Jin Helps Secure Future of Affordable Housing
In the United States, housing is considered affordable if it costs 30% or less of a person’s (or family’s) income.
In 2024, more than 12 million Americans spent more than half of their income on rent. Homeowners are also more burdened than ever; the nation currently has a shortfall of more than five million affordable homes, while another 64 million existing homes have substandard energy performance that contributes to high utility costs.
This housing crisis has been decades in the making.
“The real gross value added per hour worked in the U.S. construction industry has decreased an average of 2% each year since 2000,” said Mingzhou Jin, department head of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) and director of the Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment. “In other words, the industry’s productivity compound annual growth rate (CAGR) has been -2% for the last 25 years.”
One key cause for the decrease in construction productivity is the ongoing shortage of about 500,000 skilled workers, caused in part by the retirement of the Baby Boomer workforce and by younger generations gravitating toward non-vocational careers.
Construction material costs are also at record highs, partly due to lingering shortages from the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, materials were responsible for 60.8% of the cost of new homes; in 2024, they accounted for 65%.
In response to this crisis, the University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute (UT-ORII) has launched its newest Convergent Research Initiative (CRI), which is dedicated to increasing affordable housing.
Our vision is to become a world-recognized leader in affordable manufacturing of energy-efficient, resilient buildings.”
The multidisciplinary CRIs are led by a team of researchers from UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The CRIs are competitively funded and strategically designed to create a lasting, positive impact on both Tennessee and the nation.
The Advanced Manufacturing for Affordable Building Construction CRI (Buildings CRI) will focus on streamlining construction processes and incorporating new technologies, like robotics and advanced materials, into the industry.
“This CRI will help meet the national demands for constructing new affordable buildings and retrofitting existing buildings with affordable solutions,” said Diana Hun, the leader of ORNL’s Building Materials, Systems, and Integration Section and Jin’s co-leader on the Buildings CRI. “Our vision is to become a world-recognized leader in affordable manufacturing of energy-efficient, resilient buildings.”
New Faculty, Innovation Will Boost Construction
Over the next five years, the Buildings CRI will hire 20 new joint researchers—10 at UT and 10 at ORNL—and 25 grad students whose research concerns construction material, assembly, and process development. Jin will lead the CRI efforts at UT while Hun oversees the work conducted at ORNL.
“We will use the current and upcoming multidisciplinary expertise at both UT and ORNL to address the grand challenges of the construction industry,” said Hun. “We will also be gathering feedback from stakeholders to confirm need, understand benefits, and expedite adoption.”
The CRI research will be divided between three major priorities. First, researchers will incorporate robotics and automation into building manufacturing processes, easing the labor shortage and increasing safety; second, they will develop novel building materials that maximize the performance of robotics and automation; and third, they will work to fast-track deployment of the technologies developed within the CRI.
“These three themes will enable the U.S. residential and commercial building construction industry’s productivity CAGR to reach at least 2%,” Jin predicted.
ISE faculty will mainly contribute expertise to the process optimization aspect of the CRI with artificial intelligence-aided systems.
We believe this CRI will significantly contribute to the economic development of the state,” said Jin, “making the East Tennessee region an innovation hub for building construction.”