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A startup is 3D printing houses in under a day at a cost of about $10,000 each, and hopes to get it down to $4,000 each:
ICON has developed a method for printing a single-story 650-square-foot house out of cement in only 12 to 24 hours, a fraction of the time it takes for new construction. If all goes according to plan, a community made up of about 100 homes will be constructed for residents in El Salvador next year. The company has partnered with New Story, a nonprofit that is vested in international housing solutions. "We have been building homes for communities in Haiti, El Salvador, and Bolivia," Alexandria Lafci, co-founder of New Story, tells The Verge.
[...] Using the Vulcan printer, ICON can print an entire home for $10,000 and plans to bring costs down to $4,000 per house. "It's much cheaper than the typical American home," Ballard says. It's capable of printing a home that's 800 square feet, a significantly bigger structure than properties pushed by the tiny home movement, which top out at about 400 square feet. In contrast, the average New York apartment is about 866 square feet.
The model has a living room, bedroom, bathroom, and a curved porch. "There are a few other companies that have printed homes and structures," Ballard says. "But they are printed in a warehouse, or they look like Yoda huts. For this venture to succeed, they have to be the best houses." The use of cement as a common material will help normalize the process for potential tenants that question the sturdiness of the structure. "I think if we were printing in plastic we would encounter some issues."
Also at Fortune, Wired, and BGR.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday March 17 2018, @02:28PM
Cement is expensive, $10K just for the cement, and thats marketing vapor prices... A similar sized singlewide can be made delivered and installed COTS tomorrow by expensive Americans for $25K or so. I live in a recreational state, sometimes I feel like I'm the only guy without some hunting land and a shack on it or a RV, so I've heard decades of small talk about this topic.
Generally a 'cheap falls apart in one or two seasons' RV will be 50% less than a singlewide, or a airstream class RV that will be reliable will cost maybe twice what a singlewide costs WRT similar size and appliances.
The advantage of a singlewide is there are no RVs in the quality class between $5 kids toy faucets and $500 Kohler gold plated kitchen faucets. I live in a house with a $75 kitchen faucet, there's nothing like that in RV marketplace. RVs are used Yugos or new Rolls Royce Phantoms and there is nothing in the market in between other than giving up on RVs and buying a single wide. The disadvantage is they're immobile and will get broken into and trashed when you're not there, and winterization is a pain.
There's nothing unusual about the RV marketplace in that the rest of the market is similar for income inequality reasons; there's a walmart full of people buying $5 pants that will fall apart at first washing requiring another $5 pair of pants next week, or designer jeans at the mall retailing for $600. If you go to the suburbs where I live there's Target if you want to buy $50 pants, but theres not much of that left, and amazon will soon wipe out all legacy retail anyway.