…realized sort of right around 2020 that despite having built and and rehabbed and and improved these buildings, we had not added one unit to the housing stock of Los Angeles. And what has been a throughine of uh you know the last 15 plus years is how do we solve the affordable housing crisis?
…construction. You know, for for many years we um avoided government programs and we avoided um historically we've avoided things like low-income housing tax credits because very complicated, incredibly long timelines and to some degree drive up costs. Mhm. Um and hence the you know the headlines of of affordable housing being built for 700800 you know a million dollars a unit. Um but but opportunity zones was was different. It was a it you know despite some criticism it really has led to uh the creation of a large…
…myself that. You want to explain what it is first? Yeah. So, Model Z, you know, takes a unique approach to creating what we refer to as radically affordable housing. For us, it's all about basis. You've got to drive down the cost of construction. It is one of the major issues facing Los Angeles. It's one of the major issues facing California and the country, right? and and and when when the prices are getting to $700 to a million dollars to house someone, you know, that that barely has an income, it just is not…
…no sense. No manufacturing company would be structured that way. Yeah. And so what we do is we build the Honda Civic or the Toyota Prius maybe of affordable housing we can build at scale. It's repeatable. We were very fortunate um to hire a bunch of SpaceX SpaceX engineers and and people from the automotive industry that came with an incredible amount of manufacturing discipline. They set up the factory. They run the operations. They have done incredible things um to drive down the cost.