EXCLUSIVE: SpaceX Alum Says His ‘Lego’ Approach to Homebuilding Can Solve the Housing Crisis—and Cut Costs by 50%

American Housing Corp. is a vertically integrated real estate developer and manufacturing company based here that aims to construct pre-built “townhomes” in desirable urban neighborhoods across the United States.The factory-made components—such as pre-wired insulated wall panels, floors, stairs, roofing—are designed to be flat-packed in shipping containers and trucked to worksites where they are fitted together “like Lego” sets, says CEO and co-founder Riley Meik, to form three-story row houses.The company’s goal is to mass-produce “good homes in good neighborhoods at good prices,” one employee told me during a tour of AHC’s cavernous, 50,000-square-foot factory and the model townhouse next-door. Meik reckons that AHC can build housing at 30% to 50% of a conventional homebuilder’s cost. A mechanical engineer by training, Meik quit Brigham Young University to start Evolution Space, a rocket-launching company propelling payloads into suborbital space for scientific research.He was subsequently hired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX to work on Starship’s aeronautic flaps. A trio of co-founders with experience in manufacturing, engineering, software, and real estate development round out AHC’s le...