Rules, arithmetic and money from another time: how long will 20th-century rules hold back 21st-century homes?

Construction is trying in all sorts of ways to change with the rapidly changing world. Only the rules can't handle it, argues Pim van Meer in this Digital Maze. And financiers find it only "complex."

We in construction act as if the problem is mostly bricks and scaffolding. Too few sites, too few people, too little production. That's true, but underneath is something peculiar: we're trying to make a completely changed housing world run on regulations, business models and financing that are still designed for the single-income, savings-mortgaged house.

No wonder it grinds.

Let me start with the rules. Those fundamentally assume a world where drawings are flat and a home is a finished product. You build it, you inspect it, you deliver it, done. While we are now working with flex housing, modular systems, cooperative housing, temporary functions, care in the neighborhood, shared mobility in the plinth.

Practice is fluid, defined by measurable dynamic data; the legal framework is still brick.

"Permanent" and "temporary" are neat little boxes in the law. In real life, it's a sliding scale of five, fifteen, thirty, fifty years of use. A modular building that you can take apart after twenty years and rebuild elsewhere fits poorly into rules that want to ask only one question: is this now, in this place, approved forever, yes or no.

On the money side, it's not much better.

We still act as if every project is neatly self-contained. As if the developer is earning generously on just that one plan, and everything beyond that is nebulous. While people in the chain know: for every project won, there are three, four, five tenders that you've invested heavily in and from which you see nothing back. The risks of a changing world are crammed into old land deals that were actually designed for predictable VINEX.

And then the financiers.

Banks and funds are not stupid, they are cautious. Rightly so, to some extent. But it now leads to something absurd: everything that fits neatly into an existing pigeonhole - standard buy, standard institutional rent - gets money. Anything that does something new - cooperative structures, mixed-use programs, measurable sustainability, real estate as "urbanmine," temporary but relocatable assets, area deals over multiple phases - is "complex." Complex often just means: we don't have an Excel template for it yet, so rather not.

To be clear, these three things reinforce each other. Rules that assume finished products. Profit models that run on the one success project and four silent losses. Funding that ventures only within the hardened edges of yesterday. Together they form a kind of invisible gravity that slowly pulls any innovation back to the familiar.

And meanwhile, the world does change.

People are living longer, moving more often, combining work, care and living in ways we couldn't even imagine 30 years ago. Climate, energy, material scarcity and the labor market are putting everything under pressure. We know we need to build adaptive, demountable, energy-efficient, water-conscious and data-driven buildings. The technology is there. The models are there. The pilots are there.

But the system around it acts like it's 1995.

Digital technologies show exactly where the friction is. Municipalities with digital twins, developers with 3D models, MiniGIM-like approaches where nature, mobility, energy, noise, grex and program come together in one image: you can see in seconds what a choice does to quality, risk and time.

And that's where something funny and painful happens at the same time.

Once you have that transparency, you notice how often rules and mathematical models get in each other's way. A sustainable building that doesn't fit into the "social rent" pigeonhole, while the total cost of living for residents is lower. A flexible concept that can technically last 30 years, but legally has to disappear after 15 years. An area vision that is right on the map, but can never close financially because it follows yesterday's operating logic.

The reflex then is: tinker with the technology. Some more optimization and a layer of innovation. But fair is fair: without adjusting rules, revenue models and financing frameworks, we keep pushing brilliant prototypes into a stupid system.

What do we actually need?

Rules that tick off not just an end product, but a life cycle: how will this building behave in 30 years? How easily can you adapt, densify, transform? How many moves does it enable?

Revenue models that recognize that area development is a series, not a separate project. That you spread risk and return over multiple phases and plan sections, rather than treating each lot as if it were a loose lottery ticket.

Financing looking at performance over time rather than just the first lease or first sale. Housing costs, maintenance, energy, residual value, reuse - these are the knobs we should want to finance.

Digitalization then is not a sauce, but THE MIDDLE. You can only talk honestly about new rules and models if you can transparently show what choices do. In money, program, (social) sustainability and in time! 3D data-driven area development is exactly that: not just another talking shop, but a shared reality that cannot be ignored.

Filing moment

We like to say that "the rules" hold everything back, that "the math doesn't add up" or that "the bank won't finance it." But behind each of those phrases is a choice to keep pushing the world of today into the logic of yesterday. Please read chapter 12 of the committee tough.

As long as we try to make 21st-century solutions conform to 20th-century frameworks, it is not innovation that fails.

Then it's our system that refuses to move with us.