Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 20 /Nov 28, 2025
How 100 homes in Maui could change disaster relief forever
Jordan Rogove & Wayne Norbeck, DXA Studio
Nov 28, 2025 /Real Estate, Cities & Housing
How 100 homes in Maui could change disaster relief forever
Jordan Rogove and Wayne Norbeck co-founded DXA Studio, a New York architecture practice, and Live Connected, a factory that builds pre-finished modular homes. After the 2023 Maui wildfires they shipped a hundred of those homes to the island. They know both sides of prefab: the design ambition and the regulatory wall that stops it.
Jordan Rogove & Wayne Norbeck, Co-founder at DXA Studio, DXA Studio
In this conversation
The FEMA trailer as the benchmark: eight and a half feet wide, eight and a half feet tall, a flat box people live in for years.
Why the pair spent five to ten percent more on windows and ceiling height, because natural light is a resource available to everyone.
Fifty visits to congressional offices, and the language they proposed to open the manufactured-housing code to a new kind of factory.
The Maui story from the first call to a hundred assembled homes, and what they would tweak next time.
Every project we've tried to do in California has been over two years of approvals and every client has just given up.
Jordan Rogove & Wayne Norbeck
Chapters
A studio and a factory
How an architecture studio came to own a factory.
Why housing hasn't scaled
The permitting structure that turns every factory-built house back into a one-off project.
By the numbers
Estimated shortfall of housing units in the United States at the end of 2020
Jordan says nobody is against affordable housing and regulation still stops it. This is the size of the hole the factory is trying to fill.
Source: Freddie Mac, Housing Supply: A Growing Deficit (2021) ↗Prices come down with volume
What volume does to cost once a factory can keep running.
Lenders and pushback
Where lenders and the existing industry push back.
A hundred homes for Maui
Shipping a hundred homes to an island after the fires.
The cost of regulatory compliance and the associated delays and holding costs can oftentimes be anywhere from 10 to 30% of the cost of any project.
Jordan Rogove & Wayne Norbeck
Takeaways
Every manufacturer chases the largest box that fits on a highway. Building in pieces that grow to 14 or 16 feet on site ships a house on one truck, pre-finished, assembled in hours.
Regulation, not manufacturing, is the hurdle. Every California project sat in approvals for two years until every client gave up; HUD's manufactured-housing code has reciprocity nationwide.
Compliance, delays and holding costs run 10 to 30 percent of a project. Texas pre-authorizing disaster housing before the storm is the model.
Natural light is a resource available to all of us.
Jordan Rogove & Wayne Norbeck