Each week we uncover a new idea on how to fix housing. New building technology, financing models, policy changes, new ways to deliver buildings and new organizations trying to connect them all. But what happens “after” the idea? After the pitch, the raise, the first earnings call?
Does the idea survive the first city meeting or financing conversation? What about logistics, transportation and code review? And wait – the project has to be profitable.
Clark Ivory has spent decades watching it happen.
As CEO of Utah-based Ivory Homes, he has helped build more than 25,000 homes and thousands of apartments. Through Ivory Innovations, he has evaluated more than 1,000 ideas aimed at improving housing affordability across construction and design, finance, and policy and regulatory reform. His perspective on housing innovation relies less on a particular building tech and leans heavily into proof.
Housing has a peculiar way of exposing the distance between an idea and a solution. In software, an idea can move from concept to millions of users without touching the physical world. Housing, not so much. Land. Local rules. Logistics. Building materials and sequencing the trades. Someone designs it, someone else finances it, another insures it, permits it, approves it, sells it, and invariably the owner wonders if the building they thought was designed is actually what they purchased and the building’s occupant has no idea how many pieces and parts influenced the final outcome.
And every 50 miles or so, those conditions and rules change.
What works in Utah may not work in Colorado or California – from zoning regulations to climate and market preferences. Ivory is cautious about claims of rapid national scale. His first question is “Does it work here?”
If yes, find two or three building partners. Work through the problems and the economics. Learn what breaks. If thinking about expansion, don’t confuse interest with proof. An idea that can produce ten homes is interesting. But can that idea scale to produce 1000 homes? That distinction matters.
Three Ways to Change
Ivory Innovations organizes much of its work around construction and design, finance, and policy and regulatory reform. Each can make a difference but none operate independently. Construction can be faster and more efficient yet stalled by permitting. A financing product could improve affordability but can’t solve for a shortage of land. A city can change its policy but developers still need projects that work financially and can actually be built. That interconnectedness is why Ivory believes policy and regulatory reform can sometimes move the needle faster than another piece of technology. There are municipalities that have already demonstrated how much can change when local governments approach housing differently.
Ivory Innovations has documented many of these ideas in its work, with the goal of identifying approaches that can be adopted elsewhere. The principle is straightforward: If a city has found a better way to do something, other cities should not have to reinvent it.
The Five-Year Project
One of the clearest examples from Ivory's own experience is the Avenues project in Utah.
The project involved roughly three acres and 21 homes, each with an accessory dwelling unit also known as an ADU or granny flat.
What seemed relatively straightforward spent years moving through approvals and opposition. There were roughly five years of work and significant neighborhood resistance, including hundreds of opponents.
Eventually, the project was approved and built. Then the shift happened. Project opponents came to appreciate what had actually been created. The lesson is bigger than the project itself.
A housing development does not exist in isolation. It has to fit into a neighborhood. That means design matters. Community engagement matters. Policy matters. Financing matters. Construction matters. Marketing and delivery matter. All of those pieces have to work together.
The project also illustrates why housing solutions can be difficult to replicate.
Instead of assuming the simple answer "Build more of these houses" the question becomes: What conditions have to be true in order to allow more of these houses to be built?
Why industrialized construction is harder than it looks
This is also where the conversation about modular and industrialized construction becomes more complicated. Factory-controlled construction can improve quality and predictability. Onsite work can happen in parallel, waste in both locations can be reduced and production becomes repeatable. But the factory is only one part of the equation.
The building still has to get to the site.
Transportation, local building codes, installation all matter. The economics have to work at the scale of the project and the market.
Ivory's own experience with a large modular project in Utah reinforced the point. It took roughly two years to work through the numbers and determine whether the approach could make economic sense.
Ivory questioned whether the entire system around factory production can deliver the house competitively. That’s a question “what is the cost per square foot” may not be able to answer, nor can it predict the better outcome.
Scale is earned
Another lesson Ivory reveals is about scale. Failure can come to those who grow too quickly as easily as it comes to those moving too slowly. Housing innovation can attract attention before it has earned scale. When a large total addressable market seems like a homerun and national opportunity appears to be waiting, physical systems have a way of exposing assumptions and supply chain constraints. Labor markets differ; municipalities operate differently and even the same customer can have different expectations in different markets. A project that works once may not work the same way in ten different locations or at ten times the volume. Ivory believes the better path is to prove an approach in its own market first, building with real partners and working through actual projects. Next comes expansion. Big ideas crumble if not built upon a repeatable system.
The Billion-Dollar Question
Is money the answer? Not necessarily. When asked what he would do with a hypothetical $1Billion dedicated to housing, his answer points to an earlier comment. “The future is going to be a combination of regulatory issues, finance, and construction and design.”
The physical building is only one part of the problem. We tend to talk about housing as though the house itself is the problem. Make it:
Cheaper.
Faster.
Automate it.
Print it.
Standardize it.
Ivory’s experience teaches something different. It’s not one giant technology company or one national construction platform. He points toward many smaller opportunities: municipalities that need help, financing innovations, regulatory solutions and ideas that can be tested, replicated, then scaled. That response reveals a shift away from the builder and toward the system. Innovative methods of construction and new building materials are as much a part of that system as are the thousands of places where the system can work better. Sometimes it’s a financing structure, other times a zoning change, or maybe a city willing to approach development differently. The work is figuring out which is which or a combination of things that sparks the solution as the cost of a home is shaped by far more than the physical act of constructing it.
If builders aren’t the problem, why are we asking them for the solution?
This is where Ivory Innovations' work becomes particularly interesting.
The Ivory Prize isn't simply a celebration of clever ideas. The process involves hundreds of applications, deeper diligence on a much smaller group and an effort to identify approaches that have a realistic path into the market.
The question underneath all of it is one that Dave Cooper LIVE keeps returning to:
What survives reality?
Promising ideas are abundant. Where are the solutions that can survive regulation, capital, construction, labor, logistics, customers and scale? Perhaps that is the right place to begin the conversation about innovation in the built environment.
Not with the newest technology or the biggest promise. Asking “what problem are you trying to solve” and receiving an evidence-based answer.
What happened when someone actually tried it? What did they learn? What had to change around it? Who had to participate? And could someone else do it again?
The beginning of a bigger conversation
Clark Ivory's experience suggests that the housing challenge will not be solved by a single technology, company, policy or source of capital.
It will require combinations.
Construction + finance. Policy + development. Manufacturing + logistics. Technology + human judgment. Public institutions + private companies.
And, ultimately, people willing to work across those boundaries long enough to make something real. That gives us a useful starting point for this series. The built environment isn’t short on big ideas. The harder work is understanding what allows an idea to become a solution.
And that may be the question worth asking every time we encounter something that promises to change the way we build: Does it work in the real world?
Because that is where innovation stops being an idea and starts becoming a place where people can live.