affordable-housing
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Nick Callegari and the wall that carries its own builder
The son of a Florida construction worker went from spacecraft structures to a housing startup. At Verustruct, Nick Callegari is developing robots that climb the walls they build - with the aim of making a home easier to afford.
Martin Raymond and the second life of a piece of land
From property valuation to the leadership of Québec’s Fonds immobilier de solidarité FTQ, Martin Raymond has built a career around what land can become. His current work puts that question to a practical test: more homes, different building methods, and partnerships that last beyond the first shovel.
Brian Murray and the business of staying put
From Peace Corps service in Bulgaria to factory workshops in Kensington, Brian Murray has built a real estate career around a difficult question: who gets to stay when a neighborhood starts to prosper?
Cary Rosenblum Kept Following the Deal - Until It Became a Housing System
The Elmington co-founder started with finance, then kept moving closer to the buildings, residents and operating problems. Six business lines later, his career offers a useful lesson in what vertical integration can do - and what it demands.
Isaac Baker Is Making Solar Work for the Buildings the Market Forgot
The Boston founder built Resonant Energy around a stubborn idea: clean power should lower costs for nonprofits and affordable housing, not wait for the easiest roof and richest owner.
Misha Gurevich Is Building Miami Housing One Small Lot at a Time
The Propolis founder found his edge in Miami's overlooked 5,000-square-foot lots. His playbook is compact, furnished and operationally demanding - a small-building answer to a very large housing problem.
Jon O'Bryan
Jon O'Bryan is the CEO and Co-founder of Atlas (YC W22), an AI-first customer support platform built to replace legacy tools like Zendesk and Intercom. A PhD physicist turned serial entrepreneur, Jon previously co-founded PadSplit - a co-living marketplace that housed 23,000 people across 18 U.S. cities - and Blanket Homes. At Atlas, he is on a mission to transform customer support from a cost center into a revenue driver, bringing together session recording, omnichannel ticketing, AI copilot, and customer timeline tools in a single ergonomic platform backed by Y Combinator and angel investors including Parker Conrad (Rippling), Jack Altman (Lattice), and Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox).
Nicholas Callegari
Nicholas Callegari is the founder, chief engineer, and CEO of Verustruct, a New Haven climate-tech startup building gantry-less 3D printing robots that print entire load-bearing walls - plumbing, wiring, and insulation included. A former SpaceX structures engineer who helped design the Polaris Dawn spacewalk hardware on the Dragon spacecraft, he traded orbit for the housing crisis, betting that the same first-principles engineering used for spacecraft can cut home construction costs in half. He is a 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Manufacturing & Industry and a Yale School of Management MBA.
Rachel Munsie
Rachel Munsie is the CEO and co-founder of Ounce of Care (Ounce), a tech-enabled resident services platform that connects people living in affordable housing to public benefits, health and social care coordination, and community programming. A former Goldman Sachs banker and private equity investor who left MIT Sloan to help build home-health startup Tomorrow Health, she launched Ounce to close the gap between where people live and the care they can actually reach. In October 2023 the company raised $5.2M in seed funding led by Meridian Street Capital and Flare Capital, with backers including Chelsea Clinton's Metrodora Ventures, Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta, and Unite Us co-founder Taylor Justice.
Neil Rubler
Neil Rubler is the founder and CEO of Vessel Technologies, a New York company that mass-produces small, prefabricated, solar-ready apartment buildings and sells them through the housing industry's first franchise model. After two decades running large multifamily real estate firms - Vantage Properties and then Candlebrook Properties, which oversaw more than $3 billion in assets across seven states - he left conventional development behind in 2017 to attack the so-called Missing Middle: people who earn too much for subsidized housing and too little for market rate. A Wharton MBA and magna cum laude Cornell graduate, Rubler treats housing like a manufactured product rather than a construction project, aiming to build higher-quality homes faster, cheaper, and more sustainably.
Noah Schwartz
Noah G. Schwartz is President and Chief Executive Officer of The John Stewart Company, California's largest manager of affordable housing. He joined JSCo in 2013 as COO, was named President of Property Management in 2023, and elevated to President & CEO in January 2024. Before JSCo he led affordable housing and community action agencies across Virginia and Arizona, bringing 15+ years of nonprofit and quasi-government leadership to the operations of more than 30,000 housing units.
Rick Holliday
Rick Holliday is a San Francisco Bay Area real estate developer and social entrepreneur with nearly 50 years of experience building affordable and market-rate housing. He co-founded Factory OS in 2017 to revolutionize multifamily housing production through factory-based modular construction, securing $77.7M in funding from Google, Autodesk, Facebook, and Citi. His career spans co-founding Eden Housing (1978), BRIDGE Housing (early 1980s), and Holliday Development (1988), where he pioneered live-work loft conversions in SoMa. Factory OS, located in a former WWII submarine shipyard on Mare Island in Vallejo, demonstrated 40% faster delivery and 20-30% cost savings over traditional construction.