Why Affordable Housing Still Isn’t Served Warm: Too Many Chefs, No Recipe

 

Every time I attend the International Builders’ Show, housing conferences, and meetings, I hear hundreds of brilliant people talk about how to fix housing. Affordable housing. Disaster housing. Workforce housing. Homelessness.

And this year, I’m attending with the same uncomfortable feeling I always have.

It’s not that the speakers are wrong. Most of them are smart. Well-meaning. Passionate. Dedicated. Many have spent their careers studying the problem. But when you sit through enough of these sessions, you begin to realize something troubling.

We’ve created an industry filled with chefs—but few good tasty recipes.

Imagine housing as a giant commercial kitchen. Forty world-class chefs walk in, each carrying their own ingredients. One believes the solution is modular. Another says zoning reform. A third pushes subsidies. A fourth wants technology. A fifth argues for design. A sixth insists financing is the only real problem.

None of them are wrong. But few of them are working together.

Instead of following a shared recipe, each chef starts cooking their own dish. They compete for attention, funding, and influence. They debate. They present slides. They talk about scalability. They critique each other’s approaches. They host panels. They create white papers.

Meanwhile, the people waiting for the meal—the builders, factory owners, developers, inspectors, tradespeople, and ordinary families—are still hungry.

And the kitchen?

It becomes a disaster.

Counters are cluttered. Ingredients are wasted. Time is gone. The fire alarm is ringing. Investors grow impatient. Communities lose trust. Builders walk away. Factories struggle. Projects stall. Regulations multiply. Costs rise.

And then something remarkable happens.

The chefs leave the room.

Not intentionally. They simply move on to the next conference, the next initiative, the next pilot program, the next grant cycle.

And ordinary people walk into the kitchen.

They weren’t invited. They weren’t keynote speakers. They don’t have a slide deck or a research paper. But they know something the chefs sometimes forget.

They know how to clean up.

They organize the mess. They figure out what ingredients are still usable. They throw away what doesn’t work. They put tools back in their place. They simplify. They communicate. They cooperate. They start over.

They don’t argue about who is right. They just want to get dinner on the table.

These are the real problem solvers in our industry. The offsite factory manager trying to hit production targets. The builder juggling supply chains and labor shortages. The developer fighting zoning battles. The transport company moving modules through impossible regulations. The inspector trying to keep projects moving without sacrificing safety.

They are embarrassed the professionals couldn’t work together.

But just as the kitchen begins to function again, the chefs return.

New ideas. New presentations. New funding. New frameworks. And the cycle starts all over.

This is why housing progress feels so slow. Not because we lack ideas. Not because we lack technology. Not because we lack passion.

We lack alignment.

At IBS this week, I hope we start asking a different question. Not “What is your solution?” but “How does your solution fit into a shared recipe?”

Because housing isn’t a single dish. It’s a coordinated meal. It requires planners, regulators, manufacturers, builders, investors, and communities to follow a common process—even if they bring different ingredients.

The offsite industry, in particular, understands this better than most. A factory cannot succeed unless design, engineering, production, transportation, site work, and financing all move together. One delay, one disconnect, and the entire system suffers.

Maybe the real opportunity isn’t another innovation.

Maybe it’s collaboration.

Maybe the most powerful person at IBS this year won’t be the keynote speaker or the visionary founder.

Maybe it will be the person quietly helping everyone else work together.

Because until we agree on the recipe, we will keep hosting conferences about hunger while the people we serve are still waiting for dinner.

And if we don’t change that soon, the ordinary people in our industry will keep cleaning up the mess—while the chefs keep talking about the next meal.

Gary Fleisher—known throughout the industry as The Modcoach—has been immersed in offsite and modular construction for over three decades. Beyond writing, he advises companies across the offsite ecosystem, offering practical marketing insight and strategic guidance grounded in real-world factory, builder, and market experience.