Student Hack-A-House trailblazers focus on housing’s bottlenecks

Brett Lewis grew up in Tucson, Arizona, watching the economics of homeownership change, or rather, spool up around him.His family built its own home in the early 2000s. Today, Lewis, a fourth-year architecture student at the University of Arizona, doubts he could afford to do the same, even with the education and professional skills he is gaining.“My entire family lives in a house that they bought in the past that they could never afford in the current market,” Lewis says. “I’m going to have the knowledge of design and building a house, but is it actually going to be attainable for me to do?”It’s a question millions of younger Americans face, and Lewis and four classmates approached it from an unusual angle.Rather than starting with the price of lumber, the availability of construction labor, or the cost of land, they kindled a hidden-in-plain-sight idea by looking in their immediate environs at dozens of vacant big-box retail buildings scattered across Tucson.What if those empty buildings could become small-scale factories producing components for new homes? And what if some of those homes could be assembled on the underused paved-over parking lots surrounding the buildings, placi...