Building Tomorrow: A Special Look at the Future of Housing
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“Building Tomorrow” is a special collaboration between Marketplace and This Old House Radio Hour that asks a simple but urgent question: How do we build homes that can last the next hundred years?
From wildfire rebuilds to factory-built housing, this hour explores how new materials, new methods, and new ideas about community are reshaping the future of housing in America. Hosted by Jenn Largesse and Marketplace’s David Brancaccio, the episode blends reporting, lived experience, and hard science to show what’s possible right now.
In this episode, you’ll learn about:
- A massive prefab factory where homes are built like cars on an assembly line.
- A disaster research campus where engineers crash-test houses against hurricanes, hail, and wildfire.
- A cutting-edge micro factory using software and small factories to build homes faster, locally, and at scale.
- Touring a pioneering cross-laminated timber home built as a living case study in low-carbon construction.
- How a 100-year-old house is transformed into a net-zero, future-ready home.
- A tiny-house community redefining retirement, aging, and what “home” really means.
Note: In the segment featuring Aloe Blacc's prefabricated home, the exterior is made of cement fiber, but the interior is not. The home's fire resilience comes from a combination of steel framing, fiber cement siding, and triple-pane windows.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is David Brancaccio. I'm excited now to share a special collaboration between Marketplace and this old house radio hour. Normally, this old house focuses on the everyday questions of home, repairs, projects, how to take better care of the place you live. But for this episode, Marketplace has joined forces as we step back and look at something especially urgent. How do we build for the |
| 0:22.6 | next hundred years at a time of climate and weather-fed disasters? I've been facing this as one of the |
| 0:28.4 | many thousands who lost a home when the Southern California fires a year ago. What does it really |
| 0:33.6 | mean to build homes that are resilient, affordable, and ready for the future? All of this is playing out at a time when experts estimate that the U.S. needs to build between 2 and 5 million new places to live |
| 0:46.3 | to ease the crisis in affordability. This hour asks a simple but urgent question, not just how we build houses, |
| 0:53.3 | but how we build enough of |
| 0:55.4 | them fast enough, resilient enough, comfortable enough for our changing times. |
| 1:00.2 | Welcome to Building Tomorrow. |
| 1:04.5 | From Marketplace and This Old House Radio Hour, it's Building Tomorrow. |
| 1:08.9 | A special look at the future of housing, brought to you by |
| 1:11.6 | LASD and APM, American Public Media. I'm Jen Largis. And I'm Marketplace's David Brancaccio. |
| 1:17.2 | This hour explores how new materials, new methods, and new expectations are reshaping how |
| 1:23.0 | homes are built and the way we live in them. We'll visit a factory in California where houses are built like cars on an assembly line. |
| 1:30.4 | And a research facility in South Carolina where engineers destroy full-scale houses to learn how to save them. |
| 1:37.8 | Some people would say we crash test houses here. |
| 1:41.1 | In East Texas, a tiny house community is rewriting the rules of retirement. I didn't need |
| 1:46.0 | amenities. My amenity was going to be my community. A wave of material innovation is reshaping home |
| 1:52.4 | construction. But first, the news right after this. This old house radio hour is supported by the Home Depot, helping customers with tools and |
| 2:03.8 | guidance on any project, from installation to inspiration, the Home Depot, how doers get more done. |
| 2:23.4 | This is building tomorrow, a special look at the future of housing from Marketplace and This Old House Radio Hour. |
| 2:25.0 | I'm Jen Largess. |
| 2:27.0 | We begin in Altadena, California, where Marketplace host David Brancaccio's home used to be. |
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