1.6 Billion People Lack Adequate Housing. Here's How We Can Fix This

Affordable Housing

In 2005, when the United Nations last attempted to conduct a global survey regarding the issue, data showed that there were about 100 million people who were homeless worldwide. A follow up study conducted by Habitat in 2015 showed that there were 1.6 billion people lacking adequate housing. And in the United States alone, as of January 2015, 564,708 people didn’t have homes.

But XPRIZE hopes to do something about these statistics—by finding a way a to construct mass housing, for a fraction of the cost and time it traditionally takes to do so.

To that end, Bosa Properties is now backing one of the nine teams chosen by XPRIZE, the Affordable Housing Visioneers Team, led by Yaron Schwarcz, to address issues such as providing accessible and affordable housing through innovation in things like construction technology, speed, and safety. The goal is to allow the development of high-density housing that is truly affordable and accessible.

Key Partnerships

It is hoped that the partnership forged between Bosa Properties and XPRIZE will help see traditional mass housing cost be cut down by a third and speed up construction significantly.

"We are not satisfied with the pace of innovation in the real estate industry and we see this as an opportunity to push technological innovation," says Colin Bosa, CEO of Bosa Properties. "By leading this Affordable Housing challenge, we believe we can help shape the future of our industry by inspiring bold and audacious solutions to help solve this worldwide crisis."

Once they manage to bring these solutions forth, they could be adopted by municipal governments and housing authorities to address the deficit in the housing supply.

"We are partnering with XPRIZE in order to harness the power and braintrust of the global-crowd in order to push technological innovation, just as it has been done in most other industries, such as in automotive and aerospace," adds Bosa.

Ideas will be presented later this month at the Visioneers Summit, where a team (or teams) will be chosen at this year's XPRIZE competition. You can follow the developments here.