Homes

WHAT IS THE CHALLENGE?

Few amenities are more fundamental to life and comfort than a home. For many people, home is a sacred, personal space, and it can take many forms. It can be a home in the city, suburbs or in a small town. It can be an apartment or condominium, a tiny home, a backyard dwelling, an intergenerational home or a homestead.

Regardless of its form, a home is essential shelter — yet quality, affordable, sustainable housing is in short supply in communities across North America. In fact, recent research suggests the United States ended 2023 with a housing supply deficit of between 1.5 million to 2 million units. While construction and building materials are certainly part of the cost of building new homes, real estate costs (the land) are the primary driver of this shortage. Additionally, a preference for single-family zoning drives housing scarcity and escalates costs, diminishing affordability and access. Adding to the challenge, housing costs and rental prices are increasing, while median household income remains relatively flat.

WHAT IS OUR ROLE?

We believe that by working with partners and applying our deep industry and supply chain expertise, we can significantly increase the overall availability of quality housing — faster, more efficiently and at scale to make a real difference for communities of all sizes across North America. We see two main areas where we can play an important role in accelerating the volume, sustainability and diversity of housing availability. The first involves supporting innovation in the wood products industry to greatly increase the capacity of wood-based buildings through improved construction methods and updated building codes that will allow wood construction in midrise buildings of five to 10-plus stories. The second involves supporting the development of offsite construction and nontraditional housing options — from accessory dwelling units to tiny homes and other detached structures — to provide flexible, efficient alternatives for creating new homes through wood-based construction. To ensure enough options are available to meet different income levels and geographies, we must also improve understanding and recognition of wood as the most sustainable, versatile, renewable and cost-effective building material — especially when compared with concrete and steel, which require large amounts of fossil fuels in their production and have a much higher environmental impact than wood.

WHAT DO WE WANT TO ACHIEVE BY 2030?

By 2030, we envision a world where sustainable wood products are providing abundant, diverse options that ensure everyone has access to quality, sustainably built housing. We want to help lead a paradigm shift where people have more housing options — of all shapes and sizes — anchored in natural, renewable and high-quality materials.

WHERE ARE WE FOCUSED FOR PHASE 2 (2023 – 2025)?

While there is much we can accomplish over a decade, we have structured our long-term goals into three-year phases to effectively prioritize and accelerate progress. Currently, we are midway through the second phase of our 3 by 30 Homes Sustainability Ambitions — running from 2023 to 2025 — and are focusing on two key areas:

PHASE 2 ACCOMPLISHMENTS

During the second phase of our 3 by 30 Sustainability Ambitions, from 2023 to 2025, we are intentionally making fewer, but more strategic, investments of our time and resources. While much of our work is ongoing, we have already achieved several important milestones.

• We joined the Executive Council for Housing Affordability, part of the J. Ronald Terwilliger Center for Housing Policy. Through our participation on the council, we are engaging stakeholders in important conversations about the role of wood products in affordable housing.
• In 2024, we partnered with Habitat for Humanity to launch the first Weyerhaeuser Innovation Challenge. Participating Habitat affiliates developed and implemented ideas for using wood products to increase equitable access to affordable homes, while also demonstrating sustainability and resiliency.
• We expanded our partnerships with the University of Arkansas’ Fay Jones School of Architecture and Clemson University’s Wood Utilization + Design Institute, engaging students and academic and professional communities on both campuses about building sustainably with wood through research, projects and seminars.

To ensure transparency and accountability, we will continue sharing our accomplishments and baseline measures from Phase 2 semi-annually.

FOUNDATIONAL SUCCESSES FROM PHASE 1 (2020 – 2022)

In the first phase of our work, we focused on laying the foundation for meaningful progress. We learned that increasing construction efficiency and expanding options for unconventional housing are highly interconnected and adjusted our next phase of tactics accordingly. We accomplished more than 80 percent of the actions we set out to achieve in the Sustainable Homes ambition; remaining actions were rolled into Phase 2 or set aside in favor of more effective tactics.