Pittsburgh-based Module was awarded $3 million as a winner of the 2023 Housing Affordable Breakthrough Challenge.
The $20 million national competition finds and seeds innovative housing solutions and selected six recipients from a field of 400-plus. It is run by the Wells Fargo Foundation and Enterprise Community Partners. Winners were announced on Tuesday.
Module, a mission-oriented modular housing company founded in 2016, is receiving $3 million to expand its Last Mile Network, a partnership with affordable housing developers and local communities, to bring the power of prefabricated homes to an urban context.
This starts with an expansion of Garfield-based Module’s facility. It then will develop new facilities in Baltimore and Prince George’s County, Maryland, and Richmond, Virginia, building 100 all-electric affordable homes and hiring and training a local workforce who will also receive an equity stake in the business.
“There is incredible demand across all types of communities for affordable housing solutions that are tailored to local needs and have the potential to scale,” Jacqueline Waggoner, president of the Solutions Division at Enterprise Community Partners, said in a prepared statement “The Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge enables leaders on the ground to multiply their impact nationwide. We are so excited to work with this second cohort of winners to bring their ideas to the next level.”
The competition drew more than 400 applications from a wide range of innovative nonprofit and mission-driven for-profit organizations stretching from Florida to Alaska in three categories: Access and Resident Support, Construction — Module’s category — and Financing.
After two application rounds, 16 finalists were invited to present their innovations in a 10-minute pitch to a panel of judges. The 2023 winners will take part in a multi-year peer learning network to share ideas and cultivate their innovations into solutions that can be applied to communities across the U.S., and they will gain access to a network of leaders from across the housing sector.
Module in June told the Business Times that it had interested customers in Prince George’s County for its all-electric Accessory Dwelling Unit, which was unveiled at the 2023 Innovative Housing Showcase on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It had been invited to participate by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
