Scale Up, Carbon Down: Rethinking Housing for a Climate-Smart Future

By Alan Gibson, GO Logic, based on a co-authored talk with Andrew Frederick, Croft

This post is a recap of a talk I recently co-presented with Andrew Frederick of Croft. Together, we explored how Maine can meet its urgent housing demand without compromising on climate goals. What follows is a synthesis of that shared presentation—an invitation to think bigger, build smarter, and act faster.

Maine needs 84,000 new housing units by 2030. That figure, from the state’s own housing roadmap, is ambitious by any measure. But what struck us most wasn’t just the scale of the challenge—it was the disconnect.

At the same time that Maine is calling for a massive ramp-up in housing production, it has also set some of the most aggressive climate targets in the nation: 45% greenhouse gas emissions reduction by 2030, and 80% by 2050. Yet the housing study barely mentions carbon. In fact, it recommends fast-tracking environmental review when a project shows economic growth potential. That’s the wrong kind of shortcut.

What if housing and climate weren’t treated as separate issues? What if we saw them as two sides of the same, urgent challenge?

The Disconnect: A Broken Delivery Model

The state housing report outlines familiar barriers: rising material costs, a shrinking labor pool, and long permitting delays. It proposes solutions like faster approvals and workforce training. Those are important steps—but incremental ones. We need a 300% increase in housing production, not a 20% bump.

The deeper issue is how we build. Our delivery model is outdated. We’re still constructing homes one stick at a time, across scattered sites, relying on global supply chains and carbon-heavy materials. That approach simply can’t support our housing goals—and it’s incompatible with our climate commitments.

Reframing the Problem: Scale and Carbon, Together

At GO Logic we manufacture high-performance, Passive House-level building shells using a panelized system. These panels are built in a controlled environment and rapidly assembled onsite. It’s a smarter way to build—for precision, for labor efficiency, and critically, for carbon control.

Our first-in-the-nation Phius-certified facility runs largely on solar energy. Our buildings dramatically reduce operational energy use. We prioritize biogenic materials, regional sourcing, and low-carbon logistics. The result? Homes that have significantly lower carbon-emissions impact.

Croft takes this approach further, with compressed straw panels that actively sequester carbon. Their assemblies offer breathable, renewable walls that turn natural materials into climate assets.

Together, our work demonstrates a dual path forward: performance through prefabrication, and climate alignment through materials. Both are essential.

The Math: What Scaled Change Looks Like

What if we built all 84,000 new units using this model—as Passive House-level multifamily buildings, with biogenic panels and off-site assembly? The carbon impact would drop by more than half compared to conventional methods.

• Cost: ~$22 billion over five years

• Production: 72 small regional factories (or fewer with multiple shifts)

• Labor: ~1,000 trained panel fabricators (about 20% of Maine’s carpentry workforce)

It sounds ambitious, but we’ve modeled the logistics: square footage, labor hours, transportation emissions. With coordinated investment and policy alignment, it’s entirely achievable—and far more efficient than continuing with business as usual.

Policy Bottlenecks: Permitting and Zoning

Today, it can take months or even years to permit a 20-unit multifamily project—a timeline that renders many projects infeasible. Forget about building 84,000 units--only a fraction of them could be permitted by 2030.

One solution: pre-approve a set of multi-family designs and create a streamlined, statewide approval pathway for replicable, low-carbon housing. Instead of permitting friction, let’s build momentum.

We also need zoning reform. Traditionally, rural Maine limited development to one house per acre. With changes to state laws that number has now doubled, and designated growth areas allow much greater density. This is definitely a move in the right direction, but we still need to overcome the cultural norm of the single-family home. We get it--it's the American way. But the climate crisis and economic realities may finally move us back to another American concept we also love: compact, walkable neighborhoods with more multi-family buildings and car-light infrastructure--which will lead us to more affordability, dramatic reduction in emissions, and improved quality of life. Who doesn't want that?

Economic Bottlenecks: Capital

Let's face it: the free market is great, other than when it does't work. In the case of housing, it's not. We have huge demand and no supply. It's too expensive to profitably build affordable or even market-rate housing for most buyers. Funding for multi-family comes from a bass-ackward structure that gets rich corporations and private equity to shelter tax liabilities in housing. It works to some degree--sort of--with a lot of waste and complexity.

It's done differently in other places through a concept known as social housing, where government underwrites the cost of housing in exchange for a legal mandate of long-term affordability. This removes several big things from the equation: profit, speculation, and market chaos, all of which are major drivers of home unaffordability across the country. If we really want to solve this problem there are ways of doing it--we just need to remove blinders and look at them.

Conclusion: The Tools Already Exist

This isn’t a question of technology or design. We already know how to do this. What we lack is alignment—between planning, policy, and capital.

We need to act like the future depends on it. Because it does.

Let’s scale up the housing we need—and scale down the carbon we can’t afford.

If you have questions or want to keep the conversation going, reach out to me or Andrew. Our inboxes are open—and we’re ready to help shape what comes next.

Alan Gibson is the co-founder and sole owner of GO Logic, a Maine-based design-build firm and panel manufacturer specializing in Passive House-standard construction. Andrew Frederick is co-founder of Croft, a building technology company using renewable, carbon-storing materials to manufacture high-performance panels. Learn more at gologic.us and croft.build.