Housing’s biggest challenges don’t thwart progress in isolation, they team up. They break apart efforts to solve them from all angles. They connect, interrelate, interdepend, and helically nourish one another. And altogether, they thread into the woven fabrics of society, capital, human and natural laws, and our deepest beliefs and values around home.

Solutions for those flashpoint housing challenges – attainable access, climate and economic resiliency, sustainable, healthy homes and communities, and a renewable bloodline of talented human solutions seekers, operators, and frontline team members – are only ever real when they add up to an amalgam of capabilities that bring these swirling inertial powers together and defuse them.

In this sense, innovation is not simply a transformative building technology process, as much as that counts in the equation of expanding the access box for working households to attain decent housing in the vicinity of their livelihoods.

Rather, it’s the transformation of the entire development and building lifecycle, from the dirt to the banks to the construction and assembly to the financing and the holistic operating costs of the home.

In this context, a press release today breaks through the noise, and so doing, speaks volumes.

The News

Clayton, a leading national builder of single-family attainable housing, partnered with Georgia Manufactured Housing Association to unveil a new urban infill project showcasing two Clayton Built® CrossMod homes developed by

Image source: Clayton Homes

Per the press statement:

Atlanta is an example of a city allowing innovative housing solutions to help promote the Yes In My Back Yard (YIMBY) movement, which advocates for increasing housing supply in cities where housing has become unaffordable, and provide a path for attainable homeownership,” said Ramsey Cohen, Director of Industry and Community Affairs at Clayton. “It is critical that we find ways to increase attainable homeownership in cities across the nation, and the acceptance of CrossMod in Atlanta is a major step toward accomplishing that goal.”

In an earlier piece on Clayton Homes, we wrote:

Scores of new companies, pioneering companies, extraordinarily talented and energized companies have started-up in the past dozen or so years in the homebuilding technology space, promising to fill that void, to work at housing affordability’s nexus of apples and oranges.

Many of them are in early, or medium-phase stages of their business model and operational development. In today’s capital investment risk environment, many of them are in a race with time because they’re up against a common predicament: they’ve got to scale to become profitable; and if they don’t become profitable, they’re runway to scale will be cut short.

One company – a strapping 67-year-old producer of homes – already stands at that nexus, where apples and oranges belong in the same consideration set: It is a Berkshire Hathaway company called Clayton Homes, whose ceo is 59-year-old Kevin Clayton.

Last week’s Veev story reminded us again, to solve for housing’s hardest, most chronically stubborn problems, you’ve got to zero in on a solution that puts them all into sync.

Underneath all of this, where Clayton stands apart from all of the other technology and manufacturing-powered start-ups that aim to make the world better by making housing affordable is this.

Those vaunted startups are mostly trying to disrupt and transform the cost of building.

What Clayton does – and does so profitably, sustainably, and in an operation that considers both team members and customers as equal priorities – is to disrupt the cost of owning.