiphany, because I didn’t think about it until my daughter just would not let it go. She wanted a real answer, not, I’m just picking up garbage. And so that was the epiphany moment you mentioned I referenced, because I like speaking to that, not because it’s special. It’s just that isn’t it important all of us understand that purpose that we feel?
Tessa Murry (09:16.404) now.
Reuben Saltzman (09:33.55) I didn’t know we were going to go down this path with Sam, but I love this. Absolutely love it. And I got to ask you real quickly, Sam, have you read the book Drive by Daniel Pink?
Sam (09:38.75) Yeah.
Sam (09:47.006) No, I read his other book. He’s written so many books. I’ve read other ones, not that one.
Reuben Saltzman (09:51.884) Yeah. Delightful author, but one of my favorite books of all time is is drive by Daniel Pink. And I mean, the the 10 second version of this, it’s about what motivates us and it’s not money. There’s three things. Autonomy, being able to work on your own mastery, being really good at something. And then the third one, it’s what you’re talking about right now. Purpose, purpose. Those are the three things, autonomy, mastery and purpose. That’s what drives.
Tessa Murry (10:14.484) Passion, passion and purpose, yeah.
Sam (10:19.296) where the other another book he wrote to sell as human was my Bible for when I got when I was working in an energy store, how to figure out how to sell our program. So he’s a great author on many fronts, but that’s great. Those three. Those are three great ones, right?
Reuben Saltzman (10:23.073) Yes.
Reuben Saltzman (10:35.406) Yeah, love it. Love it. All right. I know we’re not here to talk about, you know, life philosophy and what drives us, but had to had to touch on that.
Tessa Murry (10:37.672) I knew you guys would fall in love.
Tessa Murry (10:45.126) Yeah.
Sam (10:45.364) What’s all Hartford? She asked that question.
Tessa Murry (10:48.532) Yeah. Well, you know, it’s clear, know, Sam, you’re obviously you’ve you’ve made a huge impact in this industry and it, you know, it’s driven from somewhere. You clearly care about it. And, you know, I think your presentation was full of lots of very insightful information. And one of the things I kind of to dive into, you know, we’ve got these goals of where we want the housing industry to go and where it needs to go. Things in the past.
Sam (10:55.968) you
Tessa Murry (11:18.13) that we’ve done in building history have not been working out for us. you you said before that the housing in the US is, quote, broken. And for those who may not be familiar with what you mean by that, how would you define what’s actually broken and what’s at the root of those problems?
Sam (11:39.954) Okay, I guess. It really got broken in last 20 years, about 20 years ago. Probably 70 or 80 of 100 biggest metro areas. The median price to median income ratio was about three. Now it’s a 5.3 for about 70 or 80 of the biggest metro areas, or no, on average for the entire country. median price and median income is 5.3. And for like 20 or 30 or 40, the biggest, we’re moving towards 10, 11, 12. We have a disconnect between the price of the product and the purchasing power of the consumer, their median household income. It is so broken that I consider the industry a house of cards. When a consumer can’t afford the product, something gives. Usually it’s called a correction. The reason this is so troublesome to me is because I see how much pain everyone’s in. And when I look at all the polarization in the country and I look at how people vote and what they do, I think there’s a massive amount of people in real pain. Again, we can mention the statistics that tell us people are house poor. Two thirds are living paycheck to paycheck. They aren’t saving anything on a monthly basis. Like 40 % of households cannot even take on a $400 expense without…
Tessa Murry (12:58.898)
Mm-hmm.
Reuben Saltzman (13:13.39) Two thirds of two thirds of homeowners you’re saying. Okay, wow. Okay.
Sam (13:18.452) Households, Yeah. And then, you you look at the credit debt, loan, car delinquency rates, the foreclosure rates. And then what’s happened is that with this price income disconnect, we have a huge segment of the demographic that has been devastated. Everyone who’s like
Tessa Murry (13:22.494) Yeah.
Sam (13:48.778) Well, millennials are right the fringe of it, but everyone younger than a millennial is hammered. They came into a market where the incomes have been almost flat, but housing has gone up like 3X. So what are they supposed to do? And it’s not even that good a story. It’s worse because not only has the price of housing gone up 3X, property taxes, home insurance premiums have gone up exponentially, the cost of energy.
Tessa Murry (14:00.22) Mm-hmm.
Sam (14:17.674) that everything, every cost of living in that house, internet, all the fees that come with the house, they don’t see a path. They don’t see even a way for them to have anywhere near the access to the American dream that everyone older than them had an easier access to. So you create a lot of massive people who are underserved, angry, frustrated.
Tessa Murry (14:38.736)
Mm-hmm.
Sam (14:45.672) And then we come to them and say, you got to care about carbon. You got to care about humans are creating temperature change. you’re right about all that from a lot of our viewpoints, but we’re wrong imposing a worldview to people who are underserved. And then we create this polarization. We’re not even listening to just this gross majority of
Tessa Murry (14:58.013)
Yeah.
Sam (15:13.652) Consumers, homeowners, whatever we want to call them, who are underserved. And so everything’s messed up, including housing. But this is just a huge problem. When you have a price income disconnect, just have no way but to get… A correction’s coming. And I’ll tell you, the way we build housing doesn’t work to serve that correction.
Tessa Murry (15:21.844) I’m
Tessa Murry (15:36.756) Tell us more about that. I think you mentioned that in your book, Retooling the US Housing Industry, about just the fragmented systems and short-term thinking. But can you kind of expand on that a little bit?
Sam (15:48.498) Yeah, well, I should mention that the book’s title is Housing 2.0, A Disruption Survival Guide, because I do see massive disruption has to ensue when things are this broken. can’t… The definition of insanity we all know is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. So there are a number of factors. I think…
Tessa Murry (15:53.842) Okay. Your second book,
Tessa Murry (16:11.476) Yeah.
Sam (16:17.088) Tessa, you went to a workshop, did it, Eva, that’s how you and I met and I got so lucky to spend all this time with you. so all I spent really, that entire workshop discussing over four hours, were six main pillars of how we can extract substantial, really substantial cost savings and added value into housing. Race is anything that doesn’t add value in the eyes of the consumer, or that could be increasing value at zero or negative cost. And so the fact that we’re not doing that and optimizing that has to stop. And one of the big factors, one of the six pillars that I talk about is productivity. Housing is the only industry in the entire country. that has negative productivity growth. Everyone else has about almost two times more productivity. If you look at a lot of the tech industries, they have like seven or eight times more productivity. But housing’s negative productivity. I show the picture of the home under construction, 1877 Omaha, Nebraska, side by side with a home built today. And I asked the audience, were there, name the innovation, 150 years, tell me what we’ve got in 150 years. And it’s shocking. It’s absolutely shocking how little innovation there is. And we think that we can keep.
Tessa Murry (17:42.196) Yeah, picture just, yeah, you picture a stick frame house with a guy hanging off one of the rafters and you know, the old picture and then you fast forward and it’s the exact same scene, you know, and there’s a littered job site with debris and it’s just a mess. We’re doing it the same way 150 years later.
Sam (17:59.676) Way too much wood, nothing’s more efficient. The only things we can point to maybe are things that are not having made product better, just a little bit cheaper or attempt to make it cheaper. Engineered lumber instead of dimensional lumber, we better connectors and power tools. Western platform framing instead of balloon framing. But that’s it. I run out of innovation after that. That’s for the enclosure.
Tessa Murry (18:14.984)
Yep.
Tessa Murry (18:22.58)
I’m
Sam (18:26.45) Admittedly, a heat pump today is better than a coal furnace, whatever we’re using. But the basic house is embarrassingly not innovative in terms of what we’ve done. And the way we build, the way we sell, every builder I talk to, I have a debate. I say, you’d customize too much. And they say, no, all my buyers want customization. But they need to read the book, The Paradox.
Tessa Murry (18:32.244) sure.
Sam (18:55.538) of choice. And what happens is people get overwhelmed with choice, and they get less satisfied, they make bad decisions. And I can’t even convince, even with all the scientific research, you guys are crazy. You’re adding all the cost for customization, and you’re getting a worse outcome. So all these debates and discussions need to really addressed more seriously, because I think we are approaching. crisis, but the productivity one means we have to rethink how we, the whole concept of how we build homes and assemble homes versus construct homes, really think of it as a product. And we’re just not doing that.
Tessa Murry (19:41.076) You know, and I just wanted to expand on that a little bit because you gave an example of like the car industry where, you know, back in 1920, first cars that came out, they were built in, you know, piece by piece. Yeah. And then Ford came along and created the assembly line and made it more accessible. then here fast forward to, you know, 2025, we’ve got engineers that have these, you know, use software programs that design everything down to the tiniest minutia.
Tessa Murry (20:10.276) to make sure everything is going to work properly together and it’s going to be safe, it’s going to be efficient and cars have gotten smaller and more efficient, but more space inside, more comfortable. All of these things are improving. We can build them quicker, faster, larger scale. You know the product you’re going to get on the back end. And what about our houses? We have not done that with our houses at all. Although you did mention some countries that are doing that successfully and why haven’t we moved to that yet? Ruben really quick. Yeah, you’ve got your hand up. What are you thinking?
Reuben Saltzman (20:43.374) No, it’s not it’s not really quick. It’s just I mean, I’m dying to ask this. Okay This is what we should be doing You’re telling me that builders love to do things more custom and their clients demand custom homes Why haven’t we had a big builder start doing it and have success with it?
Sam (21:03.616) And that’s the right question, Ruben, right? That’s the right question. And the reason is the system hasn’t to date demanded it. You you make about three to five times your investment in a piece of land from when you purchase it to when you sell it as a lot ready to build. That’s a huge margin. The margin on a home itself is only about 15 to 20 percent. But it’s 300 to 500 percent on the land. The rural land.
Tessa Murry (21:03.665)
Yes.
Sam (21:33.024) ready to build. So the priority is all about getting land and getting a house on it. It’s just a way to enable the sale of the land so you can build another house. And we’re not focused on the product, the house. We’re focused on just selling it. And a new house to date has had enough emotion if you just put a lot of cosmetics on it. You put on a really nice kitchen or you put on whatever new trend there is for architectural features or for master suites. There’s things we can do to make it really appealing to consumers. And up to about 20 years ago, we are still within the affordability bandwidth of a buyer and everything worked. Builders could build homes, they’d sell them. But now, I think everything’s so broken. We have the imperative. that we have to rethink, we have to think differently. We have to think of it as a product, think about excessive choice, think about productivity being improved. We have to think about getting rid of all the waste at every part of how we build a home. There’s waste in the land, there’s waste in the space, there’s waste in the energy, there’s waste in almost every facet of how we are thinking about housing today.
Tessa Murry (22:38.868)
Thank you.
Sam (22:53.92) We don’t have integrated systems. We have way too much complexity. We go through all these pillars in the workshop. And all of them cost, cost, cost, cost, cost, cost. And if we approach the product and engineer it as Tessa just said, more thinking like this is a car product, and we’re to make a product that’s completely optimized, you would kill in the marketplace. you’d be offering such a better user experience at such a better price with such better durability, better resilience. Everything about the home would be better. And one of the principles for me about how do you get change that I think is very powerful came from a book Chip and Dan Heath wrote called Switch. It’s about you build on what’s working. And what’s working today
Tessa Murry (23:21.502)
Thank
Sam (23:50.784) You just look across the ocean and go all the way to Sweden, 85 % of the homes are built in a factory. Why are 85 % of the homes built in a factory in Sweden? Because a consumer would never accept all the compromise and lower quality and poorer design they’d have to with a custom designed home than the factory home. Now, how do they get there is because they do things that we don’t do here. So why don’t we just build in what they’re doing? They do three things, three things that lead to all that. One, they design for manufacture. They design for manufacture. They don’t say, I’m going to develop a plan and go to a factory and say, here, build me this home. The plant itself says, here are all these parameters for how our robotics or.
Tessa Murry (24:30.9)
Drum roll please. Yeah, sorry.
Reuben Saltzman (24:42.19)
Sure.
Sam (24:48.198) CNC machines and our production system and our production line works. Let’s design a home for this so that we can make it the most cost effective home. And everything in the design process, you don’t really have to sacrifice anything, but you need to be completely building the product, thinking about how it’s made in the plant. You never build a car where you, Ruben, went to a car dealership and said, I like a car that looks like this, go build it for me. That would be insanity, but that’s what we do. today with advanced manufacturing. We bring a design and say, go build it. So design for manufacturing is number one. The other thing that Swedes do is they design for assembly. Most offsite plants in the US build panels or boxes or hybrids, whatever they do. And they say, here builder, you take this and go figure it out. That doesn’t work. The Swedes say, you buy the house from them. They’ve designed it so that it’s optimized for how it how it gets built on site, on a foundation, assembled in the field. The system they use is they have this scaffolding system that’s almost like what the residing contractors use. You ever see a residing job? They set up these scaffolds around the whole house because you can work the whole house ergonomically, faster, better, cheaper. That’s what they do. They set up the scaffolding systems, the panels drop, everything’s set, all the seams are done. So number two, they design for assembly, which is critical. But the third thing they do is not in their control, but a factor in the regulatory world they work on. They build to one national code. So the plant’s everywhere. Don’t have to worry about hundreds of different codes and requirements. Can you imagine if an automobile manufacturer had to comply with one set of requirements, safety and construction for cars in California and Nevada and Florida and New York. If everyone had different requirements, you couldn’t make a car in a plant and go nationally. And so it’s a regulation policy that is really, really hindering the ability of offsite and advanced manufacturing to make a national product.
Reuben Saltzman (26:48.717) Yeah.
Tessa Murry (26:49.012) Mm-hmm.
Sam (27:02.624) And that’s got to stop. We are imposing way too much cost at a regulatory level. So I’ll tell you, those three factors, to me, are the three biggest factors. A lot of the research in the country, at DOE and others, they’re focusing on the technology. I don’t care about the technology. Manufacturers will figure that out faster, better, cheaper than the government will.
Reuben Saltzman (27:02.648) Sure.
Sam (27:24.436 But if you give them the right conditions and you help them understand, again, DFM is designed for manufacturing, DFA is designed for assembly, and give them a national code. Now, in the world of affordable housing, there’s manufactured housing. HUD code housing, they have a national code, but they can’t grow because the local jurisdictions restrict them because they make such a cheap product.
Tessa Murry (27:42.889)
Thank
Sam (27:52.832) that’s inferior to site-built, the local jurisdictions don’t want the homes in their markets because they don’t think they protect maybe the homebuyer from prevailing disaster risks or they will undermine the value of the communities and reduce the tax base, whatever reasons they may have. I’m guessing that’s what they are. I’m pretty sure that’s what they are. So that industry, even though they have a national code, is constrained because they’ve chosen to build a product that is so much below site-built construction, the local jurisdictions zone it out, and you can’t build it. So they’re limited to these kind of rural locations. There are a couple of pockets where they can build, but it’s very constrained. So you see, everywhere you turn, it’s…You got to fix these three pieces if you want to get to advanced manufacturing. When you do and you look at what you can buy in Sweden for $140 a square foot retail, what you can buy for 180 or 200, it blows away the quality, design, every element, performance, everything blows away what you buy here in the US.
Reuben Saltzman (29:06.124) Hmm. Wow.
Tessa Murry (29:06.964) Yeah, you know, I think you were mentioning like you think about IKEA and the furniture that they provide. It’s like they have engineered down to the very last detail is like, here’s all the pieces, here’s all the parts you need to put it together. Boom, and then they’ve got all these, you know, it’s fascinating. And they’ve done the same thing with housing. so and people are like you’re saying people are happy they don’t want a custom built house, because there’s been all this thought and engineering that’s gone into optimizing. these factory-built manufactured homes that they go in and they’ve got all these different variations and options to choose from. They’re still getting a design that meets their needs, but it is such a better performing house than what we struggle to build for millions of dollars here in the United States.
Sam (29:54.056) It’s so simple. Build on what’s working.
Tessa Murry (29:59.476) Why can’t we just skip ahead and get there, Sam?
Sam (30:03.48) Normally, we figure we got to solve all the problems, analyze all the pain points. It’s there. The example is right there. You don’t have to make this any harder on yourself. I get so frustrated with government feeling they have to do these massive analyses to come up with new programs and figure out then the pain points again. We know how, we know what to do. The example is just sitting right there. And even Japan is about 20 plus percent. advanced manufacturing in Europe and Germany. They’re all in their 20s and moving to 30%. So they’re all getting there too.
Tessa Murry (30:43.604) So the rest of the world is moving that direction. Manufactured housing, yeah. The rest of world is moving there and we’re going at a snail’s pace.
Reuben Saltzman (30:43.768) for their housing. Okay. Okay.
What percentage of ours is manufactured? And I mean, 3%, okay. And those are.
Sam (30:54.432) And it’s been 3 % for decades.
Reuben Saltzman (30:58.934) Okay, all right. And those are.
Sam (31:00.841) It’s Flatline.
Reuben Saltzman (31:03.918) We’re not talking about what we have traditionally, I mean, in the past we used to call mobile homes, but that’s not really a PC term anymore.
Sam (31:12.672) No, mobile homes are what’s called manufactured housing or HUD code. So the terminology normally has been offsite, where now sometimes systems building. So things that are built in the factory to the local code are either advanced manufacturing systems built or offsite. Factory homes built to the HUD code are called manufactured housing. That’s a normal terminology that we use today. So manufactured housing, HUD-Code housing, is about 8.5 % of the market. So for the very constrained locations they can build in very low areas of construction, like 90 % of construction happens not in the areas that they cater to, they’re still 8.5 % of the new homes. So relative to the market size they have access to,
Reuben Saltzman (31:54.947)
Mm.
Sam (32:06.506) HUD code’s very big. And I’ve done a national roadmap strategy for the HUD code industry. And what we figured out was, figured out a strategy for how we grow their market beyond that.
Tessa Murry (32:25.876) So, you know, one of the things you mentioned in that workshop, Sam, was some of these factors that are kind of leading up to this, I feel like a pressure point, pain point that we’re experiencing in this country with, you know, affordability and quality housing. And one of them was labor shortages and just lack of skilled labor. Can you talk a little bit more about that and other, you know, what you think might be the tipping point for us as a country to really rethink how we’re doing it and move on to better building.
Sam (33:05.83) That’s a real important topic, Tessa. the labor shortage is more than just shortage. It’s a shortage of people. It’s a shortage of skills. And it’s an ever-increasing cost because as the supply drops and rates have just really gotten really much, much higher. And so the problem with the labor shortage or the labor crisis, let’s call it, is that the median age of a construction worker today is over 42. Meanwhile, for every five of these aging workers that are retiring, there only two or one coming into the industry behind them to be a construction worker. So five are going out, maybe one or two are coming in, depending on which study you want to look at. One says two, one says one. And so And what you want to do is couple that with new immigration policies. think 25 % of the construction workforce comes from immigrant labor. And now new policies look like they’re going to shrink that access to that workforce in half, one quarter, one third. And so,
Tessa Murry (34:10.782)
Hmm.
Sam (34:20.712) So you’re losing, let’s say you lose half of 25%. That’s another 12 % losing while you only have one or two coming in for every five that are retiring. And they also tend to be the lower priced labor. And so you’re shifting only from not having labor to much higher. We can’t afford this. That’s why, again, we get back to advanced manufacturing, building implants. It’s, the only way you can…really attract, really labor is having work conditions like in a plant, controlled environment, or insured job security that’s much greater, better, everything’s better in a normal work environment in the plant. And so we can grow the workforce, but more importantly, we don’t need it as big for every hundred that build a new home, you maybe need 10 to build a home in a factory. go visit the Swedish plants, you look on the floor, like four or five homes are coming out a week, and there’s like three or four people on the floor working. And it’s or six, let’s say. it’s, it’s, you know, if we know that we’re coming to a cliff, that the labor is just not there, the skill. And no, look at what happens in a field, we, we, we say, we have minimal detail and
Tessa Murry (35:23.507)
Mm-hmm.
Sam (35:40.476) guidance on the construction documents, let’s say for the heating cooling system. And we expect the heating cooling contractor workforce that arrives on a site that doesn’t speak English to look at these drawings to somehow do a good. heating cooling system, the duct work done right and everything done right. And so if it was all built and managed in a plant, a really quality control process, if it was done with a digitized system where you build the product and mechanical systems and the plumbing systems and the electrical systems on a computer first, you optimize them, you figure everything out, have them all integrated. And then in the plant, it’s all done for that optimized design process, you get faster, better treatment. But instead, the HVAC guys show up and electric guys show up and start figuring out where am going to run the wires? How am going to do this? Where are the ducts going to go? That we’re doing it this way in 2025 is mind blowing. It is really mind blowing.
Tessa Murry (36:30.301)
Uh-huh.
Reuben Saltzman (36:45.996) Yeah, it really is. And I mean, as you’re talking about this, I’m just I’m trying to look 50 years into the future. And it’s like, OK, well, OK, maybe 100 years into the future. A ways down. We’re doing all of our houses this way. We’ve got it dialed in. We know exactly how it gets put together. And when something goes wrong, there are replacement parts available. It’s like there’s a standard way to do it. There’s a book telling you when this component of your house breaks, here’s how to fix it. And all of sudden.
Tessa Murry (36:46.164) It’s so backwards.
Tessa Murry (37:09.076)
Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (37:15.18) Why are we gonna need home inspectors? Houses are gonna be put together just the way they should. And then the people repairing them, it’s gonna be really clear how to fix it. It’s like at some point, I’m not gonna have a job. There’ll be no need for us.
Tessa Murry (37:20.893)
Yeah.
Tessa Murry (37:29.716)
hopefully.
Sam (37:29.856) Oh, no, I’ll be. All right. Well, we can start talking about existing housing. There are 90 million single-family attached and detached homes. 85 % of them were built before 2000. There are about 70 % or more less efficient than the latest codes. We have work at Infinitum. Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (37:49.91) Now you’re right. You’re right. There’s a few existing houses out there. But if it had been done this way from the start, I guess my point is there’d be no need for a home inspector.
Tessa Murry (37:50.26)
For decades.
Sam (37:55.988) Yeah, a headhunter for ResNet called me about their replacing the new executive director. I told him I had no interest in running the organization. I’ll give you three things you need to do. One was actually design. your product for the consumer, not for all you raters and have these complicated 0 to 100, 200 scores, whatever you’re doing. Consumer doesn’t understand it. Just make it 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 stars. Every consumer, we have what? Millions and millions of choices made every day on hundreds and hundreds of products, depending if it’s 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 stars. We emotionally freak out if we saw a 1 or 2 store on a product. We don’t even want to touch it.
Why are we giving away that emotion for free? We have the emotion. This is again, build on what’s working. Instead, they want a zero to 100 score and hope to God somehow we can educate a home buyer that, oh no, I don’t want a 35, I want a 46, or I don’t want a 56, I want a 42. That’s not going to happen. Or the emotion will never be the emotion moving from a.
Tessa Murry (38:45.94)
Okay.
Sam (39:08.298) three star to a five star or one star to a four star. So the first thing I said I’d do, I’d change the HERS rating from one to five stars. I said the second thing I would do is pivot to existing homes. That’s where you need to have so much opportunity there and vators have so much skill and value to bring to an existing home. And the more and more new homes, as you were just saying, figure out to start using these quality, inherent quality,
Tessa Murry (39:25.844)
You can it.
Sam (39:37.888) enclosures, there’s less work for them to do. Do I need to inspect what grade insulation is in a SIP wall, a structural insulated panel? Zero value. It’s 100 % perfect. Do I need to inspect the air leakage in a SIP home? Probably not. Just visually look at some of the seams and you’re done. All these things, we get stuck with an institutionalized, this is how we do it. And we don’t pivot and keep innovating and innovating to what’s going on in the world. The third thing I said is just improve the quality control for the industry. There’s too much bandwidth between one rater and another rater and another rater. Tighten that up. Make sure that codes and all these other potential big users of HRS ratings can have confidence. The quality consistency is probably greater than it is right now.
Tessa Murry (40:31.22) Well, Sam, you know, you’ve said some things. just, my brain is kind of spinning right now. But not only do you look at, understand the house, the system, and how all these different parts and pieces fit together, the plumbing, the electrical, the framing, all of it, and talking about optimization of that actual house and the system and how we build, but also just thinking about the industry as a whole in terms of a system from the beginning of the product, what we use, how we use it. Who’s putting it together? How we put it together? How it’s sold? What standard we’re building it to? And it’s like, we just, don’t even know how do we fix this? It feels so broken. How do we fix this mess that we’re in? Yeah, where do we start?
Reuben Saltzman (41:15.793)
Yeah, where do we start? What’s next?
Sam (41:18.9) Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s right. That’s right. That is, know, that’s what leadership is supposed to do is, is kind of take something daunting and, and create a roadmap for to some future that’s better. And that’s basically what needs to be done is we need to create that roadmap, but we need everyone around the table. Every time I do a roadmap,
Tessa Murry (41:46.108)
Mm-hmm.
Sam (41:47.936) process. It starts with assembling experts in every stakeholder group affected and saying, what are we going to do? Next month, I’m going to Hawaii to see if we can figure out what to do with their epic housing affordability crisis. So we’ll start with the governor’s office and work down to the
Tessa Murry (41:59.934)
Mm-hmm.
Sam (42:11.06) to the architects and to the legislators and to the unions that are involved. There’s so many stakeholders who have conversations with everybody because it’s the only way you can do it. You have to put aside all their interests. Unions don’t want to give up, for instance, high paying work and ensure that their guys get to do, they don’t want to like a factory to place their guys, for instance, they would fight that.
Tessa Murry (42:11.7)
Yeah.
Tessa Murry (42:39.988)
Yeah.
Sam (42:41.024) So we have to start first with what do we agree on? This is the problem. And can we agree on types of things that need to be done? And then what’s the best way to do these things to reduce labor, to increase quality, to reduce cost? Well, if everyone’s working the same concepts that need to be worked on, we can maybe get past some of the just being completely dominated by just a very tunnel vision of what my own people care about to the bigger, how my people can be integrated with a bigger solution. And I think that relates to your point about on a national scale, I think we need a roadmap. And like I said, Right now, I look at the roadmaps for advanced housing. They’re looking at the wrong thing. They’re looking at technology. They’re looking at what we do to make the plants better. The plants will figure that out. We don’t need that. We need those other three things. We need to fix the market. So we have one national code. We design for manufacture, for assembly. so that is, you know, I think it is a big problem, but there’s a path. And I know we can fix it, but it starts with getting everyone around the table. getting by and that this is not gonna, this is not gonna be pretty soon.
Reuben Saltzman (44:04.161)
Good.
Tessa Murry (44:06.984)
Mm.
Reuben Saltzman (44:07.138) And I just got to say the original people who developed the and this is for people who aren’t in the industry. I know we’re talking a lot of inside shop talk here, but there used to be like three different major building codes throughout the country. And then this big body came together. Well, they consolidated all three of them into what’s known today as the International Code Council, the ICC.
Sam (44:17.685)
Here.
Reuben Saltzman (44:37.694) and they made this code for building single family homes called the International Residential Code, the IRC. And the idea is this is a uniform code. It’s built, it’s created. So anywhere you’re working anywhere in the world, you should be able to build to this. And they take into account temperatures and rain and earthquakes and flood zones. It’s got maps for all this stuff. And it’s supposed to be just one code that everybody uses everywhere. I mean, what a utopia. And this is what Sam kind of you’re talking about. Like, what if we had this? Well, we made it a long time ago. I think the first version came out in 2000. Isn’t that right? Yeah.
Sam (45:18.912) We had the model energy code up until 2006 was the first time the IECC came out.
Reuben Saltzman (45:27.202) The okay, all right, energy, but as far as the IRC, yeah, the IRC first version, I’m at anything, it was 2000. So we’ve had this for a long time, but then like you’re saying, every state gets their hands on this and they say, well, yeah, it’s an international code, but we’re special here and we’re gonna fix it. We chop it up, we make a lot of changes to it and.
Sam (45:29.523) The RLC may come out earlier.
Tessa Murry (45:34.452)
version.
Sam (45:36.063)
Yeah.
Tessa Murry (45:43.22)
for all of you.
Reuben Saltzman (45:53.314) You know, I’ve defended a lot of the changes that we make in Minnesota. I think a lot of the changes are for the good. I think there’s stuff in there that I don’t like and I’m glad we change it. But on the other hand, it’s short sighted. That’s good for what’s that’s good for Minnesota. But it’s not looking at the bigger picture. And I think if we could all just get over ourselves and just say, let’s use it.
Tessa Murry (46:02.132)
you
Tessa Murry (46:18.046)
Thank
Reuben Saltzman (46:19.936) It would it make everything better as a whole. Would you agree? Is that what you’re getting at, Sam?
Sam (46:25.696) Exactly. Exactly, Riven. There are hundreds of the code variations all around the country. My hypothesis is about 80 % of all codes, notwithstanding certain climatic or disaster protection provisions, about 80 % of the codes are probably identical. And I love to do, I think I propose doing a cost analysis to say, identify what is the 20 % that’s different. in these codes. And that was saying you have certain variations for climate. And what is that costing us to have that additional choice, customization in the code? Because NHB did a study that the average regulatory cost per home is like $90,000 or $100,000. But they included a lot of things that I wouldn’t include in the regulatory costs. But I think they’re still probably pushing $80,000 per
Tessa Murry (47:06.164)
Okay.
Sam (47:22.624) per home. No, it’s before you put a shovel in the ground, you spend 80,000 just to get through all the regulatory requirements and permits and environmental submissions and school fees. so all those things are you’re into a house, 80,000, and you can start building. That’s your ante, like if you’re at a poker game. And it’s just too high. But more importantly, is it needed? Is the cost of all this flexibility?
Reuben Saltzman (47:23.694)
Mm.
Sam (47:51.872) state by state, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, should that be allowed? I think we have to first, times are different. We didn’t have, first of all, access to advanced manufacturing in 2000 and 2005 to the degree we have today, at least to the types of solutions and advanced manufacturing systems and robotics. So now that advanced manufacturing, I think, is a really powerful solution.
Tessa Murry (48:07.624)
Thank you.
Sam (48:21.408) Shouldn’t we have a code that allows for that? And the other thing is, do we need this many climate zones? Now, California is a single state has 16 different climate zones. Insanity. 16 different for one state. 90 % of the homes are probably built in such a fairly moderate climate. You could have one code for all of them. Even the IACC climate maps.
Tessa Murry (48:32.354)
Thank you.
Tessa Murry (48:41.844)
you
Tessa Murry (48:50.274)
Thank
Sam (48:51.038) have eight zones, but you have an A and B, so you wind up with 16 different climate zones, depending if you’re humid or not humid. Whereas the national code for the manufactured housing HUD code industry has three climate zones for the entire nation. The other thing that happens that’s really interesting is that a lot of this variation is just so places where we half of 1 % of the homes, you have a climate
Reuben Saltzman (49:08.43)
Mmm.
Tessa Murry (49:08.638)
Okay.
Sam (49:20.224) requirements. have a lot of complications to accommodate some very small levels of construction that happen in countries, parts of the country where you have these all these complications of different climate zones. So think we can get it down to one to three climate zones have really recommendations what to do for when it gets really cold. Probably this is what you should do. But but you start looking at a good swatch of the country. And the things we’re trying to do to save energy are dwarfed by the by the bill savings you would achieve building more resilient. The average home insurance premium in metro Miami is about over $22,000. So we’re pushing $2,000 a month as your
Tessa Murry (50:00.212)
Bye.
Sam (50:11.104) as your insurance premium. Nationally, we’re at 2,600 or 2,700 is becoming the national average premium. So if we can build resilient and save 50%, we’re $1,300, $100 a month on insurance premiums. And more importantly, when you look at these devastated outcomes after…
Reuben Saltzman (50:13.614)
since then.
Tessa Murry (50:13.63)
That’s crazy.
Sam (50:35.352) a major event and you realize in let’s say the palisades tens of thousands of homes are going into landfill and the landfill content of those homes is really toxic. the stuff that’s in our homes that burns and then gets dumped in landfill, know, all the electronics and furnishings and the fire retardants and lot of fabrics and things, and then all the carpets. You look at all that stuff that’s getting dumped and going, and we’re counting carbon?
Reuben Saltzman (51:02.126)
Mmm.
Sam (51:08.244) when really if we were resilient and not putting those tens of thousands of homes into the landfill. So we just gotta be focused on the right price, at least for high risk locations, is the entire, follow the Gulf around the Panhandle of Florida up in Mid-Atlantic all way up to New York. And you gotta start building for what’s happening in those climates. Wildfire in the West, everywhere needs to be.
Tessa Murry (51:21.812)
you
Sam (51:33.372) wildfire resistant. So we need to be focused on the right things. it’s all these things just keep adding up that have to be integrated into our thinking.
Tessa Murry (51:47.196)
Oof.
Reuben Saltzman (51:48.162) I got two quick thoughts. One, I mean, we do all of this because we’re irrational. That’s it. Real simple.
Tessa Murry (51:54.8)
Thanks.
Sam (51:56.18) No, we’re very rational. We’re very rational. Remember what I said? This is the way a builder makes profit. I respect builders too. I said this at the EBER conference. Look at this business proposition. You have incredible risk finding labor. You have incredible massive time. and risk and all the entitlement process to get land ready. You have all these supply chain issues that happen over time. have widely varying interest rate fluctuations and economic forces that change. You have labor challenges with policies like immigration and so forth. You have design trends that constantly change and maybe your product choices may not be relevant by time you go to market. You have constantly changing codes and regulations. You look at everything a builder’s got to deal with, they’re rational.
Tessa Murry (52:52.686) Not to mention consumer expectations too. Yeah. Yeah.
Sam (52:54.154) They’re overwhelmed. Yeah, they’re just trying to get a home on the ground. So, so we need to, I think we just need to help them. We need to create conditions and ways they can, know, the industry can happen faster, better, cheaper.
Tessa Murry (53:10.004)
Yes.
Reuben Saltzman (53:10.616) Yeah. And another thought, I mean, you talked about cars and it’s interesting. We don’t have climate zones for vehicles either. I mean,
Sam (53:21.332) Yeah, well, yeah, and that’s because it could be a vehicle can go any climate zone it has to and it’s not know the load factor for a house is 70%. We spend 70 % of our time every day inside our home. Home is where life happens. And so we need an environmental separator for that space inside the home and the outdoor conditions. A load factor for a car is like 3%, only in a car 3 or 6 % a day. So the investment in the environmental separator in a car has a huge reduction in return because we’re only in it such a small part of the day. So blow. And then we have so much waste heat coming off the engine. It’s almost no cost for heating in cold climates. And air conditioning systems keep getting more efficient. And the glass that we use has got better
Reuben Saltzman (53:50.136)
Hmm.
Tessa Murry (54:01.385)
Thank
Sam (54:15.184) UV resistance and solar heat gain coefficients. So the cars work, but I still submit we’re way too granular with what we’re trying to do with the climate requirements. We’re asking a third of a trillion dollar industry to be ultra efficient and ultra lean.
Tessa Murry (54:18.836)
Hmm.
Tessa Murry (54:30.526)
Mm-hmm.
Sam (54:38.986) But our regulations and even the Energy Star programs and government programs are not ultra-lean and not ultra-efficient. We’re not doing what we’re asking the industry to do. We’re way too complex, we’re way too costly, way too much a process, and we’re not optimizing. So it’s just hypocritical. We’re not walking the talk and saying, need to be better.
Tessa Murry (55:01.908)
you
Sam (55:06.602) building homes to be ultra-leno, ultra-efficient, we, programs, codes, regulations, we don’t have to be.
Reuben Saltzman (55:13.004)
Hmm. Sure.
Tessa Murry (55:14.196) You know Sam, I love having conversations with you and hearing your perspectives on things because you’re someone who shifts my whole way of thinking. It’s like, know Ruben, you said we’re just not being rational. It’s like, well, you know what’s interesting? It’s like your perspective in first grade of the world. is rational for what you’ve experienced and what you do and who you know. But then you grow up and you get into high school and your world gets bigger and you learn more. Then you go to, maybe you go to college or trade school or you start living in the real world and you learn more and your picture gets bigger. And life keeps going, we keep growing. And your perspective shifts, I think, with time and with age and experience and wisdom. And you do that for me, but with the housing industry, feel like it’s like, I know what I know, but I don’t…
know a lot. And when I talk to someone like you, you kind of blow my mind. It’s like, these are all the things, you know, that we focus on. And we’ve got all these, you know, these policies and push towards energy efficiency and reducing carbon. These are all great things. But then let’s take a step back and let’s just say like, we can’t even figure out how to build affordable housing quickly. We’ve got a housing crisis.
Sam (56:28.298)
Yeah.
Tessa Murry (56:29.18)
You know, like, are we thinking about the right things and asking right questions and focusing on it? You know, and the phrase, you know, as a home inspector, we talk about this with training home inspectors. It’s like, you can walk through a house and you can try and check off all these little boxes for all these little things that you’re looking for, minutiae of defects, but do not miss, you know, the, what is this saying, the forest for the trees? Like, if you’re walking through and you’re coming on these little…
Reuben Saltzman (56:51.938)
Yeah, yeah.
Tessa Murry (56:55.688)
little tiny defects like doors aren’t opening and closing properly and whatever. But you miss the fact that there’s cut trusses in the attic, broken trusses from delivery, or there’s aluminum wiring in existing home. It doesn’t matter if those doors don’t open and close. And that’s kind of, I feel like what you do for me, you’re like this catalyst that just makes me take a step back and is like, wow, okay.
Well, we’ve got some things to think about and all the signs are there. All the struggles are there. Like you said, the affordability crisis, the labor crisis, and the amount of homelessness and the struggle of the day-to-day people. We’re feeling that right now. We’re seeing that and we’re on this precipice, I think, of
really needing a big change. We need more people like you out there sharing your thoughts and your wisdom and your ideas with the rest of us so that we can survive this.
Sam (57:51.904)
You’re too kind. You’re too kind. I essentially I think you just you’re you’re starting a great conversation about just how challenged it is. And you’re still only at the tip of the iceberg. think we’re not even looking at this. The disaster risks that are going up exponentially for such a huge amount of country, the country we’re not prepared. I don’t know what we’re going to do with the entire eastern and Gulf seaboard.
Tessa Murry (58:16.872)
Yeah.
Sam (58:20.916)
with all these homes. If you’re not watching right now, for instance, the Florida condo markets like in free fall, because all these buildings were under not being managed and repaired. And now they’re woefully in trouble because they have all sorts of maintenance and resilience issues, not to mention, we’ll forget that they’re low lying and they have sea level risks as well. because the residents are being now that
after Surfside collapsed, now there’s enforcement all of a sudden. All the condo residents across the state are getting hit with 80,000, 150,000, $220,000 assessment fees per unit because they have to, now they have to do the maintenance that has been.
Tessa Murry (59:04.244)
Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (59:05.141)
Wow.
Sam (59:10.992)
left unattended for decades and decades. So they just fall out. They leave the condos, markets collapsing. No one wants to take on those assessment fees. so you have a huge just collapse of that whole condo market. And of course, Florida in general, because of the insurance rates is just, again, the state was just people coming in. Now some of the highest price reduction
Tessa Murry (59:11.164)
neglected.
Tessa Murry (59:20.66)
Thanks.
Sam (59:39.538)
markets are in the Florida region as well. So resilience is a huge factor imposing on people. And then, like I said, there’s all these other costs of housing that I think people are just, people who own existing homes haven’t been maintaining them. And I think that the infrastructure issue we don’t talk about is we have 120 million
units, 90 million single family homes, where they’ve been under maintained, much like the condos and what’s going to happen. within that context, cause, know, we want to go out and we want to make them more efficient. But then you go and you start seeing all these other issues. know, it could be moisture issues, could be structural issues, it could be just really the low code construction and all sorts of locations and
So this is just really a challenge everywhere you look. so it’s you don’t throw your hands up. You say, let’s, I did a roadmap for existing homes and you just got to know you to elephant a bite at a time. That’s the only way you get through. And I think we have to figure a strategy to do better. But to stop, stop.
Tessa Murry (01:00:55.433)
you
Sam (01:01:04.608)
We can, there’s things we can do right away, reducing complexity, reducing regulation, creating a climate and conditions for advanced manufacturing, both in new and existing homes. There’s a lot we can do with industrialized systems. Look at Energy Sprung in Europe. There’s a lot of typology types within the US where we can do bulk purchase and just
really transform housing overnight with industrialized housing approaches for existing homes. So there’s just so much and I think the thing to do is be excited about the opportunity and start identifying low hang fruit, how to get points on the board early, some early wins. One of the things that I propose is we should do a national comprehensive attic upgrade program for the entire nation. Just have a campaign.
Tessa Murry (01:01:36.329)
Mm.
Sam (01:02:02.844)
It’s so cost effective, works every climate zone. There’s an existing infrastructure of insulation installers already there to do it. Now embolden and empower them to do while they’re insulating to also do seal the drywall to top plate gaps and put in the air barriers that are missing and put in the wind baffles. And if the ducts are up there, make sure to actually make the attic upgrade really like
Tessa Murry (01:02:21.3)
Ruben’s clapping right now.
Reuben Saltzman (01:02:24.312)
clapping, yes.
Sam (01:02:31.892)
two or three times more effective. And so let’s do it everywhere in the country. And then everyone has a great experience doing an upgrade because there’s no disruption. It’s in the attic. It’s already existing set of players and can be easily priced and low friction. And it’s so cost effective and it’ll have immediate impact on comfort and utility bills. And now you have millions and millions of people every year having a great experience with an energy upgrade.
Reuben Saltzman (01:02:34.254)
Yes.
Sam (01:02:58.536)
Instead of trying to do everything, why don’t we get those points on the board? And that’s the way we can start conquering some of the overwhelming size of the problem by shrinking it so we have a part we can do fast, well, with great results.
Reuben Saltzman (01:03:15.214)
I got to I got to circle back to this because I talked about how, you know, we chop up the codes in Minnesota. It’s like, well, we’ve got these rules. But I and I but I do defend some of them. I think some of them are very good. And one of them you’re talking about this, you know, what we could do for addicts. That is something that Minnesota has. And I don’t know if it’s a national thing or not, but you read the energy code for Minnesota and it says that.
Tessa Murry (01:03:28.628)
Just.
Reuben Saltzman (01:03:41.58)
you’re not allowed to have an insulation contractor go in the attic and add insulation without first doing air sealing. That is required. And it’s like, let’s go, we’re doing this right. So there are some things that I am proud of Minnesota for doing, even though it’s not scalable on a national level, it’s a good thing.
Tessa Murry (01:03:55.444)
So.
Sam (01:04:02.74)
recognize that that’s a great point, but recognize Ruben, that’s a code for existing homes to make sure to protect everyone from themselves. I’m OK with regulations that are cost effective and fix a market imperfection. And the market imperfection is that people aren’t educated that you have this opportunity when you pull back the old insulation to start
Reuben Saltzman (01:04:12.205)
You’re right.
That’s true. Yep.
Sam (01:04:31.954)
flashing the shafts and filling in the, like I the air barriers at the drop ceilings and put in, make sure to foam around the wiring penetrations and plumbing penetrations and like seal the top plates. So you can do all that, but people don’t know to do it and they don’t understand the benefit. And so just make the marketplace, fix the market.
Tessa Murry (01:04:37.635)
huh.
Sam (01:04:52.544)
imperfection by having the code say, is the way you do it. It’s stupid. The costs go back, you can’t go back, the installation’s in, now you’re stuck. You have this one time opportunity, we’ll fix that. I’m against the regulations that are ones that add complexity, that sometimes are pushing for too much cost for too little return. That’s the kind of stuff that I personally will look against.
Tessa Murry (01:04:59.614)
Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (01:05:04.728)
Yes.
Tessa Murry (01:05:05.032)
Bye.
Tessa Murry (01:05:21.522)
Yeah. Well, Sam, I hate to do this. We have to wrap this show up. But for all of our listeners, we’ve been talking with Sam Rashkin. And if you want to learn more or read more, Sam has written a few books. Sam, where can our listeners find your books?
Sam (01:05:38.496)
I would say just go to Housing 2.0 Disruption Survival Guide because that is a massive, massive update of the first book and the tool in the US housing industry. You see a focus here. I’m usually trying to figure what do we do with this industry. But Housing 2.0
Tessa Murry (01:05:58.142)
Yeah.
Sam (01:05:59.552)
is accessible from the Green Builder Media website. you just Google Green Builder Media or go to Amazon, where you normally buy books, and you put in Housing 2.0, it’ll pop right up for you.
Reuben Saltzman (01:06:12.844)
Yeah, I go to the Google machine. I type in Towson 2.0 and then it fills in the rest of it for me. So lot of people are looking you up, Sam. This is good.
Tessa Murry (01:06:13.64)
wonderful.
Sam (01:06:19.562)
That’s right. That’s right.
Tessa Murry (01:06:20.798)
There you go. yeah.
Sam (01:06:23.794)
And basically, this is just a framework for how we build better, faster, cheaper, and leverage all these opportunities just to transform the industry.
Tessa Murry (01:06:36.596)
Thank you, Sam, so much for all that you’ve contributed to this industry and that you can continue to contribute to this industry. For any of our listeners, if you’ve got questions or have a comment, Ruben, how do they reach us?
Reuben Saltzman (01:06:51.15)
Podcast you email us podcast at structure tech comm we read them all again. It’s podcast at structure tech comm and We will have a link in the show notes where you can find Sam as well as long as long as As well as his book have a link to that book, too Love it
Tessa Murry (01:06:59.636)
Mm.
Tessa Murry (01:07:10.108)
Yeah. Sam, thank you so much again. This has been just such an honor and it’s been so fun having this discussion with you. We should definitely have you back on. If you’ve got more time in the future, we could keep going.
Reuben Saltzman (01:07:20.675)
Yes.
Sam (01:07:22.112)
That was a treat to reconnect. Tessa, what a treat Rubin to make a connection. Thank you all and it was a great time.
Reuben Saltzman (01:07:29.698)
This is fantastic. Thank you so much. All right. For the listeners, we’ll catch you next time. Take care.
Tessa Murry (01:07:30.206)
Thank you.