The affordable housing industry is navigating a rapidly changing landscape, from advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to new approaches to construction and resident services.
Futurist and innovation strategist Nikki Greenberg sees these shifts as both challenges and opportunities for an industry that needs to build more efficiently and think differently about how housing is delivered.
In advance of her keynote address at AHF Live, Nov. 16-18, in Chicago, Greenberg discusses the technologies and trends that could reshape affordable housing.
What assumptions about the housing market might look very different five or 10 years from now?
There’s going to be a generational change in terms of who is operating some of these real estate companies. With that, there’s going to be a change in attitude toward technology, so there might be more of an appetite for leaning into AI, trying robotics, or whatever it might be, and a movement away from doing things the way that have always worked in the past and trying new things out that might be more appropriate for where the world is heading.
Where does affordable housing have the opportunity to lead and gain in the next era of real estate?
With affordable housing, if we continue along the current trajectory, the gap between where we need to be and where we’re going to get to is going to keep widening. … There’s an opportunity to close that gap through doing things in a different way and being smart about it. Whoever it is that does manage to crack this question of manufactured housing and industrialized construction for affordable housing and get it to roll out in the way that it logically should, they’re going to be able to solve a lot of problems.
Do you see AI and technology reducing housing development costs in the future?
In one aspect, it can enable us to use big data to make smarter decisions. For example, insurance has been an issue. You can have a more reliable answer on what things should be priced at or what the impact of a 100-year storm increasing in frequency might be. That big data component can give us more certainty and efficiency.
The other side that I’m excited about is what it can mean for robotics and construction. An example of this is in the 1960s in Sweden. They had a housing shortage. They had an initiative around 1 million homes. They said in the next 10 years they want to build a million homes. They achieved this goal. The way they achieved it was through industrialized construction, i.e., building in a factory instead of the very manual way that we build on site.
With AI advancing along, it means that construction and robotics are going to advance along with it. That conversation needs to be reopened and given more of a voice about how we can actually look at advanced manufacturing techniques now that AI has matured as a solution toward affordable housing.
What trends should the industry be watching?
They should be paying attention to what’s happening in construction and the place of robotics and industrialized construction.
Another case study that I quite like around affordable housing is happening in Queensland, Australia. There’s an initiative called QBuild. They realized that in order to deliver affordable housing, especially to rural areas, they need to rely on industrialized construction and modular and off-site fabrication. Traditional construction is not going to work for them. They found a triple win. They’re building the industrialized construction industry, a new manufacturing industry, which means jobs. They’re having training programs for people to work within this new industry. The third thing is you get new housing. It’s a triple win.
The other thing that comes off of this is talking about barriers and what is standing in the industry’s way. One of the banks, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, has created a mortgage product that’s appropriate for modular, off-site, and industrialized construction because it has different milestones. It was recognition that one of the barriers to innovation is the ability to finance it.
What is one thing affordable housing leaders should start doing today to prepare for a future they can't yet fully see?
Experimenting. Understanding that the nature of an experiment is that it isn’t necessarily going to work. Sometimes experiments don’t work, but at least you get information. That way we’re able to keep moving forward instead of standing still.