Housing affordability has emerged as a critical constraint on economic growth, inflation progress, and Federal Reserve policy decisions. As supply shortages persist and financing costs remain elevated, housing dynamics are increasingly influencing consumer behavior, labor mobility, and market sensitivity—making housing a central variable in the broader U.S. economic and market outlook.

US Economy

 

 

The calendar-year total deficit was $1.67 trillion, the smallest in three years, …

 

 

… largely due to a record $264 billion in tariff revenue.

 

 

Here’s an interesting comparison of residential electricity costs. Rates in Beijing, China’s most expensive city, are well below even the lowest US electricity costs found in Idaho. The US average is almost double the average of China’s 36 largest cities. The gap is even wider between China and other countries like Japan, France and the UK.

 

 

The Chinese government has pursued an “all-of-the-above” approach to power generation, including natural gas, coal, hydro, wind, solar, nuclear and more. While the chart shows residential rates, we can assume a commercial rate comparison would look similar. That gives China’s highly automated factories a big advantage.

Headline retail sales rose 0.6% and the key “control group”—a direct input for GDP—rose 0.4%, signaling resilient underlying consumer demand through November. The strength was broad-based across categories.

 

 

US Stock Market

 

68% of S&P 500 stocks are above their 200-day moving averages, the first time in over three months. Similar breadth recoveries have been followed by a higher S&P 500 nine months later every time since 2003.

Small caps have outperformed large-cap shares for eight consecutive days.

 

The Fed

 

Financial conditions remain very easy, which should be supportive of growth.

 

 

Headline inflation for December was in line with consensus, while core inflation was a touch lower than expected.

 

Solving the Housing Crisis

 

Studies show rising housing costs explain roughly half of the fertility decline in America between 2000 and 2020.

That’s millions of kids who were never born because the rent was too high.

We know the solution: Build. More. Housing.

Yet we’re building homes today slower than we did in 1971.

Over the last decade venture capitalists incinerated billions of dollars betting on startups that promised to fix housing. They all failed.

Introducing –  Cuby Technologies

Cuby doesn’t build houses. It builds the factories that build houses. It took an entire automotive-grade production line—robotics, CNC machines, welding stations—and packed it into approximately 122 shipping containers.

Cuby’s product is the Mobile Micro-Factory (MMFTM). It’s a standardized, portable factory that turns homebuilding into a predictable manufacturing process.

When Tesla hit “production hell” in Fremont, it couldn’t get permission to build a new facility fast enough. So Elon put up a massive tent in the parking lot. Because it was a “temporary structure,” he bypassed the zoning nightmare and saved the company.

This hack allows Cuby to stand up an MMF, capable of pumping out 200 homes per year, in just 30 days. Cuby broke the construction process down into 35 different departments. Walk past one container and inside is a dedicated welding robot fusing steel foundations. Move to the next container, and it’s a specialized paint booth coating the exterior panels.

The containers snap together to form a conveyor belt that takes raw materials—steel coils, glass, resin—and spits out a complete “kit of parts” to build a home:

Every stud, pipe, wire, and floorboard needed for a specific house is flat-packed.

Cuby = affordable homes.

Cuby’s target cost is $100 to $110 per square foot. That’s far cheaper than traditional builders that spend $150 to $300+ per square foot depending on location.

Cubby’s first US test home in Michigan had zero permitting issues. The home was built under 60 working days at 30% to 40% below local contractor quotes!

To a building inspector, a Cuby home looks like a normal house, just built with unusually high precision.

Cuby is basically…

A software company wrapped in steel

For 50 years progress was trapped in a narrow cone of software, apps and the web. That’s why your phone is a supercomputer, but your house is still built like it’s 1925.

Now that cone is widening into the physical world. Cuby manually mapped out the 10,000 steps required to build a house from scratch. It filmed every process, wrote code for every action, and built it into a system called “FactoryOS.”

This is Cuby’s secret sauce. It’s LEGO instructions on steroids.

FactoryOS spits out 3D instructions for every single screw in the house. It’s built on Unreal Engine, the same video game engine used for Fortnite. These digital guides allow even an idiot like me who struggles to assemble an IKEA desk to build a house.

The software also acts as a relentless quality control manager. For example, it won’t let a worker move to the next step until the AI visually confirms the last step is perfect.

There’s a reason I call Cuby “the Henry Ford for homes.”

Before Ford pioneered the assembly line, building cars relied heavily on highly skilled craftsmen. Ford’s innovations simplified the process and drastically reduced build time. Cuby’s software does the same for homes.

Its digitally guided microtask system atomizes assembly. Four workers (in two shifts) can go from foundation through finishes in roughly 45–60 days. Cuby plans to drive this under 30 days.

Ultimately the only thing that matters is: Can Cuby build homes faster and cheaper?

Yes. Labor accounts for roughly 70% of the cost of building a home, depending on location. Cuby’s FactoryOS aims to slash that by over 80%.

Today a traditional construction crew burns about 450 minutes of human sweat to finish a single square foot of a house. Cuby does the exact same work in 50 minutes.

A traditional builder needs over 15,000 hours of labor to go from foundation to move-in ready for a standard 2,000-square-foot family home. Cuby crosses the same finish line in just 1,659 hours. It’s building the same house with one-ninth the human effort.

This allows Cuby to pump out more affordable homes while not compromising on quality. Its houses come with steel framing and triple-pane windows, typically luxuries in the US.

“A 25-year-old schoolteacher in North Carolina no longer spends her weekends touring open houses she can’t afford. She opens an app to design her house like she’s playing The Sims.

You can drag and drop rooms, see the exact cost update in real-time, push a button to see available plots and finally click order. The MMF gets to work, and she moves in one month later.”

 

Great Quotes

 

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Victor E. Frankl

 

Picture of the Week

 

 

 

All content is the opinion of Brian Decker