Once She Told Me She Only Spent $4,000, I Thought She Was Crazy, Until I Looked Inside
By Dreamer
What if I told you that an Austin-based startup company developed a home that could end the homelessness problem in America? After reading this article, you’ll start to believe it is possible. For just about $4,000, you can download a home, print it and have it up and ready for occupation in less than a day. Isn’t that amazing?
While the company’s printable dwellings are still in the concept phase, they offer a gargantuan opportunity to people who live on the streets or in shelters. Being able to have an affordable place of their own could be a game-changer.
Watch the video below to see the inside!
The homes will first debut in El Salvador. And if they work well there, their use could expand to other parts of the world. And the hope is that billions of people could have a safer and better place to sleep at night.
The homes currently cost about $10,000 and require about 24 hours of building time. But when things get up and running, they could cost as little as $4,000.
The startup company is based in the innovative Austin, Texas. And the home was unveiled at the popular SXSW festival. The house had 650 square feet and a workable inside.
About 1.2 billion people on the planet do not have adequate housing.
A spokesman from the World Resources Institute’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities said, “History has been punctuated with advances in technology and materials that provide an order-of-magnitude decrease in cost and time required to build a new home. And while recent decades have brought major advances in personal technology, construction practices remain relatively unchanged since the 1950s. Icon aims to change this, ushering in a new era in construction to meet the needs of the future.”
The project is still being figured out. And Icon, the startup, has teamed up with New Story, a nonprofit organization that invests in international housing. Together they plan to introduce this new home to people in need in El Salvador. Over the next 18 months, they hope to build 100 of these affordable homes.
New Story has helped people in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake left millions without adequate housing.
Icon uses a Vulcan printer to create these homes. They create a schematic and upload that into the program. Then the printer takes that blueprint and “prints” the house. Basically, it does the work of contractors by laying the cement.
The model home that was on display in SWSW had a living room, a bathroom, a bedroom, and even an outdoor space (porch). Everything about the home is 3D printed except for the abode’s roof. It was built on the Icon lot. And they plan to use this 3D printed house as more office space so they can further tweak the design and make it better. Hopefully, they will be able to help homeless people sleep better at night very soon.
When prototyping is finished, Icon will relocate their Vulcan printer to El Salvador and start doing good work for people in need.
Do you think this new housing idea could change the world for the better?
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