Name: Can 3D printing solve the global housing crisis?
Uploaded: 2025-11-17T14:27:17.648Z
Duration: 4 min 53 s
Description: 3D printing technology is redefining how homes are built. In rural Colorado, a modular robot prints multi-story houses in days, instead of weeks. But can this technology scale fast enough to meet global demand?

3D printing technology is redefining how homes are built. In rural Colorado, a modular robot prints multi-story houses in days, instead of weeks. But can this technology scale fast enough to meet global demand?

Colorado

3D printing is being utilized in Colorado to construct multi-story, fire-resistant homes with the aim of addressing both affordability and resilience in housing. The technology allows for the main structure of a house to be built in about a week, compared to several weeks using traditional methods, and uses non-combustible materials to reduce wildfire risk.

Despite these advancements, the cost of 3D-printed homes remains similar to conventional homes, and mass production is still far from reality. While the technology is effective and public interest is growing, experts note that 3D printing will not replace traditional construction in the near future, though it is expected to play a larger role as housing needs and environmental challenges increase.

Can 3D printing solve the global housing crisis?

Not brick-by-brick or stone-by-stone, but rather layer-by-layer, 3D printing as opposed to conventional construction. What you're seeing behind me is a Bot2 3D printer technology, along with our material delivery system and our advanced host management system. And this machine is able to 3D print multi-story buildings. So not only one floor, but two floors. So in construction, sometimes you have different lots, different size of lots. And the machine, it's made out of modules, so it can expand and it can also shrink to accommodate whatever your land is. The hope is that technology like this could help tackle not just the shortage of affordable homes, but also the shortage of resilient homes. But it's a delicate process. A batch plant that's almost 250 feet of hose away is mixing concrete, and then that's going into our concrete pump. And then that has to come through all of our hoses and get to here. And we have a very narrow window where that concrete needs to stiffen up enough for it to support the next layer. Our operators are changing different amounts of plasticizer or internal cure or accelerant depending on the day. And then depending on the weather, the UV, the temperature, the wind, those are all going to play a factor in how quickly that concrete is going to harden. On the bad side is if we miss that window and the concrete is either too fast or something goes wrong and we're too slow, now we have all this 250 feet of concrete in the hose that we have to make sure doesn't harden. And then if we're too slow or the concrete mixture is too soft or too runny essentially, then it's not going to be able to support the next layer when the printer comes around. When all goes well, the company says they can print the main structure of a house in about a week, compared to as long as six weeks using more traditional framing methods. If you say, hey, there's 20 steps to go from zero to building a home, which is more or less depending on what you're looking at. If you can take a percentage point or half a percentage point out of every one of those steps, then ultimately you bring down the cost of home and ultimately you solve the housing crisis. And there's very much a crisis. UN statistics show that about 40% of the world's population will need access to adequate housing by 2030, or 96,000 adequate housing units every day. It says one in four people live in harmful conditions to health and safety. Harmful conditions like wildfires, as seen in Los Angeles earlier this year. But L.A. is hardly the only place in the country where wildfire damage is a risk. Here in the U.S., you know, we see signs of it increasing in its severity and intensity. So the U.S. Forest Service estimates that there are 70,000 communities and about 46 million homes We call the wildland-urban interface, which is the area where there's vegetation that meets housing and really sets up the conditions for wildfires to continue burning through our communities. Just for some context, that's about a third of our housing in the U.S. that is at risk to wildfires. And in this pocket of rural Colorado, that risk is here, too. We have a mountain with plenty of combustible trees leading right down to this particular development. This is the highest fire risk development you can have. So we have to build with non-combustible materials in general, based on code. But this already sets us up for that across all of our developments, to be building with that level of material and provide a product that is quite a bit less combustible than what you would do with a wood-framed home. Verotouch and a handful of other 3D printing firms are betting that time, labor and cost savings will eventually make durable homes cheaper to build. The 31 homes in this development are priced between $550,000 and $670,000, roughly the county's median. The technology works, but mass production that could ease the housing shortage is still a long way off, even as public interest grows. My partner and I have a business locally, and so affordable housing is super important to keep people being able to work with us. It's interesting. It's not necessarily cheap housing, but you do get masonry instead of stick, which is interesting. Would you buy a 3D-printed house? I can't say I would, and I just don't know enough about them. Half an hour away, two finished and sold houses printed by the company stand ready to be rented, adding to the low-hundreds estimate of existing 3D-printed buildings in the world. It won't replace traditional construction anytime soon, but as housing needs grow and environmental factors become more extreme, technology is an inevitable part of how and what we build.

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