Our Story

In the years leading up to the Great Recession of 2008, Clark Ivory, CEO of Ivory Homes, was serving on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. During that time, he saw early warning signs that the housing market was moving in a dangerous direction: subdivisions of new homes were being purchased by investors hoping to flip them, but were sitting empty. Recognizing the risk, Clark took steps to help Ivory Homes weather the downturn, reducing the company's debt exposure and shifting its focus toward more attainable housing types.

Those decisions helped insulate Ivory Homes from the worst effects of the recession, but the housing industry as a whole emerged in a weakened position. Clark saw that the market had shifted from one crisis to another: communities across the United States were no longer facing speculative overbuilding, but a growing shortage of homes people could afford. Clark and his daughter Abby believed that solutions were already emerging, but many of those ideas were scattered, underfunded, or disconnected from the partners and resources that could help them scale.

That belief led to the launch of the Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability in 2018. The prize was created to identify, recognize, and support promising innovations across three areas central to the housing affordability challenge: Construction & Design, Finance, and Policy & Regulatory Reform.

From the beginning, the prize was designed to be more than an award. It was a way to search nationally for practical ideas, elevate the people and organizations behind them, and help promising solutions reach more communities.

To guide this effort, Clark and Abby reached beyond Utah to bring together leading voices from across the housing sector, forming Ivory Innovations’ founding advisory board. With expertise spanning policy, finance, homebuilding, research, and construction innovation, the board helped shape the prize from the beginning and establish Ivory Innovations as a national platform for identifying and supporting promising solutions to housing affordability.

As Ivory Innovations began building a national platform, Clark and Abby also saw an opportunity to engage students and emerging leaders in the work. Shortly after the creation of the Ivory Prize, Ivory Innovations launched Hack-A-House, a student innovation competition designed to invite the next generation of leaders to develop creative, practical solutions to the housing affordability challenge.

What began as a competition at the University of Utah has grown into a national event held virtually and in person. That expanded format has allowed Ivory Innovations to reach students across the country, with winning teams from universities including Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, and other leading institutions.

As the Ivory Prize and Hack-A-House grew, Ivory Innovations established a home at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business and expanded its research efforts. Early work included thought leadership by Abby Ivory and founding board chair Kent Colton, former president of the National Association of Home Builders, whose writing helped frame the need for innovation-oriented approaches to housing affordability.

Since then, Ivory Innovations has continued to develop research, insights, and partnerships that help translate lessons from the field into ideas that can inform practice, policy, and investment.

In 2022, Ivory Innovations partnered with Call to Action Philanthropies, another foundation based in Salt Lake City, to begin developing affordable housing communities across the Salt Lake metro area. Through that effort, Ivory Innovations is working to deliver more than 1,500 units of affordable housing across seven projects, creating hundreds of affordable homes each year while also building a real-world platform for learning and implementation.