Google’s secretive think tank may be the key to solving the housing crisis

Google Corporation building sign. Photo credit: lightpoet / 123RF Stock Photo.

In this article on our episode on Predicting Our Future, a podcast about the next revolutions in technology as seen through the eyes of a serial entrepreneur, I explored the future of homebuilding. I spoke with some of the most ambitious companies addressing the world population crisis with innovations in building practices.

Google and Flux

When you hear the word Google, you first associate it with search. When you disagree with someone over a fact, Google it. You want to know where to go on vacation, Google it. You want to know what a company does, Google it.

But if you’ve been watching the company over the years, you know that it does much more than just search.

Somewhere along Google’s path of phenomenal success, the company decided to start working on some interesting and difficult problems that were really unrelated to the company’s initial mission of organizing the world’s information. The founders of the company have become so invested in developing other businesses that the company is no longer called Google. In January 2016, the company was renamed Alphabet, with Google becoming just one of their subsidiaries.

Calico is Alphabet’s biotech subsidiary that is focused on extending human life. Verily is Alphabet’s life sciences subsidiary. And then there is Google X, now referred to simply as “X,” Alphabet’s secretive think tank pioneering projects like the driverless car.

On X’s website, the mission statement reads: “We’re a moonshot factory. Our mission is to invent and launch ‘moonshot’ technologies that we hope could someday make the world a radically better place.” Google can be very secretive about their work, and this is ground zero for where their secret projects are born. X’s stealth projects have one of three outcomes: they are elevated to a division within Google and made public, they are spun out to become a separate standalone company, or they are killed.

To date, the only company to ever come out of X and spun out into a separate entity is Flux. I spoke with Jen Carlile, a co-founder of Flux, who initially joined Google as a software engineer in 2010.

The housing crisis

According to Jen:

“The way that Google X works is they identify what they call ‘world-scale problems’ and then put a group of smart people together and say, ‘try to come up with a solution for this that can be tackled within a 10-year time horizon.’ So our big hairy problem was urban population growth. And the Google X leadership recognized that the pace at which we’re building buildings and with the way that we do it now, we’re simply not going to be able to keep up with urban population growth.”

The Industrial Revolution caused massive migrations from the countryside to cities where factories were located. The result of these massive migrations? By 1900, 14 percent of the world’s population was living in cities. In 1950, that number went up to 30 percent. And then in 2008, for the first time in the history of the world, the percentage of people living in cities equaled the percentage of people who lived outside of them.

Here’s where it gets interesting. As of 2016, there are 7.4 billion people on the planet. 2.2 billion people are expected to join us by 2050, and 90 percent of this growth is expected to take place in cities.

It’s really hard to make sense of what the building challenge will look like to house 2 billion people. Jen delivered a keynote address in 2015 at the Design Modeling Symposium in Copenhagen where she suggested that we visualize this population problem by considering the number of new buildings we need to house them. Here’s my math on the new buildings we would need. If we assume that each apartment contains four people, and each new building has an average of 50 apartments, then we would need to build 495 million new apartment buildings over the next 33 years to house all of these people. This equates to the construction of 822 buildings per day, every day, for the next 33 years—no days off, no vacations. Venture capitalists, are you listening? Now that’s what we call a well-sized market opportunity.

Sidewalk Labs