While Americans are struggling under rental prices, builders turn to innovative ways to visit more housing, from 3D printing to the composition of houses in an indoor factory to the use of hemp – yes, the marijuana cousin – to make building blocks for walls.
This is a response to the country’s lack of millions of homes that have led to prices skyrocketing and plunging millions into poverty.
“There are not enough homes to buy, and there are not enough places to rent. Period,” said Adrianne Todman, the acting secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, under former President Joe Biden.
One way to build up more quickly is to embrace these kinds of innovations, Todman said. “I can only imagine what our housing situation would look like if we could make a decision to be more aggressive in adopting this kind of housing.”
What are these new ways to build houses? And can it help to lower the cost of new housing, leading to lower rents?
Factory -built housing has been compiled in a week
In a kaverneous, metal hall, Eric Schaefer stands in front of a long row of modular houses passing through the plant, similar to a car on a mounting lane.
On a series of stations, workers lie floor, frame erected, roof added and screwed on plaster. Everything from electrical wiring to plumbing to kitchen tone sheets was in place before the houses were shrinked and ready to be sent.
The business in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, which fades West, has pumped out more than 500 homes in its just over three years of operation, each taking only five to seven days to build, even in the coldest winter months, Schaefer said.
Once collected in the plant, the narrow houses in the townhouse with white finish, balconies and front porches were done about 90%. At their final destination they are ready within six weeks, Schaefer said.
The company works with towns, provinces and non-profit organizations to address the shortage of affordable homes, mostly for workers expressed by the sky height prices in a zipper mountain towns.
This includes Eagle, Colorado, not far from the Vail Ski Resort, where Fading West worked with habitat for humanity to install modular homes at affordable rents for teachers and other school district employees. The houses tend to be on the smaller side, but can be multifamal or single family.
“You can build faster. The faster you build – even of high quality – the lower the price means,” Schaefer said. “We see it as one of the pieces for the puzzle to solve the affordable housing crisis.”
There is a solid cost of building the factory, and part of the challenge is a lack of state and federal investment, he said. A patchwork of the building codes that determines how a structure can be built also makes it difficult, which should change the construction, depending on the city or the province to which it is sent.
Manufactured housing is similar to modular housing, but the units are built on a chassis – such as a trailer – and it is not subject to the same local building codes. This is part of the reason why they are used broader in the US
About 100,000 manufactured homes were sent to states in 2024, according to about 60,000 a decade earlier, according to the census bureau data. Estimates of modular homes built annually place them under 20,000.
3D printing is innovative but still ‘a long play’
Yes, there are technology for 3D prints.
A computer-controlled robotic arm fitted with a snake and nozzle moves back and forth, and lines concrete, one on top of the other, while it builds the wall of a house. It can go relatively quickly and form curved walls as opposed to concrete blocks.
Grant Hamel, CEO and co-founder of Verotouch, stood in one of the houses that his business built, made the wall behind him from concrete, distinguishes to a 3D printer. The technology can eventually reduce labor costs and the time it takes to build a home, but is further off than manufactured or modular methods to make a dip in the housing crisis.
It’s a long game to start cutting away at the prices at every step of the construction process, “Hamel said.
The 3D printers are expensive, as are the engineers and other skilled employees needed to manage it, says Ali Memari, director of the Pennsylvania Housing Research Center, whose work focused partly on 3D printing. It is also not recognized by international building codes, which has set up more red tape.
Memari said the technology is also generally limited to single -storey structures unless traditional building methods are also used, Memari said
Memari said it was a technology at the beginning. “The challenges I mentioned exist, and it must be addressed by the research community.”
A hemp and lime mixture called Hempcrete has a bright future ”
Hemp – the plant associated with marijuana – is increasingly used in the construction of walls.
The hemp is mixed with other materials, especially the mineral lime, which forms ‘hempcrete’, a natural isolation that is shape and fire resistant and can act as the extra-wall, isolation and inner wall.
Hempcrete still needs wooden buttons to frame the walls, but it replaces three wall building components with just one, says Memari, also a professor at Penn State University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Memari now helps oversee research on making hempcrete that does not need the wooden buttons.
As many as a million hemp plants that should be used for hemp prot can grow on one field within a few months, as opposed to trees, which can take years or decades to grow.
The plant is part of the cannabis family, but has much less of the psycho -active component, THC, which is found in marijuana. In 2018, Congress legalized the production of certain types of hemp. Last year, the International Code Council, which develops international building codes used by all 50 states, as an isolation.
Memari said that confusion over the legality of growing hemp and the price tag of the machine needed to process the plant is a decorticator called, more widespread in the construction of housing.
Still, he said, “Hempcrete has a bright future.”
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Associated Press -Video -Journalist Thomas Peipert contributed to this report by Buena Vista, Colorado.
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Bedayn is a corp member of the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a non -profit national service program that places journalists in local news rooms to report on national issues.
