Ivory Innovations has announced the top 25 finalists for the 2024 Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability, an award dedicated to advancing housing affordability.

As one of the longest standing and most prestigious awards of its kind in the United States, this year's competition marks the sixth year of Ivory Innovations’ effort to shine a light on the most promising housing solutions.

“We spoke with more than 200 organizations for the sixth annual Ivory Prize, a record since we launched the Ivory Prize in 2018. This illustrates the growing number of innovators across the country working on important efforts to increase affordability,” says Abby Ivory, president at Ivory Innovations and program manager at the University of Utah’s Ivory Boyer Real Estate Center. “We are passionate about increasing the impact and scale of new ideas with the potential to improve the housing ecosystem. These innovators are notable for the strength of their innovations, focus on affordability, and optimism to build solutions that can make a real difference for the country.”

The 25 finalists join 122 others in Ivory Innovations’ network of innovators. All finalists are included in the Ivory Innovations Housing Innovation Database, a comprehensive overview of more than 500 promising housing organizations across the country.

Plus, their new status as portfolio members gives them access to Ivory’s network of innovators, capital partners, and capacity builders and unlocks in-kind support such as sponsored student interns and pro bono consulting services.

The 2024 Top 10 Ivory Prize finalists will be announced in April, and the final 2024 Ivory Prize winners will be announced May 16.

This year’s 25 finalists across the award’s three categories include:

Construction & Design

Apis Cor: Apis Cor develops highly mobile 3D printers and construction materials for home building. Their robot is smaller than most others on the market and is ready to work within 30 minutes of arriving at the site.

Capsule: Capsule exists to bring a new streamlined construction workforce online. Their team of engineers, machines, and assembly technicians manufacture buildings as components to increase the number of units of housing available.

Canvas: Canvas is helping contractors build in new ways by putting better tools in the hands of skilled workers. With Canvas’ worker-controlled robotic machine, contractors are able to make drywall finishing safer and more attractive to a shrinking pool of skilled labor.

Onx: Onx is accelerating a new era of homes and neighborhoods, combining proprietary X+ Construction technology, design, and advanced material science expertise in concrete.

On3: On3 is an artificial intelligence (AI)/mobile-based learning application for field workers. It allows companies to seamlessly capture their critical work processes in video, create multilingual video-based learning modules, and transform their teams by using AI to verify retention of critical knowledge.

PathHouse: The PathHouse modular housing solution is an application of true Design for Manufacturing and Assembly techniques. It combines carbon-sequestering mass-timber products together with a SmartCassette to produce housing modules.

Revalue.io: Revalue.io prepares communities for the transition to clean energy by removing home health hazards and fossil fuel-based systems.

TANGOBuilder: TANGOBuilder uses AI to automate buildings’ structural design by transforming architectural sketches into construction-ready blueprints in seconds.

Villa: Villa is a home building platform that focuses on building prefab homes in “missing middle” infill locations. It uses an asset-light approach by partnering with factories to build homes based on Villa’s designs.

Finance

Foyer: Foyer is designed to be the entryway to homeownership for the next generation of first-time home buyers. Foyer offers members personalized financial planning together with a first-time home buyer savings account.

HIAS Housing Guarantee Fund: The HIAS Housing Guarantee Fund (HGF) is an efficient and sustainable mechanism for mitigating rental market forces that exclude newly arrived refugees from housing opportunities and expose them to homelessness.

Home Lending Pal: Home Lending Pal transforms the process of determining eligibility for Department of Housing and Urban Development vouchers to pay for a mortgage and other home buying assistance programs, making it scalable, efficient, and user-friendly.

HON Partners: High Opportunity Neighborhood Partners acquires quality homes in high-opportunity neighborhoods in order to provide these homes—along with supportive services—to Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher holders.

Montgomery County Housing Production Fund: The Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County, Maryland, partnered with Montgomery County to create the Housing Production Fund (HPF). The HPF is a $100 million revolving fund that provides low-cost construction financing for the development of publicly owned, mixed-income housing.

Rent Butter: Rent Butter aims to create a resident screening solution that offers valuable and unbiased insights to housing providers while expanding housing options for individuals with less-than-ideal credit histories.

Roam: Roam offers a unique solution to help home buyers wind back the clock on interest rates by purchasing a home with a low-rate assumable mortgage, saving them up to 50% on monthly payments.

US Modular Capital: US Modular Capital is a lender exclusively dedicated to financing volumetric construction. They provide developers with flexible and innovative financing solutions required for volumetric projects.

Policy & Regulatory Reform

City of Detroit Land Value Tax Plan: Detroit is proposing a Land Value Tax plan, which would provide long-overdue relief to homeowners by reducing property taxes while encouraging growth and reinvestment. The plan shifts the tax burden from property improvements and buildings to land.

City of San Diego ADU Bonus Program: San Diego has implemented a Bonus Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) Program that allows for increased density for affordable ADUs. This incentive has led to the construction of deed-restricted ADUs and naturally affordable ADUs throughout the city.

Compass Working Capital: Compass Working Capital partners with families with low incomes—primarily families led by Black and/or Latina women—to build savings and assets as a pathway out of poverty.

First Repair: First Repair has taken a local-to-national approach in the centuries-long movement for Black reparations. Localities nationwide are prioritizing housing-related redress as a first tangible step to repair the legacies of slavery in the United States.

FwdSlash: FwdSlash is bringing the health care industry into housing. Through contracts with managed Medicaid that generates up to $30 billion annually in health cost savings at scale, FwdSlash is enabling communities to guide the healthcare investment of these savings to increase housing supply.

Minneapolis Public Housing Authority Family Housing Expansion Project: Minneapolis Public Housing Authority helps provide 26,000 people with quality, safe, and affordable housing through its various housing assistance programs.

Placemate: Placemate helps tourism-based communities thrive by unlocking new affordable rental housing for the local workforce. Through its public-private partnerships, it has designed and implemented incentive programs to convert underutilized housing stock into new long-term rentals.

Pronto Housing: Pronto Housing provides software to streamline affordable housing resident qualification so property teams can fill units faster and improve the resident experience.

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