2 minute readLeft: Vaughan Buckley, CEO of Volumetric Building Companies
Right: Hal Hinkle, CEO of BamCore
Two building technology pioneers – Philadelphia-based New construction added nearly 5.4 million units to the national stock from 2010 to 2019, accounting for only 7% of owner-occupied housing stock in 2019. Owner-occupied homes constructed between 2000 and 2009 make up 15% of the housing stock. But more than half of the owner-occupied homes were built before 1980, with around 38% built before 1970. Due to modest gains of housing construction, the share of new construction built within past 9 years declined greatly, from 15% in 2006 to only 7% in 2019. Meanwhile, the share of housing stock built 50 year ago or earlier increased significantly from 30% in 2009 to 37% in 2019. So owner-occupied homes in the U.S. now average almost 40 years old, another metric source of pull. In that context of powerful urgent constraint, a strategic commitment and investment private-sector solution that specifically weights housing’s more-better-faster go-get as an achievable bar of ambition shines meaningfully, especially in harsher, meaner, and gloomier moments for housing. Buckley says above that a motivator underlying the partnership is to get-ahead of the curve of regulators and code officials. There’s hardly a business strategy in existence that thrives by waiting for mandates to fall into place before developing solutions to eclipse their sway. Even more than that, Buckley tells The Builder’s Daily, the real matter depends on a business’ capacity to reimagine what industrialized construction means and how it works in a way that fully integrates both durability, quality, and carbon optimized construction and building performance. As a start, the two partners will team to design, produce, and engineer wall panel assemblies that extend the length, and load-bearing capacities of BamCore systems for Type 3-style mid-to-high rise buildings common for affordable housing communities. Carbon neutrality and affordability are two of the many things that need to go into the solution rather than being disentangled and pulled out of it, and we’ve recognized bamboo as a key opportunity area building material for some time now,” says Buckley. “We [VBC] will co-fund the development necessary, provide design resources, develop the factory tooling and platform implementation, and go through the multiple phases of testing and approvals for the BamCore structural assemblies in all of our VBC branded affordable housing products and beyond.” Hinkle too sees attainable and sustainable not as opposing goals, but as part and parcel of a single one, to source plentiful, highly renewable materials that perform as well or better than those currently commonly used in construction, as a means to both bend the cost curve and bend the embodied carbon curve to reduce CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a misperception to say that building affordably means lower quality or lower standards on on the sustainability front,” says Hinkle. “We’re out to demonstrate persuasively that the market should consider affordable and sustainable buildings as equally achievable and equally essential.”Join the conversation
![Image courtesy of NAHB Eye on Housing New construction added nearly 5.4 million units to the national stock from 2010 to 2019, accounting for only 7% of owner-occupied housing stock in 2019. Owner-occupied homes constructed between 2000 and 2009 make up 15% of the housing stock. But more than half of the owner-occupied homes were built before 1980, with around 38% built before 1970. Due to modest gains of housing construction, the share of new construction built within past 9 years declined greatly, from 15% in 2006 to only 7% in 2019. Meanwhile, the share of housing stock built 50 year ago or earlier increased significantly from 30% in 2009 to 37% in 2019. So owner-occupied homes in the U.S. now average almost 40 years old, another metric source of pull. In that context of powerful urgent constraint, a strategic commitment and investment private-sector solution that specifically weights housing’s more-better-faster go-get as an achievable bar of ambition shines meaningfully, especially in harsher, meaner, and gloomier moments for housing. Buckley says above that a motivator underlying the partnership is to get-ahead of the curve of regulators and code officials. There’s hardly a business strategy in existence that thrives by waiting for mandates to fall into place before developing solutions to eclipse their sway. Even more than that, Buckley tells The Builder’s Daily, the real matter depends on a business’ capacity to reimagine what industrialized construction means and how it works in a way that fully integrates both durability, quality, and carbon optimized construction and building performance. As a start, the two partners will team to design, produce, and engineer wall panel assemblies that extend the length, and load-bearing capacities of BamCore systems for Type 3-style mid-to-high rise buildings common for affordable housing communities. Carbon neutrality and affordability are two of the many things that need to go into the solution rather than being disentangled and pulled out of it, and we’ve recognized bamboo as a key opportunity area building material for some time now,” says Buckley. “We [VBC] will co-fund the development necessary, provide design resources, develop the factory tooling and platform implementation, and go through the multiple phases of testing and approvals for the BamCore structural assemblies in all of our VBC branded affordable housing products and beyond.” Hinkle too sees attainable and sustainable not as opposing goals, but as part and parcel of a single one, to source plentiful, highly renewable materials that perform as well or better than those currently commonly used in construction, as a means to both bend the cost curve and bend the embodied carbon curve to reduce CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a misperception to say that building affordably means lower quality or lower standards on on the sustainability front,” says Hinkle. “We’re out to demonstrate persuasively that the market should consider affordable and sustainable buildings as equally achievable and equally essential.” Join the conversation](https://develop.housingwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/image-3.png 960w){kind=link}