Building Swell

SF’s tackling one of construction’s biggest roadblocks: permitting. The mayor's new plan cuts fees and opens the door for more ADUs. He called the current system “death by a thousand cuts” — and anyone who’s built in the city knows he’s right. 👉bit.ly/4nnG0VS

The AI boom has a problem. Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI are spending hundreds of billions on new data centers, but the U.S. doesn’t have enough people to build them. Without new ways to build, the bottleneck isn’t compute power. It’s people. 🖇️cnb.cx/4nBRSn2

Canada committed $9.4B to launch Build Canada Homes, a new agency focused on delivering factory-built housing on federal land. The first wave? 4,000 modular homes, built off-site to speed up delivery and lower costs. 👉bloom.bg/47ulugk

A new paper consolidates decades of prefab studies. Two things stuck out. 🏗️ Cost advantages kick in at scale (~1,000 units/year). 👷‍♀️ Social benefits like safety + skill growth are real but under-studied. 🔗 bit.ly/47GZDU3

📰 enr.com/articles/61298…

Construction lost 7k jobs in August. Tariffs, policy whiplash, and immigration enforcement are all being cited as reasons projects are pausing or disappearing. Labor shortages aren’t going away. The economy depends on construction. Prefab can help fill the gap.

Construction is always up-and-down. When things slow down, shops scramble. When things speed up, they’re overloaded, behind, and burning out their best people. That cycle is exhausting. And it’s not sustainable. That’s what we built this guide for 👉 bit.ly/4mqiN4Z

📰 bisnow.com/national/news/…

Modular hit 9% of multifamily starts. Currently, the financing model is holding things back. Modular projects need more capital up front, but most lenders are still working off old draw schedules. That’s what the ROAD to Housing Act in Congress is trying to fix.

Read more here: techcrunch.com/2025/08/11/for…

Ford is ripping up its own rulebook. They’re tossing the assembly line and dropping $2B to rework how vehicles get built—fewer parts, faster cycles, and a big hit of automation. And it’s the only way to close the gap between what we need to build and how fast we can build it.

In the 1940s, we built 3 Liberty ships/day. In the 1960s, Apollo scaled a national supply chain from scratch. What will it take to move that fast again? We break it down--what prefab unlocks and why this feels like a new industrial moonshot. 👉 bit.ly/4l2uQo8

Read more here 👉 spectrum.ieee.org/chips-act-map

$30B in CHIPS Act projects were committed by the end of 2024. Since then, it’s been pretty quiet. Manufacturers still have a big backlog. Demand for chips hasn’t dropped and the infra those facilities need is already behind. Projects will stack up. Prefab shops should be ready.

📰 whitehouse.gov/presidential-a…

An Executive Order... for data center infrastructure. On July 23, the White House ordered fed agencies to speed up permitting for the infrastructure behind these projects—all the components that bring power to the rack. Prefab shortens the distance between permit and power-up.

Read more here 👉 #citation" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">rand.org/pubs/research_…

Power demand is growing 10x faster than utilities planned for. Utilities got a surge in demand—driven by EV factories, data centers, and the more electrification. The grid just isn’t ready. We need to build more infrastructure—and fast. Prefab is how we speed up.

👉 manufacturingdive.com/news/us-manufa…

“We’re entering a new era where energy, manufacturing, and economic prosperity are deeply intertwined.” – GE Vernova CEO If that’s true, prefab has a lot of catching up to do.