A housing start-up hopes to save the American dream

After years of reading each other’s work and debating America’s housing crisis online, four men who met through housing Twitter decided it was time to stop writing and start building. Today marks the official launch of the American Housing Corporation, a start-up based in Austin that aims to bring affordable family housing back to American cities and the American dream back to American families.

The founders — Bobby Fijan, a real estate developer; William Davis, a software and mechanical engineer known online as @YIMBYLAND; Riley Meik, a former aerospace engineer; and Harris Rothaermel, a software engineer — began working together at the beginning of 2024, united by frustration that existing solutions to housing scarcity weren’t solving the problem at scale. Each founder came in with a different angle on the same crisis, but what connected them was the conclusion that none of these perspectives mattered in isolation.

“To tackle the problem,” Fijan said in an interview with Slow Boring, “you need to be the manufacturing company, and you also need to be the developer.”

That insight became the foundation of the American Housing Corporation. Unlike many venture-backed housing start-ups that attempt to sell new construction technology to traditional developers, the American Housing Corporation decided to vertically integrate from the start. The company buys land, manufactures building components, acts as the general contractor, and ultimately sells or rents the homes itself.

The decision was shaped by watching earlier modular and prefab companies struggle. Their technology worked, but selling it to developers, who each had their own floor plans, incentives, and timelines, often didn’t.

The company’s approach draws inspiration from mid-century developer Joseph Eichler, whose distinctive homes transformed parts of the Bay Area. Fijan and Meik bonded over their shared admiration for Eichler’s philosophy: sell the lifestyle of a well-designed home, not the innovation behind it.

“Ultimately, what we’re really trying to do is just build something good for the customer,” Fijan said. “The product is not, like, the new Sears manufactured housing company, or to manufacture this, or module that, or analyze that. It’s just about building nice houses.”

The American Housing Corporation is targeting the “missing middle” — often multi-unit housing that falls between single-family homes and large apartment buildings in size. The company’s focus is particularly on townhouses, which Fijan argues are where the housing