Of horses and houses

The Boxabl story and how the Fed just flipped the market

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Cars are the most American thing I can think of. There’s nothing like the feeling of freedom and control that you get while zooming along the interstate, putting on your Spotify road-trip playlist, and singing along with friends. It’s surprising to think that 150 years ago, none of these existed.

In fact, the headline crisis of the late 1800s was the horse problem. New York was a bustling city even back then, and people needed to get from one place to another. There were anywhere from 100,000-200,000 horses in just Brooklyn and Manhattan! And where there’s a lot of horses, there’s a lot of… horse manure. New York and London were being inundated with filth, and waste management was a massive problem. On top of this, a working horse’s life expectancy was only around 3 years, so horse carcasses started piling up as well. There’s a reason I’m painting this gross picture, stay with me.

If you were living in London in 1894, you would have woken up to the news above. Of course, this never came to pass – because cars were invented. Horses were slowly phased out of existence, and if you’re walking around New York these days, you wouldn’t have a clue about what it was like back then. Since then, the “Great Horse Manure crisis of 1894” has often been quoted as an example of how insurmountable problems from the present point of view are usually solved by new technology.

But there’s a point that this story misses – the first car was patented by Benz in 1886, 8 years before the crisis. Nobody thought the car was a solution to the horse problem. It was a luxury novelty item. Cars are now affordable for almost every American household because Henry Ford found a way to manufacture them cheaply. By stripping down a car to a minimal design and making the parts interchangeable, he made it faster and cheaper than ever to make a car. The cheaper things are to make, the more people they can reach.

Since then, the assembly line principles that Ford perfected have been adopted by almost every industry – except my favorite one, housing. You see, despite all the advancements made in production over the last century, construction is still pre-industrial: houses are not built in factories, and they can’t be moved around, stacked, or customized.

That might sound like a pipe dream, but that’s exactly what Paolo Tiramani and his team are making a reality at Boxabl.

By designing foldable and portable houses and manufacturing them in a factory, Boxabl aims to bring down the cost and time it takes to build a house, and rethink the whole concept of owning a home. Elon Musk was one of their first customers! Check out the video where I tour their factory, learn about their process, and discuss what the future looks like for housing.

What do you think the housing industry will look like 20 years from now? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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The Fed just bailed out the market

So here’s what happened the last month if you missed it. Layoffs are putting downward pressure on the employment market, and we might be poised for the biggest downsizing we have seen since 2008. Retail sales are falling and taking inflation down with them. The real estate market is slowing down… And you know what? All of this might be actually good news – because it shows that the Fed’s plan is working the way they intended it to.

Just two days back, the Fed lowered the rate hike to 25 basis points after two months of silence, signaling that higher rate increases could be coming to an end. On the other hand, some experts think that if the Fed backs down now, it could cause a 1970s-like situation. Here’s everything you need to know about where this will go in the coming months:

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So that’s it for my Sunday round-up. For the new folks here, in this newsletter, I give a quick recap of whatever you may have missed over the week on Sunday, and on Wednesday, I will be doing my deep-dive article on one of these topics.

See you next week with another bunch of exciting videos!

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