News

Blokable is fortunate to have an incredible community of advisers, investors, and partners who actively support our mission: To build a new housing development platform that maximizes individual and community prosperity. If we can build high quality affordable housing at scale, then we can start to really solve some of today’s greatest social challenges. One of Blokable’s first advisers, Nelson Del Rio, is a pioneer of this holistic, human-centric platform, and it’s our pleasure to announce that he has recently joined us in an official capacity serving as Co-CEO alongside Aaron Holm. ...

CEO Aaron Holm was recently featured in The Columbian’s special insert as part of its annual Economic Forecast breakfast. His op-ed, which can be found in its original format here, is below. Even housing can be an Internet product Drive costs down by producing homes like mobile phones We are experiencing a severe housing crisis in the Pacific Northwest. Homelessness is increasing, and housing affordability is in peril. These problems cannot be fixed by simply adjusting. ...

As we begin 2018, we at Blokable are actively working in Washington, Oregon, and California preparing to deliver projects for customers. Collaborating with policy and real estate leaders has been a critical aspect of our work to date, and today I’m thrilled to welcome Molly Turner to our Board of Advisors to help us further build relationships with the housing policy community. Molly Turner (photo credit: Kate Munsch) Molly is a strong voice and someone who I’ve followed since starting Blokable. ...

What is the design thinking behind Blokable? Our mission is to make housing affordable and accessible for everyone: how it is conceived, how it is sold, and how it is implemented. End users, including tenants occupying the buildings and building management companies, become a much more important piece of Blokable’s design focus than the typical project might consider. Millennials and boomers are going to fuel a whole new type of demand for living spaces as they converge on urban areas seeking culture and convenience, creating a whole new set of demands on the communities they live in. ...

Why did you start this company? While I was working with Amazon on Amazon Go and Amazon Books I started to connect the inefficiencies of custom built architecture and construction with what I was seeing with homelessness and housing affordability in Seattle. There was a huge need for new housing but no way to place an order. Every build was a custom job that started from scratch and took many months or years to build even the simplest of projects. ...

At Blokable we live at the intersection of industrial design and architecture. We have a deep appreciation for people who apply industrial design, manufacturing, and technology to bring new ideas to the housing market. This post is an appreciation of Tony Hsieh who has invested and continues to invest his own money to re-imagine downtown Las Vegas. I learned about Tony’s work during my time at Amazon when I worked on both the Amazon Books and Amazon Go businesses. ...

Amsterdam has a reputation as an innovative city in a challenging physical location. As the city has pushed growth to the water’s edge it has slowly embraced new concepts such as modular building and floating communities. One result of this thinking is a neighborhood called Ijburg. Approved in 1997, Ijburg is built on a string of artificial islands connected by bridges and integrated into the city’s rail, auto, and bicycle transport networks. ...

When I first met Jason Calacanis it was literally Blokable’s first day of existence. My friend, investor, and advisor Jennifer Lum had invited me to attend the March 2016 Launch Angel Summit in San Francisco as her founder guest and introduced me to Launch’s visionary founder Jason at the opening night reception. Jason was in the middle of a conversation with a network television exec but excused himself to meet me and hear our 15 second pitch. ...

I’ve been watching downtown LA slowly bloom for over a decade. In a previous life, as a partner in Industrial Color, we spread our wings from New York City and opened our second office in LA. Coming from New York it seemed natural to locate downtown where the tall buildings were concentrated and where the words ‘Los Angeles’ were written on the map. But in the end it was not an ideal location because of traffic patterns but also because there was not really any photo production going on in downtown. ...

Michigan Ave, Christmas Eve, 2015 For Christmas this year we visited family in Windsor, Ontario. It made sense to stay in Detroit so we found a rental apartment called Honor and Folly, located in Corktown near the lot where Tiger Stadium used to be and within sight of the Ambassador Bridge to Canada. We arrived on Christmas Eve with hungry kids in an empty city. I set out immediately to track down groceries and dinner as nothing was open on the hip Michigan Ave strip where our apartment was located. ...