Denver – As Americans fight under exhausting rental prices, builders are resorting to innovative ways to produce more homes, from 3D printing to house assembly in an inner factory and the use of hemp, yes, the cousin marijuana, to make construction blocks for the walls.
It is a response to the deficit of millions of homes in the country that has led to shooting prices, immersing millions in poverty.
“There are not enough houses to buy and there are not enough places to rent. Point,” said Adrianne Todman, an interim secretary of the United States Housing and Urban Development Department under former President Joe Biden.
One way to build more quickly is to adopt this type of innovations, said Todman. “I can only imagine what our housing situation would be like now if we could have made the decision to be more aggressive when adopting this type of housing.”
So what are these new ways of building houses? And can they help reduce the cost of new homes, which leads to lower rentals?
In a cavernous metal room, Eric Schaefer stopped in front of a long line of modular houses that moved through the plant, similar to a car in an assembly line.
In a series of stations, the workers put apartments, erected framed, added ceilings and screwed plaster panels. Everything, from the electrical wiring to the plumbing to the kitchen countertops, was in place before the houses were wrapped and ready to be sent.
The business in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Fading West, has pumped more than 500 houses in its more than three years of operation, each of which takes only five to seven days to be built, even in the coldest winter months, Schaefer said.
Once assembled in the plant, narrow -style houses attached with white ornaments, balconies and front porches are made of approximately 90%. At his final destination they are ready in six weeks, said Schaefer.
The company works with cities, counties and non -profit organizations to help address the shortage of affordable housing, mainly for workers who have been squeezed by high prices in Ritzes mountain cities.
That includes Eagle, Colorado, not far from the Vail skiing station, where West’s fading worked with Humanity to install modular houses in affordable rentals for teachers and other employees of the school district. The houses tend to be on the smallest side, but they can be multifamily or single -family.
“You can build faster. The faster you build, even with high quality, it means the lower the price,” said Schaefer. “We see this as one of the puzzle pieces to help solve the affordable housing crisis.”
There is a considerable cost to build the factory, and part of the challenge is a lack of state and federal investment, he said. A mosaic of construction codes that govern how a structure can also be built, which requires changes in construction depending on the city or county that is being sent.
The manufactured house is similar to modular housing, but the units are built in a chassis, such as a trailer, and are not subject to the same local construction codes. That is part of the reason why they are used more widely in the United States.
Approximately 100,000 houses manufactured were sent to the states in 2024, compared to about 60,000 for decade before, according to data from the Census office. The estimates of the modular houses built annually put them below 20,000.
Yes, there is technology for 3D print houses.
A computer -controlled robotic arm equipped with a hose and nozzle moves back and forth, overturning concrete lines, one on top of the other, as the wall of a house accumulates. It can be relatively fast and form curved walls unlike concrete blocks.
Grant Hamel, CEO and co -founder of Vrotouch, was inside one of the houses that his company built, the wall behind him made of concrete rolling layers, different from a 3D printer. Technology could eventually reduce labor costs and the time it has been to build a abode, but is further than manufactured or modular methods to make a dent in the housing crisis.
It is “a long game, to start eliminating those prices in each step of the construction process,” said Hamel.
The 3D printers are faces, and so are the engineers and other qualified employees that must administer them, said Ali Memari, director of the Pennsylvania Housing Research Center, whose work has focused on part on 3D printing. Nor is it recognized by international construction codes, which puts more bureaucracy.
Technology is also generally limited to single -floor structures, unless traditional construction methods are also used, said Memari
It is “a technology at the beginning, it has space to grow, especially when it is recognized in code,” Memari said. “The challenges I mentioned exist, and the research community must address them.”
Hemp, marijuana related plant is increasingly used in wall construction.
Hemp is mixed with other materials, most importantly, mineral lime, forming “hemprcrete”, a natural isolation that is resistant to mold and fire and can act as an external wall, insulation and internal wall.
The Hempcrete still requires wooden studs to frame the walls, but replaces three wall construction components with only one, said MEMARI, also a professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Penn State University. MEMARI is now helping to supervise the research on the manufacture of hempcrete that wood bolts do not need.
Up to one million hemp plants that will be used for the hemprcrete can grow in an acre in a matter of months compared to trees, which can take years or decades to grow.
The plant is part of the cannabis family, but it has much less of the psychoactive component, THC, which is in marijuana. In 2018, Congress legalized production of certain types of hemp. Last year, the International Council of the Code, which develops international construction codes used by the 50 states, adopted the hemprcrete as an isolation.
The confusion about the legality of the hemp culture and the price label of the machine required to process the plant, called decorticator, are barriers for the hempcrete to generalize in the construction of homes, said MEMARI.
Still, he said, “HEMPRETE has a brilliant future.”
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Associated Press’s video journalist Thomas Peifer, contributed to this good view report.
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Bedayn is a member of Associated Press’s body/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a non -profit national service program that places journalists in local writing rooms to report covered issues.
