Scott Dergance has spent 27 years in architecture, and for the first decade of his career he was designing convention centers, high rise hotels, and office towers all over the world. Then he made a shift into residential work and found something that stuck with him: the idea that everyone deserves a genuinely good place to live. That idea now shapes his role as a principal at KGA Studio Architects, where he leads the home builder and developer studio, and it shapes this entire conversation with Michael.
As Scott puts it:
“I sort of found my passion, which is about providing great housing for everybody. That’s the thing that kind of drives me on the day to day now, is this idea that every single person deserves a great place to live. I try to live that every day I come to work.”
Scott brings a rare perspective to the show. He has worked on the builder side, the modular side, and the architecture side, so he sees the housing crisis from angles most guests never get to touch. Early on, he and Michael dig into a pattern he has noticed in buyer behavior. Builders keep adding bedrooms because of how homes get appraised, yet most households do not need that extra space. People under 40, many of whom are trying to buy their first home later in life than in past years, are telling Scott they want something simple: a bedroom, a bathroom, maybe a small flex space for yoga or reading. What they are being offered rarely matches what they are asking for. Scott traces part of the problem back to how homes get valued in the first place:
“This tendency of builders, because of how homes are appraised, is to just add more bedrooms. Meanwhile, the vast majority of American households don’t need more than two bedrooms.”
From there, the conversation turns to why homes cost so much to build in the first place. Scott shares a number from the National Association of Home Builders that puts real weight behind the frustration builders feel: roughly $96,000 of every new home goes toward regulation, fees, and requirements that add no value for the person buying the house. That number is expected to climb past $130,000 when updated figures come out. Here is how he lays it out:
“The number of dollars on average that all of that stuff, which is bringing essentially no value to the homeowner, was $96,000 per house just for the red tape and regulations. And he suggested that the one that comes out in 2026 is going to be more like $130,000.”
Add in competition for land from data centers and the picture gets even tighter for builders trying to keep prices reasonable.
Scott ties this back to a number that sets the tone for the whole episode. Nearly 70 million American households cannot afford a home priced above $300,000, yet only a small slice of what got built last year landed anywhere near that price point. That gap between what people can pay and what is actually going up is the thread running through everything else Scott and Michael talk about. Scott lays out the numbers plainly:
“In the United States, there’s about 135 million households, and NAHB released their latest numbers, and it was 69.9 million households that cannot afford a house of more than $300,000. And yet, only 16% of the houses built last year were in that price range.”
Modular construction comes up as a genuine path forward, and Scott is careful to separate it from manufactured housing, since the two get lumped together constantly and that confusion holds the industry back. He walks through how hospitals already use modular components at scale, why the economics currently favor mountain towns and other places with expensive labor, and why banks remain hesitant to finance modular projects even though the insurance and risk structure is more solid than people assume. He is honest about where modular still falls short and where he believes it is heading:
“We’re getting closer to a crossover moment where labor is becoming increasingly expensive in certain markets, and modular prices aren’t rising as much as traditional construction prices are. Eventually there’s going to be a crossover point where modular makes a lot more sense in a lot more places.”
The conversation widens from there into something bigger than construction methods. Scott and Michael talk about what happens to a society when homeownership slips out of reach for a growing share of young adults. They connect the dots between housing costs, delayed marriage, falling birth rates, and a quieter kind of isolation that has crept into daily life since 2020. Scott explains why he sees so much riding on this:
“The American dream is I can work hard, I can make money, I can buy myself a house, I can have my two kids and my dog, and I can have my car, and I can live a comfortable American life in the suburbs. That is built around the concept of essentially building wealth around the fact that you are a homeowner.”
It is a sobering stretch of the episode, but it lands somewhere hopeful. Scott points to trade education programs popping up in Colorado high schools, where students graduate with real certifications and job offers waiting for them, and he talks about why he is more optimistic today than he was a year ago.
Along the way you will hear about a modular project Scott is currently working on between Aurora and Louisville, Colorado, the missing middle housing working group he recently joined, and a book that has been sitting with him lately called Why Nothing Works.
This is a conversation for anyone who wants a clearer picture of how we got here and what it might actually take to build our way back to something that works for buyers again.
About Scott Dergance
Scott Dergance is a Principal at KGA Studio Architects, an award-winning residential architecture firm based in Denver, where he leads work with regional and national homebuilders and developers on master planned communities, urban infill housing, and multifamily projects across the country. His work is focused on one central value: every single person deserves a great place to live.
Scott brings a rare, cross-disciplinary perspective shaped by leadership roles across the full housing ecosystem. As Division Architect for Toll Brothers, he managed product design for large-scale housing portfolios, aligning design decisions with buyer demand, construction realities, and business performance. In the off-site construction space, he served as Director of Design at Blu Homes, a volumetric modular housing builder with national distribution, and as Director of Market Development at Prescient, a prefabricated structural system manufacturer with a focus on multifamily housing projects nationwide.
Scott is also heavily involved in industry advocacy efforts both locally and nationally. He is an active member of the Denver Metro Home Builders Association Government Affairs Committee, the National Association of Home Builders’ Design Committee, the New Home Trends Institute’s Design Council, and was recently appointed to the NAHB’s Missing Middle Housing Working Group.
When paired with his advocacy efforts, his combination of builder, architect, and off-site construction expertise allows Scott to connect design, construction, policy, and economics into practical, market-driven strategies. His work focuses on translating emerging ideas, whether in housing design, community planning, or construction methods, into scalable solutions that improve speed, cost, and overall quality of housing at every level.
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