tl/dr

• The Townbuider’s Podcast filled a media gap where no podcasts featured urban developers talking openly about building great places.

• After two seasons with me as the leader, the series is evolving with a new host, Levi Wintz, a leader within the Emerging New Urbanists.

• In advance of the new season, I will be re-releasing some of my favorite conversations and explaining why they mattered to me.

DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA | Four months into the coronavirus pandemic, everyone started a podcast, and I was not able to avoid the bug (oddly, I still have never gotten COVID).

The Townbuilder’s Podcast was a production of the National Townbuilder’s Association (NTBA), a small group of the best new town developers and architects on earth. It was sponsored by James Hardie.

Though the podcast has remained niche, it immediately fostered a dedicated group of followers. I suspect this is because there are so few resources where developers openly discuss the strategies and difficulties of building great places. We started producing The Townbuilder’s Podcast in the summer of 2020, and the first episodes rolled out that August.

Even though it has been out of production for almost three years, I still get people thanking me for it about once per month.

WHY I LOVED PODCASTING

Podcasting was really rewarding for me. In this fast and frantic modern American lifestyle, we are constantly multitasking. Most people I know carry three devices that are beeping and buzzing and custom ringtoning throughout the day. We no longer have opportunities to do anything for an hour and a half—uninterrupted—and I found that this distractibility leads to disconnectedness and imbalance.

That’s why I personally loved the podcast format so much. It’s 60-90 minutes, uninterrupted—period, full-stop.

The fact that I got to curate conversations with amazing people was just gravy. And it didn’t hurt that they just happened to be some of the most talented and successful industry professionals on earth: Andres Duany, one of the founders of the New Urbanism. Grant Humphries, innovative developer of the new town Carlton Landing, Eric Kronberg, architect developer and zoning whisperer of Atlanta, and many more.

My first five guests were responsible for over half a billion dollars of world-class urban development.

For me, podcasting had the same appeal as black-and-white photography. It strips out all the unnecessary variables that clutter the medium. In today’s technology, most “features” just make it harder to produce a quality thing. A good two-way podcast is just two people talking, cross-pollinating their expertise, searching for common ground and tensioned disagreement, and seeking to solve some problem. Everything else is just noise, and podcasts eliminate that noise.

I still engage regularly with most of my podcast guests through the NTBA (13 out of my 21 guests remain active members). Still, if it weren’t for Townbuilders, I would never have gotten that time—alone and uninterrupted—with any of them. I continue to be grateful for the opportunity.

RE-ISSUING THE GREATEST HITS

As I prepare to hand the mic to new host Levi Wintz, I wanted to re-publish some of my favorite conversations.

First up is a conversation with Lou Marquet, a founder of the NTBA organization and developer of at least four new towns, who passed away on March 10th of this year. Lou was among the most giving people I had ever met and radiated with his French Catholic traditions of excellence and charity. He was an invaluable mentor to me and hundreds of others, and it is worthy of his own separate obituary.

When Lou passed, he had just started as the lead developer on Sandy Point in Edenton, NC. Sandy Point is a 30-year project with 1100 homes. Lou was 75 at project commencement.

That tells you all you need to know about Lou's character and his many followers within the NTBA. They build towns not because it’s what they do but because it’s who they are. You never stop being who you are; you do that until the day you die, precisely what Lou did.

In our podcast talk, Lou revealed that during his 50 years of construction experience, he had been through recessions I had never heard of (each fascinating and different in their unique way). He also discussed how you treat your sub-contractors during good times, which can dictate how your company performs when the economy or projects go sideways.

Lou continues to be missed. I hope you enjoy my conversation with him as much as I did.

If you like these conversations and find them valuable, subscribe via your podcast service. That will help Levi continue the brand into 2025 and beyond. SUBSCRIBE HERE.

SERIES STRUCTURE

• Part 1: The Case for Mail Order Housing

• Part 2: The 4 Necessary Ingredients for Re-Launch of Mail-Order Housing

• Part 3: What the Pilot for Mail Order Housing Looks Like

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PART 2: THE 4 NECESSARY INGREDIENTS FOR RE-LAUNCH OF MAIL ORDER HOUSING

THE PACKING PROCESS

There are a few principles I follow when attempting to launch anything new.  

• First, whenever you are trying to do something complex, eliminate variables. 

• Second, the path from zero to one is far harder than one to two. 

• Both of these yield the need to answer one critical question: “What is the minimum viable product?” followed by “How can we most simply engineer that minimum viable product?”

When applied to mail-order housing, these principles take an otherwise extremely complex business and boil it down to four necessities: Land, Architecture, Supply Chain, and Capital.

These necessities are to be addressed linearly because each precedes the other:

1. With land, zoning informs the architecture

2. With architecture, takeoffs inform the supply chain needs

3. With supply chain needs, a budget is created, informing capital requirements 

Procedurally, this isn't all that different from a traditional stick-built home. The major innovation - an attempt to pull the sword from the stone - is the radical overhaul of the supply chain.  Packing an entire home into a single container is new, novel, and nuts.

Pondering this exercise, I took a small Allison Ramsey cottage (The Wharf) and Sears-ed it up. Doubling down, we even took the anachronistic Groucho-Marx syntax from the 1920s marketing catalog (the cat’s meow! the bee's knees!) and updated it for modern amenities. 

I then sought to find how much house would fit inside a single stock 20’ container.  The (very) rough findings? I can pack a 500-sf cottage in a standard 20-foot container. Maybe more. The contents include everything except the foundations, mechanicals, and plumbing pipe. 

That’s a lot of stuff in a small area. It’s basically an uber-efficiently flat-packed IKEA model on steroids.  

What’s in the Box?  Everything needed to construct the Wharf cottage, minus the foundation (which is too variable by project), and items that need to be licensed trade supplied like mechanical HVAC equipment and plumbing pipe. Everything else, from framing to cabinetry, sheetrock, flooring, windows, doors, roofing, and fixtures, is in there.

THE MAIL-ORDER REVOLUTION

Container-packing a new home could be revolutionary on a couple of levels:

1. Mail-order homes are perfect for small builders, including affordable home builders, who could eliminate the inevitable 100 trips to Lowe’s that burden each and every house (Click “purchase” button -> house show up -> build house). This eliminates substantial waste, saving money, time, and misery.

2. Mail-order homes are superior for building in remote areas far from supply houses. Those Lowe’s trips are particularly brutal if you are building in Northwest Nebraska or deep in the Smokies.  But a truck can deliver a fully pre-specified home in a single container, with all the parts numbered, anywhere in the world, and hundreds of trips are eliminated.

3. Lastly, container-packing gets around the fatal modular/manufactured problem, where a builder has to deal with inspectors in two locations (factory and site), which can become logistically and cost-prohibitive, particularly on small projects.

I have always believed that a viable model was here. And the exercise described above only made me more sure of it. It needs a major supplier or network to back the idea.  

I can imagine a future where a supply house has a dozen pre-packed containers ready to go and could custom pack containers with a 1-2 week lead time.  Builders, framers, and trim carpenters would love it.

As my friend Sam Bayer coached me, business is all about identifying constraints.  The constraints here?  The rebirth of mail-order housing is a huge operational lift to pilot and requires a fairly big capital raise. A pilot requires a builder/developer with land, too. It’s a slightly bizarre amalgamation of tech and development, and the start-up world and land development don’t overlap a lot, and there are a lot of failed companies in that overlapping space.

I’ll open source how I would prove the model in Part 3. 

Subscribe now

SERIES STRUCTURE

• Part 1: The Case for Mail Order Housing

• Part 2: The 4 Necessary Ingredients for Re-Launch of Mail-Order Housing

• Part 3: What the Pilot for Mail Order Housing Looks Like

PART 1: THE CASE FOR MAIL-ORDER HOUSING

I have a personal mission to bring back great architecture to my home state of North Carolina. For various reasons, North Carolina has a very low ratio of architectural quality to the education of the citizenry (I’ll unpack why in a separate post). My solution to this is simple: import the South’s best architecture to my backyard, much of it from the low country of Charleston and Savannah.  I do this in partnership with Beaufort, SC-based Allison Ramsey Architects (ARA), which owns the world’s largest stock plan catalog of traditional architecture homes.

Allison Ramsey’s offerings position it uniquely to facilitate a mail-order home business.  The company has been creating home plans for 40 years, longer than Sears ever did.  

At its peak, the Sears catalog had 850 plans. Allison Ramsey currently has 3500.

My role in this business model is fairly simple.  A) I know my local zoning code. B) Allison Ramsey has great plans. C) Most small builders are really good at following instructions but not good at navigating zoning or creating great architecture. I simply solve the problem by using A to deliver B to C. 

Almost exclusively, this model is as simple as identifying already completed plans - of homes that have been built from Charleston to Colorado, Beaufort to Belize- and aligning them with the pre-ordained regulatory constraints on a local owner’s survey. Sign, seal, and deliver.  Move on.  Easy peasy.

The stock plan model offers a load of opportunities for innovation in the industry.  In theory, all architects ponder re-selling stock plans.  Architects generally retain full copyrights to their drawings, even when their clients pay top dollar for them.  As intellectual property, they can, in theory, simply resell “your” plan to someone else.  In practice, very few ever do.

Bill Allison, one of the partners at Allison Ramsey, has been adding to his collection of intellectual property for 40 years.  Anyone can license them simply by going to the site.  In this way, ARA is the great democratizer of design, bringing quality architecture to the masses.

A niche within the stock plan business is mail-order housing, a model that largely disappeared when Sears shut down their division prior to World War II.  At the time, they had produced roughly 75,000 of the estimated 100,000 total kit homes built between 1908 and 1940.  Customers could choose from up to 447 different designs in Sears’ Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans —or they could submit their own designs—which Sears would then manufacture and deliver via railcar. 

For about $2,500, the home-buyer received a kit containing about 30,000 pieces, including everything from lumber to nails and hardware to paint and shingles, plus a book on how to construct the home. 

Even before the days of Amazon and intermodal shipping, mail orders worked remarkably well.  Sears was the Amazon of its day, with an unrivaled factory and supply chain networks.  

The materials for Sears’ mail-order homes were shipped to the nearest rail yard, and generally, they included everything you needed except the foundation and mechanicals.  From there, a builder would shuffle back and forth the pre-cut materials.  Many of those builders were full-time aligned with Sears.

In 2023, we have tools to execute the mail order plan even better: 

1. You can literally buy a home on Amazon at the touch of a button.

2. Intermodal containers allow for homes to be prepackaged anywhere in the world and delivered to your front yard relatively inexpensively, usually in weeks.

3. Computer Numerical Control (CNC) factories are set up to mass-produce materials with more efficiency and precision (including numbering and labeling) than ever before.

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A stock house for sale via Amazon. CNC Cut Cabinets via CNC RTA Cabinets - flat packable and snappable into final form at the site.

None of these three tools existed during the Sears home era. Nor was there a mass housing shortage, particularly serving 1-2 person households that are both 1) drastically undersupplied and 2) conveniently packable in a single container.

What prevents it from working, then? For that answer, stay tuned to part 2, and subscribe.

Subscribe now

SERIES STRUCTURE

• Part 1: The Case for Mail Order Housing

• Part 2: The 4 Necessary Ingredients for Re-Launch of Mail-Order Housing

• Part 3: What the Pilot for Mail Order Housing Looks Like

PART 3: WHAT THE PILOT FOR MAIL ORDER HOUSING LOOKS LIKE

All new ideas need a proof of concept, and this is particularly true of new construction and development models. Every generation has a new “this will totally change the construction industry” model, and traditionally they all fail. For better and worse, we have been building (and supplying) homes the same way for 140 years - through site-built stick framing.

The nature of housing is that it is expensive, and the industry is famously resistant to change, so testing new ideas can be incredibly capital-intensive. The other issue is that Silicon Valley is a graveyard of failed tech attempts to revolutionize housing (none bigger than the epic failure of Katerra). That’s a longer post for another day, but the main thesis, lifted from Devon Zuegel, is that tech exists in an almost completely unregulated world, where the brightest are freed to solve problems without constraint, and development, well, let’s just say, does not.  

Thus, the two industries often work together like oil and water, and techies who think they can solve the problems in development often get their asses kicked after misunderstanding the constraints of human unpredictability, intense regulatory realities, and the ever-increasing politicization of housing.

So, let’s talk pilot.  How do we prove this model? Given these constraints, how do we pull the sword from the stone?

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Mass timber (also known as cross-laminated timber or CLT) is a new construction technique that allows towers of 20+ stories to be supported only by wood.

There is no steel. There is no concrete—just wood.

I’ll get into the specifics and the predictable objections. But first, let me say this: it is hard to overstate the beauty of mass timber. 

I have the world's most contemptuous relationship with modern architecture, and I rarely find any 5+ story building attractive or inviting. Yet, by returning to the essence of nature - unpainted wood - something innately changes. 

Mass timber is creating a revolution in American building not seen since Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan melded the natural and industrial ambitions that defined the Chicago School. 

The next great building innovation is always being pitched. Most quickly come and go. But mass timber has staying power. You can see it gain a beachhead in Europe and the Pacific Northwest. This trip was designed to understand it more fully.

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It was a packed itinerary. We would be touring the continent’s best mass timber buildings, meeting with their architects, and interviewing the code reformers who are responsible for making these buildings possible.

The first building we observed on the trip featured the largest open-span glulams in North America. These massive wooden beams spanned 100’ between load points and were installed with little to no steel, bringing to life an otherwise bland, soulless, utilitarian building. 

These beams were so iconic that they alone defined the space with their sheer size, warming it with their golden red color. 

What beauty. What grandeur. It was both awe-inspiring and comfortable.

Of course, we hadn’t left North Carolina yet. We were in Terminal 2 of the Raleigh-Durham Airport.

The joy of this trip came in little reveals showing how North Carolina is intimately connected with the mass timber industry, mainly without even trying. 

Many of the paradigmatic buildings of North Carolina’s Renaissance are built with timber framing, such as the repurposed historic mills of Durham’s American Tobacco and Golden Belt.  

The difference between historic timber framing and modern mass timber is that the former is solid wood, and the latter is engineered. 

Old-growth wood (“timber timber”) is either in short supply or too valuable for structural components. 

But today, this mass timber technology emerging from Austria assembles standard 2x stock into floors, roofs, walls, and columns to create endless possibilities. 

American Tobacco was built with 12x12 solid timbers. American Tobacco Phase 2 (2025) may be built with seven 2x12s glued and pressed together to form 12x12 engineered timbers. 

They are different paths to the same end. Mass timber is simply a new method to honor an old building technique.  

The engineering, however, makes the wood cheaper, more dimensionally predictable, and less wasteful. 

On the waste side, the environmental benefits of mass timber are only starting to be understood. They appear to be game-changing. 

For starters, understand that steel and concrete are two of the worst environmental offenders on earth. Let’s start with the sad fact that cities are built almost entirely from steel and concrete. It is not sustainable. 

If these worst offenders can be largely removed, or their use substantially reduced and replaced with renewable wood, huge gains can be achieved.  

At scale, there are few better options for carbon capture than wood, which, over its growth cycle, captures and sequesters CO2 very efficiently.   Left to rot in the forest, the CO2 is slowly re-released into the atmosphere. However, it is captured when wood is harvested and put into cities. It is a carbon sink. Theoretically, it is captured permanently.

In fact, wood buildings may be the best carbon sink strategy man has thus far invented.

Even the head forester of Nature Conservancy said, “Grow it. Harvest it. Grow it again.” His directive - to timber the forest faster - took environmental absolutists by surprise. But he wasn’t wrong. Wood is the most sustainable product we have to work with.  

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The Pacific Northwest exists at the Mecca of the mass timber market. It is the epicenter of talent. It features seasoned designers, ambitious developers, and problem-solving politicians.

In this author's view, the most beautiful city in America is Seattle. It is only rivaled by its northern sister, Vancouver, the most beautiful city in North America.  

Seattle and Vancouver are the gates to Cascadia, with the world's largest and most productive forest. A temperate and remarkably northern rainforest, Cascadia runs from Northern California to Southern Alaska. It is home to a plurality of America’s logging industry.

I met with Architect Michael Green, whose TED talk became the rallying cry for the mass timber industry’s ambition and policy reforms. 

I told Green that I envied his local access to the unrivaled productivity of the British Columbian forests. Green replied “Actually, North Carolina pine trees grow to maximum yield in 20 years, British Columbia’s Douglas Fir take 70 to get there.”

In other words, according to Green, North Carolina forests were actually better suited for the smaller, quick-growth timber that the industry relies on. 

Another coincidence? Michael Green got his start working for Duda Paine, whose offices are in Durham.  

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We then toured the Bullitt Foundation’s landmark HQ, in the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill. The stunning building may be the greenest building in the country (for reference to that standard, your author is the at-risk developer of 2 LEED Platinum Buildings). 

The Bullitt Center is almost entirely built out of mass timber. The ceilings are assembled like a butcher block, stunningly beautiful and natural, and nothing more than simple 2x4s nailed together. The desks are gorgeous: simple vertical grain Douglas fir.  

The Bullitt Foundation specializes in safeguarding the natural environment by promoting responsible human activities and sustainable communities in the Pacific Northwest. 

Before touring the building, I had never heard of Bullitt. Where did the Bullitt’s create their wealth? We were told they made their money in North Carolina Timber (though an effort to verify it later pointed to Michigan and Kentucky roots).  

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The University of British Columbia built the tallest mass timber building in North America, an 18-story student dormitory. Remarkably, it took only six weeks to top out. 

Recreation centers across Vancouver are built with mass timber, creating an indescribably (and ironic) warm feel to ice hockey rinks. 

The snowball effect appears to yield tremendous growth, local industry, jobs, great design, and even affordability.  

America is clearly late to the game. And it’s an industry with nearly zero presence on the Eastern seaboard. Mostly, this is due to regulatory issues: mass timber is governed by the International Building Code Type-IV construction, which currently allows little flexibility to build over four stories. This forces mass timber to cost-compete with stick frame, where it does not pencil. 

The 2021 IBC code changes this, offering prescriptive paths to build 9, 12, and 18-story wood frame buildings, each with increasing life-safety requirements. Practitioners and code officials completed the research at building science centers, mainly in Cascadia.  

Then Oregon did a remarkable thing. They accelerated the code.  

In 2018, the State of Oregon took the 2021 code (which was already complete but unlikely to be adopted by states until 2021-2025) and made the mass timber section legal. As in right then and there. They accelerated adoption.

All it took was a simple vote of the legislature, which authorized its building agencies to accelerate its legality. The State of Washington followed suit in 2019. In both states, the adoption of the 2021 IBC mass timber code passed overwhelmingly with bipartisan support.  

Oregon and Washington then got a colossal jump start in creating the industry and now have dozens of mass timber buildings and a plurality of the industry and skilled trades.

So why not here? Why not in North Carolina? According to the most well-known thought leader in the industry, North Carolina is better positioned to be a leader in this industry than the Pacific Northwest. 

And Michael Green was only referring to the forestry stock. He made no mention of North Carolina’s intellectual capabilities, our relatively affordable quality of life, or our centrally located access to significant population centers, or our engineering schools at NCSU and Duke, or planning school at UNC, or architecture at State. Or the environmental programs at all three.

I was left to ponder the skyline of Raleigh as the epicenter of the East Coast mass timber industry, with Dix Park flanked by dozens, maybe hundreds, of locally grown, renewable wood buildings.  

Like Washington and Oregon, all it takes is 1 line of legislation. And that industrial and architectural future might be North Carolina’s destiny and rightful taking. North Carolina is behind. But there is no better time to catch up than right now.