Stephen Jemal knows what it looks like when demand outpaces supply. He watched it play out across the consumer electronics market for two decades while running Nobody Beats the Wiz, the retail chain his family built from a single Brooklyn storefront into 110 locations, 6,000 employees, and $2.5 billion in annual sales.
The housing market is a different category of problem. The mismatch between supply and demand is not cyclical. It is structural, generational, and getting worse by every measurable metric.
Jemal’s company, JemRock Organization LLC, spent years pulling together the research to understand exactly how bad it is. UN-Habitat reports. World Bank housing finance data. National housing ministries across 28 countries. OECD databases. Academic literature from 2022 through 2025. The conclusion that came back was consistent across every source: the global housing deficit stands at 155 million units today, it is heading toward 240 million by 2030, and no existing construction system is built to close that gap.
BUILT is Jemal’s answer to that problem. An AI-powered, robotic-driven manufacturing platform anchored by a primary US factory producing robotics machinery for deployment to regional factories nationwide and globally, BUILT was designed specifically around the scale the research identified rather than the scale existing technology could comfortably reach.
What New York Knows About Housing
Anyone who has tried to find an apartment in New York in the last decade understands the local version of this problem intuitively. Rents that consume a third or more of take-home pay. Supply that never catches up to demand no matter how many buildings go up. A gap between what housing costs and what working people earn that widens every year.
New York Metro’s housing deficit sits at 380,000 units according to JemRock’s research. Los Angeles carries 520,000. San Francisco Bay Area 450,000. Miami 210,000. Seattle 180,000. Boston 160,000. Median home prices across these markets run 8 to 12 times median annual income. Restrictive zoning and sustained NIMBYism block new supply in exactly the neighborhoods where demand is greatest.
These numbers are severe. They are also a small fraction of the global picture.
The Global Picture
2.8 billion people worldwide lack adequate housing. 300 million are absolutely homeless. 1.12 billion live in slums or informal settlements. 1.6 billion are affordability-stressed, spending a structurally unsustainable share of income on shelter. 40% of the global urban population lives in informal settlements without secure tenure or reliable services.
The deficit is mapped at 155 million units across 28 countries. Asia-Pacific carries the largest share at 62.5 million units. Africa follows at 52 million, with Sub-Saharan Africa accounting for 67% of that figure and informal settlements housing 55% of the urban population. South America accounts for 13 million units. North America 12.5 million. Europe 9.5 million. MENA 5.4 million.
City by city, the crisis epicenters are Mumbai at 5.8 million units, Delhi at 4.2 million, Lagos at 3.9 million, São Paulo at 2.7 million, Dhaka at 2.5 million, and Jakarta at 2.3 million. India’s total deficit is 31 million units. Nigeria’s is 31.5 million, driving a $380 billion regional financing gap.
Seven forces accelerate the problem simultaneously. Urban populations in developing nations are growing at 4% annually. Global population growth adds 80 million new people requiring housing every year. Climate migration is projected to displace 200 million people by 2050. Construction costs are up 45% since 2020. Zoning laws suppress supply in high-demand markets. The global housing financing gap is $16 trillion. Decades of deferred infrastructure investment have left the system with no capacity to absorb demand shocks.
The world needs 96,000 new homes built every day through 2030. The current construction pace produces about 60 million units per decade. The required pace is 90 million. Closing the gap requires an additional 30 million units per decade and $8 trillion in investment. Only scale manufacturing can deliver it.
The 88% Problem
Of the 155 million unit global deficit, 137 million units — 88% — fall into affordable housing for low-income families, essential workers, recent immigrants and refugees, and rural communities. Government subsidies, LIHTC tax credit programs, and public-private partnerships provide the financing framework. The demand is stable, long-term, and present in every major geography simultaneously.
This is not a niche market. It is the market. Everything else — social housing at 5%, workforce housing at 3%, student housing at 2%, middle-income gap housing at 1% — is secondary to a single dominant need that has no adequate supply response anywhere on earth.
How BUILT Works
BUILT manufactures AI-powered robotics at a primary US factory. Those systems ship to regional factories in target markets, commission locally, draw on local materials, and produce housing at a pace and cost structure conventional construction cannot match.
Construction timelines run more than 50% faster than manual methods. Cost savings reach up to 50% through automation and material optimization. Millimeter-level factory precision eliminates the quality variance of manual construction. Local production cuts transportation costs and emissions simultaneously. The model anchors manufacturing capability in target communities, creates local jobs, and reduces material costs through operational efficiency.
The US policy environment is aligned. CHIPS and Science Act funding, Section 48D manufacturing tax credits up to 25%, MACRS accelerated depreciation for robotics, reshoring incentives, and federal Industry 4.0 priority designation all reduce the cost of building from American soil outward. BUILT’s distributed regional hub model captures state-level incentives across every deployment market.
From the JemRock research: traditional construction cannot meet this demand. Innovation is imperative. The time, as the company puts it directly, is now.
About Stephen S. Jemal
Stephen S. Jemal is a Brooklyn-born entrepreneur and the founder of Nobody Beats the Wiz, the consumer electronics chain that grew from a single Fulton Street storefront to 110 locations across six states, ranked 13th among America’s most recognized retail brands, and generated annual sales exceeding $2.5 billion before its sale to Cablevision in 1998. He subsequently founded JemRock Organization LLC, a New York-based real estate development and construction innovation company and employed 6,000 people. Jemal serves as Founder, President, and CEO of JemRock alongside his sons Norman, Solomon, Richard, and James.
Media and investor inquiries may be directed to Stephen S. Jemal at ssj@jemrockorg.com.
