A $10K tiny house 3D-printed in 24 hours | Hacker News Reader

A $10K tiny house 3D-printed in 24 hours

apis-cor.com

626 pointsyurisagalov250 comments

I'm so surprised that people have not heard of the late R.G. LeTourneau. The man was a mechanical genius, and the father of modern earth moving machinery.

Here's a video of his Concrete House Machine from 1946: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpWjyZO2lPU

This was 70 years ago! I read about them in his autobiography "Mover of Men and Mountains". He went with concrete because it was cooler in the summer, and warmer in the winter. Seems to me the "Not Invented Here" mentality has been around for a very long time.

The machine is impressive, but not really comparable to this. As it could only do fixed shapes. With this printer you can do any shape, and also change the inside struxture of the walls. And while this one is quite limited in its range, it is still impressive and a glimpse, of what will come, soon ...

Shape diversity is often a requirement that is specified but not needed. It comes down to a flexibility vs quality and bandwidth tradeoff. From the looks of it, a different mold could be swapped out in the vehicle. How many molds would one need? Kitchen, School, Light Manufacturing, House 2-4 bedroom, etc.

3d printed parts are great because of zero RE costs, but quality is reduced and cost is high for a single part. Some economics hold for this technique as well.

I see both having broad applicability.

The idea goes back even further, to Edison in 1908.[1] His system used a large set of metal molds which latched together to make a house-sized mold. Then just pour in the concrete and go. The houses were quite elaborate, with lots of architectural detail, all the way down to bathtubs and picture frames. A few are still around.

There's no problem mass producing concrete houses. Or apartment buildings. Building shells aren't really that expensive. The interior parts cost more.

[1] http://www.concreteconstruction.net/_view-object?id=00000153...

>Building shells aren't really that expensive. The interior parts cost more.

And land in a desirable location with a building permit costs even more, if it's even available.

Can't beleieve I had to scroll this far down. Land prices in urban areas are set by ability to pay, so with cheaper construction you can pay even more to the land owneer! Prices won't fall in urban centres one cent.

The problem of expensive housing is man-made: by bakers lending enough fiat credit to match your surplus value.

If land prices are set by ability to pay (rather than willingness to pay), that could be a good thing for buyers.

A reasonable model for the seller is to sell to the highest willing buyer. Each individual purchaser has an ability to pay and willingness to pay and will presumably only offer the lower of those two prices.

If land trades on ability to pay rather than willingness, that means that the highest bidder would have been willing to pay more but was only able to pay what they settled on, and I don't see a significant problem. The buyer is presumably quite happy, having paid less than they were willing to pay.

The chief downsides I see in such a system is that either the buyer is not actually able to pay (they misjudge their ability to pay), or for the non-buyers who are out-bid by other buyers with a greater ability to pay. (It could be frustrating to only be able to pay $X while land or properties change hands at 1.5 * $X, but no reasonable seller will sell for 2/3 the market price, so...)

> If land trades on ability to pay rather than willingness,

Banks create fiat on request for a loan. It's infinite. You have to bid all your surplus value or someone else will, either a dweller or a speculator.

That still means that you were willing to bid that much, right?

I've bought two homes in my life. In neither case did I bid all my available funds and in both cases, I got a house that served very well as my home. (There were several other houses I bid on over the years where I didn't get the property. Two cases were bank REOs where the bank was unreasonable, IMO. Two other cases I was simply outbid. Life goes on.)

You were forced to bid more than others who were willing to bid as much as they can. That is where the price tops out. If you have more money than them you still had to pledge more of your labour because bankers extended loose credit.

Life does go on. And we have to work for longer for the exact same pile of bricks than our parents because of the changes in banking, gold std and the tech enabling tracking vast quantities of digital fiat credit.

> Banks create fiat on request for a loan. It's infinite

No it isn't! Otherwise Anglo-Irish would never have collapsed.

Guess you disagree with the Bank of England.

https://bankunderground.co.uk/2015/06/30/banks-are-not-inter...

Or Werner, the guy who coined the ideas behind the (since basterdized) QE:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914...

Banks are not intermediaries. Just where do you think all the new money is coming from?? $100K used to be worth something, it's worth sweet FA now for land. Banks issue money against land. There are two tiers of pricing as a result:

1. land - insane increase

2. everything else - mostly falling in price

Banks are the new churches, vast open receptions with hundreds of square feet to be in awe of in city centers.

Banks do indeed create money via lending, but that process is not infinite. It's "fractional reserve banking" not "zero reserve banking".

That may no longer be true. Using mortgage backed securities in the way that triggered the financial crisis of 2007 effectively allows banks to bypass the fractional reserve mechanism.

With this process, the bank lends $1 creating a new $1 new deposit from thin air as they always have, but then start using the mortgage certificate as money to by selling it. This allows a $1 loan to create an extra $2 in new money instead of an extra $1.

If we only allow a fractional reserve of 80%, then $1 would previously have created an 80c new deposit, which in turn would create a 64c deposit on the next cycle and keeps diminishing. However, with the mortgage certificate thrown in too, $1 becomes $1.60 (80c of new deposit and 80c of sellable mortgage certificate), which becomes $2.56, which becomes $4.10 etc.

This process is detailed by Greg Pytel here: https://gregpytel.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/largest-heist-in-hi...

Nope, have a read of those links. Also when banks create this gets credited to other banks. And they lend and that, on average gets credited to their bank. The system bootstraps itself. Lending is only constrained by willingness to borrow, and in the new financialised world only playing money games gets you rich.

Read the links.

Wouldnt it make sence to resculpt urban area into something like a canyon sponge to make the most of it?

"canyon sponge"?

Google isn't providing anything informative to me for that phrase.

A thing is worth what another is willing to pay for it.

The problem with land, unlike almost anything else, is that you can't move it (or trade for a fungible equivalent). People pay high prices for urban land because that's their preferred way to get closer to other land they want to be close to. When it's important enough to you to have that lot, you are willing to trade a lot of value for it - which may include liquidating some of the value of what you intend to put on the lot (million-dollar lot, build cheap bungalow), or working with others to figure out how to put a lot of inexpensive housing on it (billion-dollar building with 1000 million-dollar flats).

The bankers just help you figure out how you can rearrange your assets & income to free up that million dollars now - when you're willing to pay more later to have the money now.

And nobody is forcing you to do anything. It's your choice to decide whether having that land, right there, is sufficiently valuable compared to the value of what you intend to do with it.

Most land is cheap. It's the land you want that's expensive - usually because a lot of other people want it too, and you're all bidding for it. No imposition of "fair" is going to be any more fair than supply-and-demand.

Want cheap land? Go to zillow.com, enter your state as a search area, and set the max price to whatever absurdly low value you want. I've found many lots for $1000, $100, and even $1 (including a lot in Atlanta for $1; no, they're not going to show you what's inside the building, take it as-is).

Here's the related patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1219272A/en

I went to LeTourneau University. You are preaching to the choir, brother. (Yep, he founded an engineering school too. If you built a giant hacker space, and university classes suddenly broke out, LU is what would happen. Even the campus itself was hacked together out of an old army base.) The sheer amount of things he was involved in back in the day is mind blowing.

I would love to hear more about your experience there (my email is miles at coderpath dot com), and would like to learn more about R.G. My only knowledge about him was through his autobiography.

Not sure how much of it overlaps, but I've been going through the biography "God Runs My Business" which is from the 40s and might show more detail from that time in his life. It's definitely a product of that era, too, just in the way different subjects are brought up, so I think it's interesting for that glimpse into the USA as well. There are lots of pictures as well. A very interesting man.

I'll have to read that as well. Thanks for the tip :)

Unrelated, LeTourneau was a name from Old French, meaning The Starling, and is the origin of the surname Turner. I only mention it because I had been taught that Turner came from the profession of wood turning, but it turns out that was unlikely to be correct after all!

Multiple origins?

A lot of people are commenting (correctly) that any cost savings achieved here are trivial relative to the land cost. I think this is looking at this tech too narrowly though. There are many areas of architecture that can be revolutionized by cheap, accurate mass-customization.

One example would be energy. Right now heat transfer and the transmission of daylight through walls/windows can be theoretically optimized to reduce energy costs simply by customizing the geometry of the windows and walls relative to their orientation and local context. We don't do so in architecture because the costs of customizing the geometry is too expensive. Architecture has a history of attempting mass-customization since the 1960s[1], but it's always been limited by the technology and realities of integrating multiple subcontractors and consultants. Those problems still exist, but the industry is changing pretty fast and I feel automated form generation, simulation, optimization, and production technologies are converging to a point when this could be achieved.

[1] i.e John Habraken.

Not to mention that once this industry is mature, they will print upwards. Taller buildings spread the cost of land on more units.

I seem to recall (from my thermo fluids course) that its the thermal efficiency of the materials that determines that ticker walls triple glazing etc.

And not all house can be built with an ideal orientation

Yes, and traditionally, the biggest contributor to thermal inefficiency is the window to wall ratio (WWR) b/c windows have a very high conductance relative to walls. So if you can reduce the window area, or mitigate it's thermal inefficiency in some way (i.e compensate heat loss through passive solar gain), you can have a huge impact on overall thermal inefficiency.

Beyond thermal performance, optimizing windows for lighting potential is also interesting because electric light is a huge contributer to total energy consumption for offices, and outdoor light reflection and transmittance into interior areas depends a lot on geometry and material selection.

The price of land is much lower if the entrepreneur goes big and build a whole new town from scratch. There are however some challenges with this approach. None the less, it's being done all the time in Asia.

The "build it and they'll come" approach to planned cities never seems to work out. It looks like a city has to form organically to be viable.

Where has it failed? China has a lot of cities currently empty, but many are being populated slowly.

China building unoccupied cities has more to do with the fact that the average Chinese citizen is not allowed to speculate or invest in much other than real-estate.

Like you mention, there are many almost empty cities, also called ghost cities. You can also argue that they are slowly being populated, but that doesn't equate with success.

They failed in that there was a huge investment to build them, but the expectations for these cities were never met. Additionally, there is tremendous upkeep or maintenance.

For example, those new roads are crumbling and require extensive repair work. Think of a road that is 5 lanes wide, but a 1 lane would suffice to serve all of the traffic. The unused portion will still degrade, even though it's not used.

It's kinda like buying a huge house before having children. You still need to fix, maintain and clean the extra square footage, even though it's not used.

It has worked for Norilsk in Russia's far north. They built it and people came including refugees from more southern climates like Ukraine. And even though they have not yet solved all the engineering issues, there are ways to deal with them.

Engineers generally like big problems like this, and a world where Global Warming will displace large populations needs to get really good at managing huge engineering projects.

Just look at Russia and their Crimea bridge, St. Petersburg bypass bridges, Vladivostok bridge, infrastructure projects associated with the Sochi Olympics, the Universiade games in Kazan and so on. And now Trump says that he plans on fixing the USA's decrepit infrastructure that has been neglected for the past two generations.

Engineering solves problems.

Also, in some countries there is the potential to build entire new towns and cities in the abundant unpopulated vastness of their territory. Mostly this applies to Canada and Russia but theoretically it could also apply to countries like Australia, Namibia, Libya and so on.

In order to build a new town, far from existing towns, you need a major engineering project to build all the transport/communications infrastructure as well as all the buildings. That kind of thing would likely be done using systematic building technology like the machine that was demonstrated.

Consider Canada with a huge supply of petroleum that could be turned into natural gas and piped to a distant shore if only the land was unpopulated to avoid the NIMBY effect. Look at the land between Fort McMurray and the Arctic Ocean. Imagine building a gas pipeline parallel with a railway and a highway along with a port city and harbour on the Arctic Ocean. You would also need to build gravel pits, limestone mines, cement plants to burn the limestone using natural gas, and greenhous complexes using natural gas to generate heat and electricity for artificial lights.

It could be done, if Canada has the will. We already know that Russia has the will because they have done this, and they are running so many big engineering projects that they are likely building up to something bigger that would help ease the refugee problems of nearby countries by absorbing them into new Russian Arctic cities. Being a Muslim country gives Russia an advantage in this area, but Canada has other advantages so the game is not yet over.

I think this should be primarily interesting for buildings with special form which are hard or expensive to build with traditional methods. The price is not the selling point here, at least not in Russia. Russia has a lot of cheap labor from the southern ex-USSR countries like Tadjikistan. So $10k for 38qm is not really cheap. You can build a 150qm two-floor house for around $25k. Also $277 for the foundation seems a bit suspicious, should be much more expensive.

"the radius of curvature of the TV matches the house wall curvature" pretty much looks like a PR stunt for Samsung. I wonder if they've actually chosen curved walls to somehow justify curved TV.

Yes, if those figures are converted to USD (I presume so as they're using the '$' sign without specification?), then they are so manipulated as to be worthless. There is no way to pour a foundation, even a small one, for $277.

I agree the formal implications are the interesting aspect. Creating an exactly equivalent design, with curved walls everywhere, would be phenomenally expensive with conventional practices.

It's actually astonishing how much good concrete costs. You can barely fling $20 bills off a stack as fast as the truck is pouring $20 worth of concrete into your foundation.

I doubt a 10k house in Russia is "good" concrete.

It was built on the premises of a concrete factory. Maybe it is their internal cost.

It's a house, not a bridge. The concrete doesn't have to be especially exotic, just made to the right spec.

> Creating an exactly equivalent design, with curved walls everywhere, would be phenomenally expensive with conventional practices.

You could easily make a house with round walls today if you wished to do so. But you wouldn't because you'd curse yourself every day when you want to place furniture and lay floor coverings.

Curved spaces seem like a good idea until you actually try to use them.

Hell, even non-square spaces (or spaces composed of non-right angles) are a pain in the ass to effectively use. My old place had a main living area with a few 45 degree angles, and it really limited what you could do with it unless you were willing to lose several square meters of floor space.

As our local swimming pool built in the shape of a pyramid found out - they had to get so much custom one off stuff made it increased the cost a lot.

They included only the cost of materials. Moreover, the article says that the house was built on the territory of the concrete factory itself. That might explain the discount.

Ah, so the whole exercise is entirely pointless, then. Raw material costs are not what makes housing prohibitively expensive, and also not the variable 3d printing is designed to solve for.

Well, they did say that after the foundation solidified, the actual 3d construction took under 24h. So it does reduce the construction time. But not sure how much hiring such a printer would cost. And how much headache the building permits will be...

A round building can also be larger than a square building constructed with the same "printer" that articulates around the center.

A round building maximizes the area for the amount of wall material. You get benefits not only in the initial building materials but in the ongoing heating/air conditioning. Rectangular buildings are only popular because they're easier to build and easier to fully utilize. A totally spherical building such as a Buckyball is even more efficient/more awkward to utilize.

Awkward to utilize is right, try and insert furniture, kitchen/washroom utilities in a round room. The other problem is that the low surface:volume ratio means daylight penetration is pretty difficult. That's why hyper-optimized building geometry (for cost and building code) go in the other direction, high surface:volume achieved through more and more extrusions (i.e. towers in HK).

Why not put square rooms into your round building and use the voids for closets or some other purpose? The interior shape of a dwelling doesn't have to directly conform to the exterior.

> Why not put square rooms into your round building and use the voids for closets or some other purpose?

Because nonrectangular closets are also awkward to use (moreso than putting furnishings directly on curved or non-right-angle walls, the problem with furnishings is that you have to have them custom made for the wall angles or degree of curvature, which is expensive, but they often aren't inconvenient at all in use.)

My family used to have a house in Mexico with exterior walls that were circular to greater or lesser degrees. You can make it work. You mostly wanted to be looking out the windows so those walls mostly didn't have furniture against them anyway. And, where you did need seating areas against a curved wall, those were built in.

But, as you say, it's hard to just stick in regular rectangular shapes.

Do you mean putting the square rooms in the interior, and creating closets/stairs etc along the awkwardly shaped perimeter? The problem with that is that the space by the perimeter is the most valuable (access to fresh air, light, views) so you actually want to do the opposite.

Well, if you could 3D print rounded furniture...

I find the notion of 3D printing a house intriguing but it seems ultimately impractical. There are better ways to manufacture homes that can be componentized and transported for final assembly on site. One where I visited the factory was the BluHomes[1]. You can automate much of the construction of walls and wiring and finishing if you do it in sections.

[1] https://www.bluhomes.com/

Pricey. How are these competitive with traditional construction?

The price is artificial, much like the Tesla Roadster pricing they have been focused on really high end homes that someone can truck up into the Sierras and 'poof' your mountain getaway is there.

They are developing a core competency of creating the fixturing to mass produce homes. The cost per house should drop well below that of a traditional house with equal square footage when they go for volume. They do that by removing construction labor, site/weather variability (so site delays), economize material transport cost, and reducing time to construct (labor hours). Things that don't change, the cost of basic materials, the cost of land, the cost to prepare the site (foundation/leveling etc), and permitting/access.

For the absolute lowest cost with on site materials the 'sand' homes [1], that provides the framing (much like the 3D printed house in the article).

[1] https://www.niftyhomestead.com/blog/earthbag-homes/

All of those homes cost nearly or over $1M. A garage is $60k. How is this even remotely similar?

Prefab houses have been around forever. I grew up in one. I think my parents paid about $100k in 1989. The construction was:

- dig a hole

- pour a foundation

- truck in the house in two halves

- bolt the house together

- do final wiring, plumbing

move the family in

I have no idea how much these kinds of homes are today, but their latest zillow zesitmate puts it at around $300k (on an acre of property)...so YMMV.

3d printing, in general, is expensive and better for one-off, or low-volume things. Mass manufacture techniques are hyper-optimized and beat 3d printing most of the time when you need to make >10 of the thing almost every time...this includes houses.

Exactly right. And as the manufacturing techniques expand you get more choices than just single wide or double wide.

Yeah, it was basically a fixed double-wide mobile home with better materials. I can't remember the movie offhand, but there's a fight scene that takes place in half of a prefab house on the highway.

The house is still there, still looks fine. A little cramped for adult me, but a perfectly fine place to live and grow up. The house I live in now could fit that house inside of it and have plenty of room to spare. My parents still live there, have all the amenities of a modern home. They turned half the basement into their master bedroom suite and the other half into a nice extended home office.

Housing crises are not going to be solved by tiny houses on half-acre properties. The houses are a tiny fraction of the overall property values -- and are made in a factory, on the cheap, in mass quantities. Making structures has been solved for hundreds if not thousands of years, making land is the problem.

   > Making structures has been solved for hundreds if 
   > not thousands of years, making land is the problem.

Well stated. I think land allocation also contributes to the issue. I was pleased that 'mixed commercial/residential' zoning got to be a thing as it makes for a much nicer living experience if you have your basic needs met by walking. I'm still waiting for a mixed commercial/residential/governmental tract where you can have a police station, library, courthouse, and office space mixed in with houses and shops. I remember touring York in the UK and thinking about how medieval villages were set up, they have the taint of 'old times' but they optimized a space for useful living and commerce. I think there are things to be learned there.

> I'm still waiting for a mixed commercial/residential/governmental tract where you can have a police station, library, courthouse, and office space mixed in with houses and shops.

Especially for "consumer" facing government services like libraries and postal centers.

I think getting local governments to mix in more "official" functions might be harder since some of the legitimacy of those functions sometimes stems from the power signalling they use to distinguish the building from the rest of society -- e.g. courthouses tend to be big official looking buildings with lots of wood paneling in the courtrooms.

In Korea, where land is at a premium, you find tiny police stations all over Seoul, but even the very small ones tend to be stand-alone affairs. IIR courthouses tend to be either standalone or as part of larger local government centers.

http://img11.deviantart.net/5c0d/i/2013/337/5/1/police_stati...

https://s3.amazonaws.com/gs-waymarking-images/fb6d6675-11fb-...

Government can lease commercial property, the same as anyone else.

In the backwaters of upstate New York, half the post offices are in leased buildings, including parts of private houses in otherwise residential neighborhoods.

So, you don't really need anything special to provision for local government, just a local government with tax dollars to spend.

> I can't remember the movie offhand, but there's a fight scene that takes place in half of a prefab house on the highway.

Lethal Weapon 4?

I think that's the one!

And we have tons of land as well. We just don't have tons of land in a handful of places where a lot of people have convinced themselves they just have to live or their life isn't worth living.

After a quick search on prefabricated homes and reading the Wikipedia article, I'm really not clear on what their limitations are. Most of them seem optimized for warmer weather? I would really appreciate some links describing the current state of prefab housing and it's practicality.

You've got to look around. There are a lot of options today. You have everything from Tinyhomes (for which you'll finds tons of manufactures in each country .. easy startup idea really with a lot of shared eco-friendly components out there), to Yurts, to fully finished multi-piece homes that don't look pre-fab at all/you wouldn't know unless the owner told you.

You're not going to find any huge suburban type houses, but there are a lot of small to medium options, all with their own strengths and tradeoffs.

Look up Finnish modular homes. They work in climates where temperature goes below -30C.

In Sweden, where I live, there are lots of prefabricated houses. An example of what it can look like: https://www.myresjohus.se/vara-hus/annedal/ So it's clearly suitable even for colder climate zones.

The basic limitation is how wide a load you can move by road and rail. That usually limits you to a double-wide house.

There's panelized construction, which is like IKEA for houses. This works reasonably well for rectangular houses. The joints can be a weak point, both structurally and as leak points.[1] Plumbing, wiring, and interior walls are best done at the factory, but that makes the connections complicated.

If you're willing to have exposed bolts and joints, it's easier. Butler Buildings makes industrial buildings and barns from prefab panels of corrugated steel. Those buildings are everywhere in rural America. They're strong, they go up fast, they can be purchased with insulated panels, and they last a long time. You can even get a fake brick exterior and a nice interior. But the result will look industrial.

[1] http://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/PDF/path_panel_co...

> The basic limitation is how wide a load you can move by road and rail. That usually limits you to a double-wide house

It limits the size of the individual module, but I've seen an entire multistory, city-block-size apartment complex built up from trucked in modules; limiting the size of the prefabricated modules doesn't meaningfully limit the size of the final building.

It's amazing to watch! There was a row of townhouses like that put up near my old house. They had a crane and a steady stream of trucks bringing in the modules. Truck shows up, two guys put straps around the module and hook it to the crane. When I was watching, they were on the second storey, so there were two guys on the roof that helped the crane operator drop them in place. Take the straps off, throw them down to the ground, and repeat.

Pretty incredible watching the entire storey of a block worth of townhouses being assembled in an afternoon.

Depends on what you consider a limitation. There is the Broad Group in China which had proposed to build the worlds tallest structure in 90 days. [1] They have pre-fabricated buildings and put up a 57 story one [2] in 19 days. To be fair there is still a lot of prep for the foundation.

[1] Article on the "overly" ambitious Sky City -- http://fortune.com/2015/07/09/china-skyscraper/

[2] The video of them building 57 stories in 19 days -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyxwgLYbAk0

https://www.huf-haus.com/en.html

I love huf hauses. It's on my list of life-goals

Some are clearly designed for warmer climates, but some are suitable for colder ones as well. I'm here in Norway and my spouse and I have been looking at alternative house building. Prefab has come into our radar more than once.

The UK built a lot of prefabs to solve the postwar housing shortage: http://www.neverpaintagain.co.uk/blog/damp-in-concrete-house...

Unfortunately they weren't very well insulated and suffer from catastrophic rusting of the rebar ("concrete cancer"). This may make them unsaleable: https://harveybowes.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/are-concrete-ho...

(They look nothing like the US "doublewide", but more like similar panelised concrete construction in Eastern Europe)

The better quality pre-fabs are modular homes. They're not strictly limited to "double-wide" dimensions, but being that they're still being trucked to the building site, it's an important consideration (to clear telephone poles and street lamps)

Here's a firm in Austin that specializes in making them in the Modern style: http://www.mamodular.com/

Half a million for 600 square feet. C'mon man

> Half a million for 600 square feet. C'mon man

Why half a million when you could have 600 square feet for 1.3 million in Silicon Valley?

https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Sunnyvale-CA-94085/195...

That includes the land at least...

Wow. I'm really trying to understand this house price. I just can't imagine who would think 1.3 million is a reasonable price for this house? I mean that's like a $10,000 mortgage. That's the same amount of money as a $333/night hotel room. A quick search of the area reveals $100/night hotels--typical across the country. So... how is this market priced housing? I mean I could have housekeeping and free breakfast every morning plus two or three 'bedrooms and bathrooms' in a secure, maintained property for the same price as this house. Sure, I am not building home equity... but I'm assuming a house rented in this area would not be a lot cheaper than that.

So your choices are rent or live in a hotel if you don't want to buy a home this expensive?

I would be making some tough choices if I had to move out there.

To be honest though, that one is an outlier. It's in a crap location (next to the highway) and looks pretty awful. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a house that the realtors can point to in order to make other houses in SV look "inexpensive" in comparison.

> It's in a crap location (next to the highway)

Actually, the ease of getting to Central, Arques, Fair Oaks, and Wolfe makes that location extremely compelling for a lot of people, me included. From Central eastbound you would take the Fair Oaks exit, keep left onto America, and boop, you're home. That's actually pretty good, unless you're expecting Sunnyvale to behave like San Francisco and be anti-car.

This isn't theoretical, either. I know someone who specifically looked in those dozen or so blocks between Maude and Arques once his employer dug in about a mile away, and he ended up buying on Morse. He walks now. It's a cute little neighborhood, and I'd consider it if I were in the market.

It's also been on the market for what appears to be 70 days. Houses in SV normally don't take that long to sell. That being said, it might be teardown material and the land alone would be worth $800k+

The current technology is perhaps impractical, but it will get better with time. Some advantages of having a building built by a machine are a) the skills of your workers are no longer a constraint on building geometry and b) machines don't care if the houses are all the same or all different, so individual customization is cheaper.

What follows from b) is that it would be less difficult/expensive to customize a house to match the constrains of its site, which is currently hard when dealing with non-flat, non-rectangular lots. One could even generate building designs algorithmically according to some heuristics.

My prediction is that if house-building robots take off, we'll see a lot of co-evolution between the machines and architectural design software.

My parents just built one of these homes. Having contributed reluctant and unskilled labor I would be interested in hearing how the automation of wall construction, wiring, and finishing is done.

practical for colonizing other planets maybe

I love the idea of building on site with site materials. Rammed earth housing - is an example. Mouldings/hoardings are brought in, but if you do sections at a time, you don't need that much. Labour is the intensive part. If you could get a machine to print with materials on site, or tapping into the waste stream that would be great. Not so happy with the concrete here. I'd rather a more friendly aggregate. An adobe tube house isn't a far cry from this - but looks more eco friendly. I'm sure you could machine much of that building process.

Discussion on reddit from 2 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5xf7sf/a_russia...

Apparently the $10k includes electrical, windows, etc.

Thanks! I was already thinking that 4 people with a bunch of bricks can quickly raise a wall too.

edit: 2 people, 7h (including a 40min break), one wall: https://youtu.be/gSM70WGbTiA?t=25 This is what the innovative part of the project is competing against.

Or one robot brick layer:

http://fbr.com.au/

Laying brick is very quick. And if you are willing to do a full brick width as the wall thickness, you don't really need much further insulation IIRC. Stick built houses are not as durable and take longer, but as long as wood and labor are cheap, they will be popular. Drywall is also cheap, though takes multiple passes to finish.

Personally if I was constructing my home with my own hands, I would go for brick.

Even better/faster than brick is dry stacked concrete blocks: http://www.drystacked.com/index.html

But ugly.

You can just finish it with a layer of render.

You can put bricks on the outside. The interior, well, I don't know. I guess you could put a frame in there (though when you get there what's the point).

Not necessarily. Dry-stacked blocks require surface adhesion which can be dressed up anyway you want (e.g. smoothed and painted, make to look like stucco, etc).

> Stick built houses are not as durable

Unless you happen to live in an area with earthquakes... if you do, the flexibility (literal, not metaphorical) of 2x4 construction will really shine.

This is not new. China already has company that can 3D print a real two-story house. See this https://3dprint.com/138664/huashang-tengda-3d-print-house/

This article also mentioned another Chinese competitor can 3d-print 6-story apartment and a mansion.

This product immediately reminded me of that 10-story (maybe it was larger) apartment building in china that they were able to put together in a day. Every floor was ready-to-go and all they had to do was plop them down on top of each other.

In the article you linked, they say the rebar had to be positioned ahead of time. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

Another one here:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2014/apr/29/3d-...

While this is clearly an impressive technical feat, I can't help thinking of the carbon footprint of creating a house out of concrete, which is notoriously un-environmentally friendly, and difficult to deal with when the structure is no longer required. Hopefully a more environmentally-sound material will be used. There's not a single mention on that page of the carbon footprint of the building method used, and I think it would be interesting to compare physically identical (as much as possible) buildings of different construction (3d printed like this, bricks and mortar, pre-fab wooden/osb panels, etc), particularly when the tag line of the article is:

"We Are Building the Future Today."

It is an interesting fact that concrete itself is a carbon sink, and that it mitigates a bit the emissions associated with its production.

That said, I agree that it would be interesting to have a independent study of the complete environmental impact of such a building, from its erection to its disposal.

I would instinctively expect a smaller impact from this kind of "lean" approach, though this might also create problems due to the economy of scale not necessarily being present.

Cool tech, but...

Curved walls only look good from the outside. Design looks like something someone who has never built a house before drew up. Things like a sofa that can't face the TV screen, or ostensibly a bathroom that you have to walk through the bedroom to get to.

Also everything looks very narrow. I want to see them build a real house this way, something with full-sized doors (36"), full-sized washers and dryers, something with 2 levels, something with actual electrical outlets (I see none in the video or pictures).

I can slap together a shed without plumbing or electricity in a day. Boasting about the price, showing electrical appliances, but not including the electrical wiring... let's be kind and just call that some "optimistic marketing." I mean... It doesn't even look like they have a real foundation... And small point... if they are going for speed, why are they using a roller to apply paint? Spray would do a better job and cut the painting time more than 50%.

Here's a video of them making a larger more traditional structure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViqzfPW6TFo

Though part of the point is that you can use this to make more complicated structures with less effort and error; whether they are always appropriate is sort of a separate question.

I think they have included wiring costs based on comments here & on reddit, though their site seems to be down after the HN hug.

Personally I'm more interested in modular construction than 3d printing since it's much clearer how you scale that up to larger buildings, but this is still neat.

I don't see any electrical outlets in the photos or videos.

I also don't see the cost of the foundation included... looks like they built on top of an existing concrete slab but didn't add that into the cost. I don't want to rip on them too much, but if they start talking about time and cost (literally as the headline) and they aren't being honest about what it really costs... it's hard to trust anything else about the article.

Can it even be called a "house" without a heater? I mean... they aren't following any sort of industrialized nation building code at all here. No sinks, no bathrooms (can't tell), no insulation in the roof, no smoke alarms... Calling it a "house" and bragging about the time it takes to build and cost... it's moot if it's not really a house. That's all I'm getting at.

Bottom of the page gives the cost of the foundation -- $277. It also does have an insulated roof, heating, a sink, a bathroom, etc. Electrical, they probably used a wall chaser/cutter to put a groove in to lay the conduit, which was covered when they surfaced the wall. Finish work like that is really similar regardless of the house, and is not really different from what you'd do with a brick surface, etc.

$277 seems suspiciously cheap. A google suggests that should cost $5/sq foot, or $2000 for this house.

This was done in Russia where labor costs are a lot lower. Most construction workers make a fifth of what they make in the states, and I imagine related costs are also lower. So probably a lowball figure, but plausible.

They have other videos where they print straight walls. I think this is really just a tech demo.

Right, it's to demonstrate that it can make any shape.

I'm not sure why the OP thinks that it can only do curved walls. The "print head" is pretty clearly capable of accessing any point within its working radius.

It seems they do include wiring.

Around here houses are still built on site, stick by stick. The only things built off site are the roof trusses.

I don't understand why all the walls, at least, aren't built in a warehouse and then trucked in. It could be built cheaper, more precise, with far less wastage. Holes for electrical, plumbing and HVAC could be already put in. Even windows can be pre-installed.

(I know that part of the problem is architects under-design houses, leaving it up to the contractors to figure out how to route electrical, plumbing and HVAC on-site.)

Pre-built walls are commonly used in tract houses.

Same here, there are pre-built houses but they are ugly. It is even forbidden in some neighborhoods to put a pre-built houses.

I guess this is just because there is no company doing it properly and maybe no market for it.

There's no reason the factory cannot build walls for custom houses. The jigs and all will be computer controlled, anyway. Nor does that imply cheaply built or poor materials.

It's got to be an industry ripe for disruption.

Exactly. They already do custom roof trusses in factories along with standard sizes.

Near where I live in Cambridge, MA a four story apartment building was recently built/assembled over a weekend. They moved in modular components that were built in a factory in Maine. I think it was done on the weekend because they could briefly shut down the street (Mass. Ave.) to truck in the pieces. The interiors took longer, and are probably customized for the buyers, but the structure itself appeared in a couple days.

Prefab homes are definitely a thing, even luxury ones: https://www.bluhomes.com/

A majority of Hurricane Katrina reconstruction was supposedly manufactured in factories, because it was cheaper.

It might come down to culture/demand?

In Japan where it's preferred to make a new home rather than buy a pre-owned one (outside the big city), pre-fab seems to have taken off rather more (13% of new builds in 2013). For example, a house built in a day (customisable, moderately expensive but very high quality):

https://youtu.be/Kzpv47o80eg

It's already done everywhere in Europe. Here is a typical example. http://www.scotframe.co.uk/MainlandUK/Val-U-Therm/Val-U-Ther....

No-one is willing to pay architects/engineers to design houses like airliners which have all the cables and pipes routed in CAD before hand, the margins in the industry are too low to take the time to do this. Sometimes if there is a tricky area where I am concerned that the parts won't fit I will do a reference design to be sure that I have enough space, but contractors almost never build it the way we have drawn it anyway because we haven't specified the systems which they prefer because of the kickbacks from existing relationships with their suppliers. There is nothing more annoying than doing a load of work for free which you know is pointless.

I have worked on everything from individual houses to airports and even with large buildings the contractor's engineers often completely redesign the systems that have been designed by the client's engineers.

Edit: another example. http://www.dan-wood.co.uk

What is the outcome of housing this cheap? This is one more option in a growing list that includes inflatable concrete structures, and Tumbleweed houses, prefab cabins, etc etc.

Is this cheap enough to house people in third world countries. Probably not yet, but could it be on the way? And I'm sure construction costs aren't even the primary economic factor to solve...

Is it possible this trend could make vacation housing for affluent people disposable?

I love the idea of having a tiny house or even two I can move around, but I suspect, knowing me, that it wouldn't get used and would take more maintenance than I'm really truly interested in.

The third world isn't a good target; there's no permanent dwelling shortage.

The reason why you often see people homeless or living in squalor in the third world is because they were uprooted by war, famine, or natural disaster. They often need short notice temporary dwellings, rather than new permanent ones as this would produce.

So there's a market for "popup housing" in some of those countries (and even in the US for natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina), and the Red Cross and similar international aid charities make some use of those. Erecting concrete structures that would be hard to disassemble is likely a non-starter (in particular as it requires a plentiful supply of water which may be unavailable in an evacuation zone).

The source of homelessness is true for many places, but not all; Mumbai/Bombay, Kolkatta, Delhi and I would guess most other indian cities have crade-to-grave homeless communities. I know some of them do not consider themselves homeless, because they have a piece of corrugated metal to put their head under at night which is "theirs" - but would probably be considered homeless in the west.

Your statement about the 3rd world not being a good market is, of course, correct.

It will only be cheap if the finishing of the house becomes cheaper.

The raw materials + labor for a 'casco' (that's what we call them here) are not the biggest factor in creating a space that you can live in.

It's all the wiring, plumbing, window sills, insulation and so on that make up the bulk of a construction project.

That's also why those 'built in 24 hour' structures then need a lot of work (far more than the initial 24 hours to lay the base) to finish them.

Building houses cheaply is largely a solved problem, and offhand I don't see any particular reason to think this is actually any cheaper than techniques that have been around for decades, in terms of producing a practical finished dwelling.

If you want to house a lot of people cheaply, build a big, ugly apartment building. Or twenty. No big deal. The cost comes from the fixtures, finishing, the land, and (most especially, in desirable areas) the building permits.

This is cool, but it's hard to see what problem it's solving.

this house is much more cost effective. Here in CA, it's hard to build a house for less than 200$ per square foot (either due to laws or local labor conditions) - not even including land and permit cost.

> either due to laws

Right. If it was legal to build tiny, cheap houses, you could build tiny, cheap houses, including using this tech. But since it isn't, you can't.

The issue with housing in the bay area is NOT, by any possible stretch of the imagination, that it's technically challenging to make small, crude houses cheaply enough.

Plus:

> not even including land and permit cost.

But you do need the land and the permit. And once you have those, why not build a nice house? It's sensible to try and use the scarcest resource most efficiently, and in coastal CA, the scarcest resource is neither building materials nor labour.

I have a slight feeling that this won't become very widespread on Earth - simply put, the thing is too small to be able to construct a house larger than a typical 1-family house.

However, taking such a thing and sending it up to Mars or the Moon, now there's a potential for "real" prefabricated housing.

Why couldn't you use 3 or 4 of them to make a larger house? Seems like as long as it can print your largest room you are Golden.

Oh man, I'd sure like me some Samsung Nano Crystal Color Revolutionary Super Ultra High Definition TV and a Samsung refrigerator with No Frost system, a Samsung induction stove, Samsung dishwashing machine, Samsung electrical oven, and maybe even a Samsung microwave oven. Not to forget the innovative Samsung AddWash washing machine.

I wonder why that is.

At last! A house-sized 3D printer that automates product placement as easily as wall placement.

At first it seemed to me to be expensive for a little not really practical house to live in. Then I figured out this is a tech demo and PR stunt and not an attempt to make affordable housing for people to live in.

I wonder how this compare to a yurt or straw bale construction.

But with this technology it seems like it would be straightforward to build a slightly larger, more practical house. Though I agree, I think building a house with at least one actual bedroom would have made a better demo.

I'd be surprised if this house meets state regulations for residential construction in any US state.

That'll be one of the biggest obstacles to 3D printed housing in the US. Even if you somehow get efficiency gains through 3D printing, it's going to require a different configuration depending on the regulatory environment, which varies by nation and state and county and city and topography, and changes every year.

These regulations affect every detail of the construction of your house, from the foundation to the window panes. Even details as innocuous as sink depth are regulated.

If you open the link, you'll note that this is in Russia; a lawless land where the government is constantly struggling to prove that you can run a business which isn't gazprom.

Europe is also relatively lax in terms of building regulations, it's only the North America which is hung up on having a rule for every little thing.

I'd beg to differ. From personal experience, in the UK you cannot breathe without getting planning permission.

Although, these days, not sure whether to legitimately include UK as part of a European discussion, sadly.

Yeah I'd agree about planning permission, but inside you can do pretty much what you like without issue. The US has rules such as the number and type of sockets you need to have in closets.

Holy crap, fair play. That would drive me insane.

On the other hand, if you really want to ensure that every construction detail are up to date and followed, automation and 3D printing is the way to go.

This is really cool, but I'd love to know how durable a printed house is over the long term. Right now though, I think that there's a profitable niche for this sort of portable and low-labor-intensity construction in the defence and disaster-relief fields, where speed and cost are a higher priority than aesthetics.

I could easily see the US government (or rather, their contractors) using this technology when constructing bases overseas, especially in places in Afghanistan where workers don't just need to be paid, but fed, housed and transported at great expense.

I'm working on buying land some land and building a house right now. The prices for a typical traditional way of building a house aren't that astronomical. I looked into some prefab but for a split entry or two story it's pretty hard to bring my costs down much lower.

I wish I could get my land prepped and then print it out cheap or dropped off but haven't found anything that can get me to the price point I want with ~2500 sqft other than doing the typical way.

Oh wow, pretty neat and surprised it took just 24 hours. For some reason it reminds me a bit of the Monsanto House of the Future at Disneyland. I wasn't even born yet when they took it down, but randomly found videos of it on YouTube once. But it was a whole house made of plastic. Probably molded I'd guess since they didn't have 3D printers back then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qUkNZ5aJWE

Amazing.

Concrete is also amazing. I can't believe how wood and stick frame took over traditional housing methods.

Earthquakes

Carpenters roofers painters and plumbers are safe. This "printed house" seems to have required lots of hands. It is also so small that any reasonable team of humans could have built it in as short a time.

A better approach would be to have the robot print the concrete forms, allowing for humans to erect and fill them on the site. That might actually save on manpower.

Right, I don't see them bringing this machine on site and having it print something.

You have to move materials on site anyway, so I bet they simply prefab modular components and then assemble somewhere else.

They just want to show they can build any shape and even take electrical and plumbing into account as they build.

There is the technological achievement that not too many years ago most concrete came in trucks and was wheelbarrowed by hand and leg into forms. Then came the era of boom trucks where a crane like machine squirts out of a hose into prepared form. The logical extension is getting rid of the prepared forms. That's what this technology demonstrator shows.

I agree the "any shape" aspect is key in that they're probably going to do more engineering and repair work than anything else. So dig up a sidewalk for a repair they'll print in place a new sidewalk faster than someone can build a sidewalk form, minimal as that is, after all a sidewalk is pretty small compared to an entire house LOL. Or your cellphone tower taken out by tornado they'll print a foundation for a backup tower as fast as rebar can get tossed in, sit a couple hours, toss a tower on the foundation, and you're back on the air. Or exotic repairs to civil engineering accidents, maybe that dam in CA needs a herd of 3-d printers to make a new spillway faster than they could even construct the forms. This also might come in handy with tunnel boring machines, rather than making pre-made panels fit, you could print panels to fit the as dug hole, which is interesting to think about.

The CivEng side of the conversation with the concrete factory probably sounds like: There's some damage, we're not even sure how bad it is yet, no obviously we haven't built a form we haven't even hauled out the big rubble yet the crane just got started, OK send out your 3d printer to patch, we should be done demolishing and hauling out the broken chunks by the time your truck arrives.

Even better if they can print nicely enough to make it residential grade appearance, perhaps they can patch things to look nice, not merely be physically strong enough.

"""The construction cost of the printed house amounted to $10134, which is approximately $275 per square meter, taking in account that partners have provided the highest quality materials"""

Due to the wording of the sentence I'm not sure if the material is included in the calculation or not. But assuming prices going down and technology improving a building like that for 10-20k in 24h is an interesting proposition for on demand housing (even if it is just destroyed afterwards). Embedded sponsoring by Samsung aside I think the wall printed to match the curvature of the TV is an interesting example. This could be interesting for events/marketing booths etc.

Edit: This could also be very interesting for Hollywood for set building :)

Looks cheap to build, impossible to modify or fix.

Yeah, that's typically the case with concrete construction. :-)

Tiny houses are great and all, but most articles, tv shows, etc two basic issues:

- land - hookups

Had this discussion today with someone enthused about a tiny home community until the land use rental fee came into play.

Anyone read the short science fiction (soon to be non-fiction) story Manna.

Is this the prototype of cheap "terrafoam" housing for the poor ppl displaced from the society? ;)

Awesome! Finally, Flintstone on HWY 280 will have some competition http://www.flintstonehouse280.com/

I can see artsy architects thinking up a whole new range of designs that escape the constraints imposed by established manufacturing and construction practices. Probably not as much not for permanent habitat, but for a garage, or a playhouse for kids.

Video of the process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViqzfPW6TFo

That was the first video I've ever had to play at 6x its original speed!

Related: This House Costs Just $20,000—But It’s Nicer Than Yours [1]

[1] https://www.fastcoexist.com/3056129/this-house-costs-just-20...

Given the fact that climate change is the big deal, how much energy did it take to actually build such a house versus the energy needed by a regular brick & mortar & human workers house ?

Well, I suppose it's not meant to replace traditional building methods/materials, but as it gets better, imagine the usability of such tech eg. for building a base on the moon.

Print the walls and let this guy to do the rest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_Uoq6JYKbw

Too bad that the article doesn't mention any electrical nor water/sewage installation. No wonder the appliances are depicted turned off.

Great but I dont think it's the walls and roof that take time usually. It's the planning consent, foundations, utilities and internals.

When people say, "All the manufacturing has gone to China!" show them this video, and say, "No, they've gone to robots".

I was just thinking this morning how all the stuff we get from china should be the first things we try to automate so we can't stop contributing to child labor.

China has been replacing human worker with robots for a while now. The reason stuff is made in China is not child labor but supply chain availability.

Walmart has been pressuring vendors to move more SKUs to the US. This has mostly resulted in the most easily automated SKUs moving to the US.

Good, send them back to sustenance farming

I hear Bill Gates wants to place a tax on robots in the USA. An interesting idea, but they'll just move the work to countries with tax free robots.

Then put an even heavier tax on what comes out of these countries. See how the tax workaround can be easily worked around (if there is political will to do so) ?

Inventor: https://angel.co/nikita-cheniuntai

Other people have mentioned the high embodied energy of concrete but there is also a problem with insulating this structure. I hope the PIR wasn't just injected into the cavity because that is a recipe for disaster. The zigzag cross bracing you can see will be a massive cold bridge which will cause cold spots that will develop mould patches inside. Concrete is not breathable (it is mostly impermeable to water vapour) but hairline cracks develop which make it capillary active and will allow water to be wicked into the interstitial space containing the insulation and then through to the inner face to cause damp problems. A standard concrete wall needs to be a minimum of 300mm of solid concrete to remove the chance that a localised crack will form right through the wall. Usually when concrete is used it is purely for the floors and structural frame for this reason. You do see concrete clad structures but these are typically decorative panels with a capillary break behind, or they are damp and leaky old 60's buildings. Paint systems are not the solution as they tend to fail within 3 - 10 years and then they just trap even more moisture in the construction. Conventional houses get around this problem with a capillary break, basically just an air gap between the outer wall and the internal insulation which is on a block or in between timber structure. The alternative, which is well understood in central Europe, is to use breathable materials such as calcium silicate blocks and wood fibre insulation.

It looks like it forms a structure that only works in compression because of the way it is laid down. Even if it is glass reinforced concrete I don't think there could be a good structural interface between the printed layers. This is why it doesn't print the roof and they don't show how they dealt with the lintels over the doors and windows. These must have been installed manually. If the window openings had been 3d printed then they would have needed gothic arches to get around the 45 degree angle corbeling problem which is inherent in compression structures and the roof would have looked like a gothic vault for the same reason.

Another thing that is needed to make this into a dwelling that won't go mouldy, is some kind of vapour control layer on the inner concrete face. You then need to wire the place up, but there is the problem of how to hide the wires internally. You don't want electrical cables to go through the vapour control layer where possible and you definitely don't want any cable junctions where there is a risk of interstitial condensation making the electrics 'go fizzy'. Did they have to manually install dry lining over the cables? Are the internal faces rendered over conduit and then plastered?

I think their costs are suspicious as well, I don't know about Russia but in europe $227 would barely cover one day of time for 1 groundworks operative let alone machine hire and materials for foundations. A recent project we worked on had £20,000 installed cost just for the gravel fill for the groundworks for 2 small houses.

As an Architect, I think CNC machined cross laminated timber panels are more interesting because the embodied energy characteristics are much better and they are capable of forming diaphragm structures that experience tension such as floor and roof planes. In general flat vertical surfaces are not going away any time soon, because they are ABI compatible with Furniture v1.0.

I wonder about 3d printing with cob like materials.

I image using a similar jig, but with wider tubing and possibly mixing the straw in as clay mixture is being poured out. But how would keep the cob mixture consistent? Pre separated components, like the sand, clay, straw? Depending on how wet you apply it, you might need to take timeouts for layers to dry.

Yeah, lots of questions to get it right.

I'd be interested to see how the process scales up to larger structures. That house is smaller than my apartment!

Finally some real innovation! This is awesome.

Now, let's get this over here in CA - I know I'm just dreaming.

You don't have to print a house - it better be built from Lego-like blocks.

We need Elon Musk to ship a few of these things to Mars

Great to build a large and long wall /s

we should print on the moon using robots with no human aid.

this is what elon musk must send, not just an orbital tour.

the housing crisis needs vertical buildings, I hope 3d printing can got in that direction soon.

A house without plumbing

What's the point of cheap housing if the landowning rentier class keeps extorting everybody through higher and higher rents?

The only way to get actually affordable housing is to tax land so hard that it stops being an investment at all and becomes merely a commodity, like it should be.

Nobody is extorting anyone. Rents are set by the market price just like anything else. Landowners can only charge what people are willing to pay.

If there is a problem, it's with the availability of land for building new housing. Zoning laws and NIMBYism artificially constrain the supply side of the equation, which drives up rents. There is no extortion happening - just supply constriction.

There can be more than one problem at once, you know. Zoning laws do keep new houses from being made in some places, and investors buying houses and doing nothing with them or raising all local rents in the area to increase the average rent paid are both problems that need to be fixed. At least with the housing tax, we'd see a wealth redistribution, which I could argue is highly needed at the moment.

You have to decide if what you want is to provide people housing or want to raise revenue to do wealth redistribution.

IF you add a tax to owning a property, you make it less interesting for people to buy housing, since it will be sold for less, and thus creates less supply for the future renters.

> Rents are set by the market price just like anything else.

This isn't technically incorrect, but it overlooks some important details. Historically, prices typically reflected local supply and demand, but recently throughout the world we are seeing tremendous external demand from people with massive wealth entering local markets and driving up prices. In other words, in your statement "Landowners can only charge what people are willing to pay.", "people" is not the same thing it was 10 or 15 years ago.

Of course, this has always been the case to some degree, it's just much more widespread now.

This is technically incorrect. First because there are places where rents are regulated, then because rents are often artificially inflated. In other words market prices can be and are manipulated to make more profit to owners.

Also gentrification.

I don't think I understand what you're saying?

The global demand thing is a temporary market condition. It's purely a function of the need for kleptocrats in a few countries to launder money, and the willful blindness on the part of various governments. That will eventually change.

Even then, locality still matters. The children of chinese industrialists or party officials aren't buying property in Littleton, NH. Just in places like NYC, Miami, Vancouver, etc.

Like anything real estate, boom leads to bust. Mere millionaires will be living it up in NYC penthouses again soon enough.

Actually, a friend of mine was looking for a flat (a rented house) about 3 years ago. He and his girlfriend were waiting to interview with a real estate/rental management agency in Dunedin, when a (probably) Chinese man walked in with an interpreter, walked over to the rental board, pointed out half a dozen houses and whipped out his cheque book.

I can't recall just how much I was told the offers were, but they were significantly over the listed price of each house. The cheques were signed and handed over (presumably to make a firm offer) and they left. So, at least one wealthy Chinese family are buying up in the smaller towns. (Perhaps they had a forecast that suggested property values would go up significantly. Who knows?)

It's worth noting that Dunedin's permanent population is around 75-80,000, but as it's a university town it can get as large as 120k during semester. Housing stock are small, old, cold, drafty, damp houses, and many student dwellings are literally falling apart but the rents per room can be more than $100/week (where the student loan or allowance approaches $200/week). Most landlords who own student housing expect to make a lot of money, and a number of don't care about the conditions the tenants live in.

If you're curious, go to Google Maps and look up Hyde Street, Dunedin. Or Castle Street North. A friend of mine had me go and look at a flat for her, while she was out of town. It was literally a woodshed that had been reclad and had a window put in, on Castle Street North.

They better start building more woodsheds, because if it's anything like Vancouver, that fellow won't be seen again for years and those houses will just sit empty and decaying.

It's getting to the point in many western nations where there are two classes of people: those who own real estate, and those who don't, and it couldn't be more obvious which one of those groups they are serving. If a Trump comes along in Canada, I think I would knowingly vote for a disaster, at least it would level the playing field. If those who lucked into wealth don't give two shits about anyone else, the least I can do is vote to destroy our economy and return the favor.

I'm not sure where you live, but right now on HN's front page there's a post about the housing bubble in Toronto and the 100k vacant homes in Paris. So what you say may be true where you live but it is not the case elsewhere.

Many people pay more than they were willing to or have to share their place to be able to pay rent. When the choice is between paying more than you were willing to or not having a place to live, you don't really have a choice.

I agree with your sentiment but not your language. Nobody pays "more than they're willing to" in economic terms. They have the choice to not pay rent and be homeless, and the price they pay in rent reflects their desire not to do that. But I'll agree that most people pay more than they'd like, more than is sensible and more than is fair.

People can also "choose" no to pay for food and eventually die of hunger. To describe paying for basics like its a choice is highly insulting to those who cannot afford those basics.

With the same morality it would be highly insulting to those who cant get food to worry about taxing properties in the city so middle-class have better access to them.

But even more, it would be more practical to understand why are people paying such high rents, not only because of housing supply, but because of the concentration of work in the cities, once again, making it way more sustainable to live in a city than in the country side.

It's an economic model. If you're starving you'll choose to spend all your money on food and none of it on rent. And you'll choose to buy the cheapest food. Incidentally I don't believe it helps for you to get offended on behalf of the starving.

> I'm not sure where you live, but right now on HN's front page there's a post about the housing bubble in Toronto and the 100k vacant homes in Paris. So what you say may be true where you live but it is not the case elsewhere.

I live in Los Angeles, and rents here are certainly higher than i'd prefer. Not as high as some places, but much higher than most.

But where I live doesn't really matter. What matters is that this is still a simple question of supply and demand. The fact that the real estate market has globalized has allowed these properties to get closer to their 'true value'. The true value of living in one of the most bustling, dynamic economies of the world turns out to be quite high. And that is a price that unfortunately most people can't afford.

For some reason people tend to view this as an affront to human rights. We don't view it as a violation of human rights when someone can't afford a Ferrari, but we do when they can't live in San Francisco. But at a fundamental level, your cities like San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, etc..are the Ferrari's of cities. They are luxury products and life in them is priced accordingly.

> Many people pay more than they were willing to or have to share their place to be able to pay rent. When the choice is between paying more than you were willing to or not having a place to live, you don't really have a choice.

It isn't a choice between paying more or not living though. It's a choice between paying more and not living where you want to live. As I previously mentioned, it's also an issue of artificially constrained supply due to the political and social influence of existing property owners, which is indeed a huge problem.

Except the rentier class pays off the local politicians to keep land in short supply. Are you telling me you really didn't know about that?

I think it's less of an outright bribe and more that they are champions of protecting the value of their homes, which they see as an investment and not a commodity.

Pretty sure I said that in the second and third lines of my three line comment:

> If there is a problem, it's with the availability of land for building new housing. Zoning laws and NIMBYism artificially constrain the supply side of the equation, which drives up rents. There is no extortion happening - just supply constriction.

Yes, but you didn't specifically say that this is to a considerable extent due to the rentier class paying for it.

I constantly hear this argument, but I've never seen any evidence.

There's been a simultaneous skyrocketing housing costs in disparate parts of the world in the last 20 years - I find it implausible that they got NIMBYed to the tune of tripling the price of real estate all at roughly the same time.

There is definitely a global effect of house price increases. One explanation is that access to cheap credit inflated prices in the US, but after the crisis, its the feds general interest of money being low that continued that.

Its interesting to see that dwelling production in the US hasnt caught up with basic demographic demand: its possible the 2008 crisis hit developers so hard that its taking time to recuperate dwelling construction (generally world wide)

But how would that affect the house prices in, say, Sydney Australia where the prices have also skyrocketed but 2008 had little effect?

Investors that would usually invest in the US find those assets expensive, and thus invest in other countries. Even argentina, which was definitely shielded from the financial crisis, has had price increases.

I'll agree that that the two markets aren't isolated. But you can't be claiming that NIMBYism in the US is the dominant cause of a sudden tripling of house prices in Australia, can you?

The elephant in the room is that, during that same time period, China (and to a lesser extent, other BRICs) suddenly acquired a tremendous amount of wealth, and saw developed-world housing as an attractive blue-chip-investment/money-laundry.

You can argue that NIMBYism made it harder for the Chinese to dump money by the freighter into the real estate market, but is that really a bad thing? It caused(/is causing) a massive bubble in an area that should be stable, on account of it being critical infrastructure.

In any case, it's the giant piles of cash coming in that's the actual cause of the issue. NIMBYism (in the right-wing view), is taking the entire blame, when really it's only a factor, and it's highly debatable whether it's helping or hurting considering the potential downsides of the influx.

I dont think its nimby-ism, i think its just the development industry recuperating from a very high-high that made them go bankrupt very quickly.

The chinese money angle is interesting, and though it can definitely help raise prices, once development gets hold of demographic growth, and a tad more, even increase demand would be met with increase supply.

One of the great problems nowadays is that supply is not catching up and lots of measures are being put in place to limit demand, but once =supply catches up (which it can, and considering prices theres little reason to think otherwise), house prices could stabilize or even go down.

People are "willing to pay" rents only in the sense that people are willing to give a mugger their watch.

Nobody made land. So why should some people be able to demand money from others for it?

> People are "willing to pay" rents only in the sense that people are willing to give a mugger their watch.

That's a silly comparison. You could say that about literally any product that's charging more than you feel like paying.

> Nobody made land. So why should some people be able to demand money from others for it?

Now that is an interesting question. I think there is a strong case to be made against the ownership of land in general. The fact that people have been allowed to own land seems like an odd historical quirk to me. I think it should probably be changed.

That, however, does not make rent into extortion. It's still a commodity regulated by the same laws of supply and demand as anything else.

> You could say that about literally any product that's charging more than you feel like paying.

Exactly. Property is a system of violence.

The concept of property taxes is the way governments prevent you from truly owning your land. I'm paying about $450/month for the privilege of owning my house. Renters here are able to apply for a property tax refund based on their rental amount.

Yes, clearly the problem with housing is not enough taxes. Taxing people for owning homes will definitely not result in rents rising and fewer people owning homes.

He didn't say tax housing, he said tax land. Specifically non-agricultural land that has no homestead.

That is a double edged sword though (at least in the US). If we continue to try to divest of public lands (thank you republicans) but then tax private lands, what happens to conservation efforts?

You'd at the very least need to enact something that has an exception for land conservation, but good luck keeping out the loopholes. Minimum of 100 years before the land can be built on? And then an egregiously high tax at the end if it is to be built on?

Fewer people owning homes is exactly what he's talking about. More taxes means a higher incentive to rent to cover that cost. A tax on ownership is a tax break on renting, and more competition among renters.

Of course that also means more people looking to rent, so I don't think that will really work, but its not an absurd suggestion.

I disagree. If you tax the home owner, they will pass on the taxes to the family renting that home.

Of course. But the renter and/or rentee will still be paying less in taxes than people who just own.

Have you thought about all the outcomes that will be caused by this policy? Because one obvious one is old people and poor families being kicked out of homes because they can't afford the tax. I guess we can just increase taxes even further to pay for their safety net which will result in them living in nice beautiful public housing.

This isn't a drafted policy proposal. Tax laws are a little more refined than "tax houses". The tax would obviously be progressive and targeted at cities, to avoid affecting the poor, retired or rural.

You're arguing against a strawman of a concept I'm not even a real fan of. There's no need to attack via the fallout of flawed implementations. If you disagree with the fundamental concept that's valid, but it needs to be disproven on a fundamental basis.

Policies which encourage high density are definitely the right way to go. Our cities should be filled with massive futuristic towers connected by rapid transit. If you want to live in a house or even a townhouse, move to a rural area.

Why isn't the landowning rentier class extorting everybody through higher and higher food prices?

You can transport food around, so there is competition. You can't conjure up land in the middle of a city.

Cannot blieve hn downvoted this. God this site!

This isn't useful because the printed house lacks wiring, plumbing, and finishes and is also an example of wasteful land use. The occupant of this house will indirectly demand roads, power, water, and sewer systems and most likely parking for a car as well. If we accept that housing has become critical issue then we need to take it seriously and look at the whole problem and what aspects are the most costly. Currently planning, infrastructure impacts, and labor intensive details are where most of the money goes. Basic construction is already competitively cheap.

Housing isn't a critical issue at all. Housing is large cities is a critical problem.

With the internet and modern transport infrastructure there's no reason to live in a big US metro area like SFO or NYC. The quality of life sucks and the cost of living is outrageous. I can be in midtown Manhattan with a trip about 20 minutes longer than the average Long Island commuter, and live in a bigger, nicer home in a better place that would be possible in the metropolitan area.

It's kind of ironic that we pay people on the other side of the planet to run our IT systems, but the average technology company insists on locating much of its stateside operations in a small number of ridiculously expensive places that increase cost and almost certainly decrease the quality of output. Car companies figured this out 100 years ago.

I mean part of that is what kind of tech CEO wants to live in Kansas? They want to live in NYC or SF or maybe Seattle. The companies are sometimes built where they want to live, sometimes relocated but in the end people like cities.

Getting off the main subject but there are lots of midwest towns that are pretty cool. Especially those with universities. Culture, things to do, good public schools, low cost of living, low crime rate, low tax rates, people not defecating on the sidewalks.... I think could be attractive to a lot of people.

I think you are looking at some confirmation bias here.

Single 20-somethings (whether or not they happen to be tech CEOs) often enjoy living in cities.

Older people with children generally do not.

If I live in San Francisco or New Work, my spouse can easily get a job. If I want to change jobs, I can easily do so without putting my life upside down. This what a large, diverse job market does. Plus a lot of people value urban amenities (i.e. the ability to walk 2minutes to your favorite café...)

I'm not saying those things aren't valuable... just more expensive!

100 years ago most households had one 'breadwinner', and this breadwinner had a job for life. With the advent of the 2 working adults households, and increase in job mobility, having access to a large pool of potential employment is crucial for many.

> almost certainly decrease the quality of output

I think this is a dubious statement. The bifurcation of American society, with increasing concentration of wealth in cities, and increasingly desolate rural areas, has only accelerated in recent years.

The fact is that most in demand knowledge workers want to live in central urban areas. You say you can have commute "only 20 mins longer than your average Long Island commuter" - does that mean your door-to-door time is over an hour each way? No thank you, I'd much rather live in a small apartment with a 15 minute walkable commute.

I'm door to door to work in in the morning in around 10 minutes. About 25 if I walk.

My comment is more about the idea that we demand that people work in overcrowded cities in large offices, where most jobs can be done remote or in small offices.

>The fact is that most in demand knowledge workers want to live in central urban areas.

That's definitely false. There are hot markets for "knowledge workers" in every American metro, and a hot virtual market that is more than happy to pay for talented developers no matter where they're located.

In local markets, salaries may be adjusted based on the cost of living, but in relative terms, valuable knowledge workers have a lot of opportunity and are compensated well for their work wherever they live.

You might be conflating "my classmates at the university" with "in-demand knowledge workers", but it's incorrect to assume that people who could match the profile of a recent graduate comprise the majority, or really even a substantial part, of the "desirable worker" market. Real-world experience is immensely valuable, and real-world experience is generally only found where age, the necessary corollary of experience, exists. That is frequently not urban centers.

I know a senior developer who, in his mid-50s, left behind the Seattle metro for a quiet life in the mountains of Idaho. As long as he had an internet connection, his clients were more than happy to keep him on board.

I've spent my entire career in metro areas of respectable size, but not the "urban centers" or tech hotspots that you're probably referring to. There are good (and bad) developers everywhere.

>No thank you, I'd much rather live in a small apartment with a 15 minute walkable commute.

That works while you have 1 -- maybe 2 -- inhabitants in your "small" (read: tiny) apartment. If you ever have kids, the impracticality of this plan will be immediately visible. This further suggests that you're constraining your view of "in demand knowledge workers" to the under-30 set. I suggest you get out more!

I think it has more to do with stage of life than type of worker. For example, now that I have a family, I find that I'm willing to spend a few extra minutes driving to the office in order to have a more spacious house and more open space for the kiddos.

That's assuming that the jobs are actually in the city, as opposed to industrial parks in the suburbs. Although urban offices are more common that they were 20 years ago I'd be willing to bet that there are far more engineering jobs in suburban locations than there are near walkable urban cores.

It seems like Kansas ought to be a much bigger tech-hub for startups (along with other central-US states) because everything is cheaper and you can get reasonable latency to both coasts without having a presence on both coasts. What's holding them back is probably more cultural/political than anything else.

> With the internet and modern transport infrastructure there's no reason to live in a big US metro area like SFO or NYC.

This is an utterly ridiculous statement. Clearly there must be many reasons that hundreds of millions of people worldwide choose to live in big cities. Just because you do not personally find it valuable does not negate its benefit for countless others.

I'm not talking about global. If you read carefully, I scoped that statement to "big US metro" areas.

There are plenty of reasons that clustering like industries is useful. IMO, it's been taken to an extreme and the reasons for doing it in technology are mostly convenience for investment management types.

The case has already been made by the large companies. How many of JP Morgan's 30,000+ developers are in the NY metro area? If you pick 6 mid-sized tech companies at random, and try to justify why they need to be in SFO, you'll have a tough time. Most of the engineers could be in Omaha for half the price.

I'm sorry, you did say US metro, so let's reduce that number to tens of millions.

You're talking about something different now, needs versus wants. People live in cities for many reasons besides strict necessity. Quality of life, cultural events, diversity, ease of transportation, take your pick. Heck, there are plenty of developers who work in Silicon Valley but choose to live in SF. They could live closer to their jobs. Are they daft? Or do they value other things about urban life that make the extra rent and a longer commute worthwhile. Price is not the only consideration for where to live.

There's no reason a printed house you couldn't get wiring, plumbing etc. just as with normal construction. Maybe even easier since you can preset positions of sockets and openings in the house model.

Wasteful land use? Why that, because of the unusual form of the house? That was probably just to reduce movement of the printing head and fit production within the 24h deadline. They seem to be able to build rectangular structures just as well.

"The occupant of this house will indirectly demand roads, power..." etc. - just like the occupant of a usually constructed house. I don't see how it is an argument.

This is definitely useful for building of special forms which are hard, expensive or not possible to build otherwise.

> This isn't useful because the printed house lacks wiring, plumbing, and finishes and is also an example of wasteful land use

Did you even read the article? The cost includes wiring, and interior and exterior finishing, the prices are even itemized.

The rest of your argument applies to any housing at all, and has nothing to do with this proof of concept demo.

This is kinda cool, not incredibly new, but the first 3d concrete printer I've seen. It's not the cheapest house on the planet, but it's more than an order of magnitude cheaper than what most Americans are paying. So why are you dumping all over it? Just don't buy one if it's that bad. :P

What's the point of cheap housing if people are going to spend all the money that is saved into unneeded new electronic devices or new cars?

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