Can Tech Fix Affordability?

Despite all the tech innovation and solutions coming to housing, affordability remains the industry's main issue that remains unfixed. 

More venture capitalists are investing in housing, startups are proliferating with affordable, stackable modular homes, and tech companies outside the industry are funneling millions into affordable housing projects, yet overall affordability is still unaffordable. Writing for The New York Times, Emily Badger explains, "The larger forces shaping the market are beyond even what a $4 billion construction start-up can disrupt, or what a national nonprofit can bend. Pull a thread in the housing market, and it leads to the decline of good working-class jobs, or the federal government’s long-term retreat from housing, or the fundamental tension that Americans want housing to be both affordable and a good investment."

“None of that investment, nor the solutions that those companies are offering, will fundamentally change the dynamic of the housing market in a way that increases housing affordability,” said Matt Hoffman, the vice president for innovation at the national housing nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners, surveying what venture capitalists have come to call “proptech.” Policymakers warn that the housing crisis isn’t a problem technology can solve. Yet it’s intriguing to think what might happen if investors threw money more directly at this goal. Mr. Hoffman believes that the right ideas could help change the market. And so Enterprise recently began to invest in early-stage tech startups itself.

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