Rundles Roundup: Colorado housing innovation needed to revive the American dream

This Rundles Roundup column appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of ColoradoBiz titled, “The American Dream-On.”

As I stare out of my home office window, watching crews begin construction on a new house next door, I am struck by a comment I heard on a podcast recently that pointed out that we still build houses these days the same way we have built them for a hundred years: by hand, stick by stick.

Within a week, on another radio program, I heard a senior executive of Warby-Parker, the eyeglass maker, talk about how they came up with the idea of streamlining the eyeglass market because it seemed “too expensive,” and launched a juggernaut by modernizing the optical marketplace.

Then I was musing about other innovations, like the apocryphal story of the FedEx founder imagining such a package-delivery system during his business school studies and receiving a poor grade because the professor thought it was impossible. He proved the professor wrong by ignoring education and fundamentally changed an entire industry, indeed created a new industry, and made a fortune in the process.

So many things – products, services, conveniences – have been improved and made more cost-effective through technology, innovation, entrepreneurialism, ingenuity, persistence and just plain dumb luck, that it’s absolutely mind-boggling that home building really hasn’t changed over the last century.

Many of the new ideas and innovations that arise address a fundamental need to lower costs and create efficiencies that, essentially, target affordability for the general public over the previous standard.

This is key, as the term “affordability” has become an economic buzzword in the last year or so – especially as it relates to housing. All over the country, and right here in many Colorado communities and neighborhoods, affordability has become a key complaint in the housing market what with an overall housing shortage and rising and persistently high mortgage rates.

Indeed, the generations coming of age now – the latter part of the Millennials and the emerging Gen Zers – have largely written off the home ownership aspect of The American Dream as a pipe dream, simply unattainable. It is quickly becoming the American Dream-On.

This is a distressing trend, a fundamental shift in the trajectory of the United States over the last 80 years, where each succeeding generation had the same ideals and expectations to do better than the last generation.

Home ownership has long been a reliable pathway if not to wealth then at least to a kind of financial stability that has sustained economic growth for each new generation. It would be in all our best interests to reverse this trend.

Like in other parts of the economy where innovators have reimagined existing strategies and created better, more sustainable methods for delivering goods and services, we need Dreamers to tackle all aspects of the housing market and develop a better pathway. There are emerging construction strategies, such as additive manufacturing (also called 3-D printing), but we also need innovation in finance and real estate.

A recent study placed Colorado as the seventh most expensive state in the union for residential land costs, with residential lots costing $942,200 per acre in 2022, up from $343,800 per acre in 2012, nearly a three-fold increase in 10 years, one of the fastest gains in the country. This is unsustainable.

I want my children and my grandchildren to aspire to the kind of America my generation has enjoyed, and it is depressing to think they don’t dream as we did. The American Dream, however you define it, is more than just housing: it is fundamentally about the future of the country itself. If we lose our aspirations, we all lose.

I don’t have the answers, but as I look at the new house going in next door, built with the same techniques homebuilders used a century ago, I know there has to be a better way. This is a wake-up call for innovators and entrepreneurs to imagine a greater pathway forward for affordable housing and the American Dream, sooner rather than later.

I do, however, have high hopes. I have lived long enough and seen enough crises and emergencies that I am confident that, perhaps at the 11th hour, solutions will present themselves.

I can dream, can’t I?