It costs more to build a house than it used to, but Duluth's challenging terrain makes the numbers - and your head spin.
Blasting through bedrock to put in utilities and other infrastructure can add $80 thousand dollars to a project right off the top.
Solution? One of the ideas identified at the 2014 Housing Summit was a page right from HGTV's book: fix up, renovate and modernize aging houses and get existing, foreclosed and condemned properties back on the market.
But how do you get a lender to give you an extra hundred thousand or so on a property valued at half that? That is where the out-of-the-box thinking comes in.