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Happy Wednesday, Crew!

Let’s talk about the one industry technology forgot: homebuilding. Cars, chips, and phones all became cheaper and faster to produce. Houses didn’t. Today I’m breaking down why construction never scaled like everything else.

We live in a world where almost everything we buy gets cheaper and better over time. Phones, TVs, cars, airplanes, even groceries. Technology raises productivity. Scale lowers cost. Efficiency compounds.

Housing missed that memo.

Even as tools and software improved, the act of building a home still looks like it did decades ago. A crew shows up, materials get delivered, and day by day a structure takes shape. It is craftsmanship, not automation. It is slow and variable, not standardized. The price reflects that.

The key problem is simple: houses are not products in the way we think about products. They are projects.

Every house sits on a unique piece of land with its own rules, soil conditions, and approval process. The blueprint changes. The timeline changes. The crew changes. Nothing repeats quite the same way twice. Factories thrive on sameness. Housing is built on difference.

People have tried to drag homes into the factory era. Prefab and modular construction come in waves. They always sound promising. Build the home indoors, away from weather delays. Use precision tools. Ship the finished pieces to the site and assemble like Lego.

But physics charges a tax on that idea. Anything you build in a factory must be strong enough to survive trucking, lifting, and on-site fitting. Those steps add extra structure, extra hardware, and extra cost. Whatever you saved in efficiency gets eaten on the delivery route.

Another barrier: risk. If a home goes well, a builder might make a little more profit than hoped. If something goes wrong, they can lose their entire margin and more. So the industry is cautious. New methods that could save money 90% of the time but blow up 10% of the time are very hard to justify.

Even technology has limits here. Materials like lumber, concrete, and drywall are already some of the cheapest industrial goods on Earth. We are not waiting for a miracle material to suddenly cut costs in half. The bottleneck is the process, not the stuff.

That is why housing affordability remains stubborn. It is not just zoning. It is not just interest rates. It is that the actual cost of construction has been climbing while productivity refuses to climb with it.

There are paths forward, but none look like flipping a switch. We will see progress where building starts to resemble manufacturing without pretending it can be identical. Neighborhoods where developers repeat the same floorplans over and over. Software that eliminates permit purgatory. Drones and layout robots that shave hours off routine tasks. Standard parts that fit together with fewer surprises.

No single change will make homes cheap. But a hundred small changes can make them less expensive than they are today.

When people ask why houses cost so much, the easy answers get the attention. The real answer lives in the dirt, the codebook, and the day-to-day work at the job site. It is that housing resists the efficiency that transformed every other major industry.

The home is still built by humans, outdoors, one address at a time. And until that reality shifts even a little, the price of a place to live will keep rising faster than we want.