How an 11-foot-tall 3D printer is helping to create a community

San Francisco

PEDRO Garcia Hernandez, 48, is a carpenter in the south-eastern Mexican state of Tabasco, a rainforest-shrouded region of the country where about half of the residents live below the poverty line.

He ekes out a living making about 2,500 pesos (S$167.05) a month from a tiny workspace inside the home he shares with his wife, Patrona, and their daughter, Yareli. The home has dirt floors, and during Tabasco's long rainy season, it is prone to flooding. Dust from his construction projects coats nearly everything in the home, clinging to the bedroom walls, the pump toilet and the counters of his makeshift kitchen.

But that will soon change. In a matter of months, Mr Hernandez and his family are moving to a new home on the outskirts of Nacajuca, Mexico: a sleek, 500-square-foot building with two bedrooms, a finished kitchen and bath, and indoor plumbing. What's most unusual about the home is that it was made with an 11-foot-tall 3D printer.

A manufacturing process that builds objects layer by layer from a digital file, 3D printing is set for explosive growth. After a pandemic-related boom from printing objects such as Covid-19 test swabs, protective gear and respirator parts, the 3D printing market is forecast to be worth US$55.8 billion by 2027, said technology consulting firm Smithers.

Nearly any object can be printed in 3D; in construction, it uses concrete, foam and polymers to produce full-scale buildings. The real estate industry is warming to the trend: Construction firm SQ4D listed a 3D-printed house in Riverhead, New York, this year for US$299,000. It was billed as the first 3D-printed home for sale in the US, but it was predated by similar projects in France, Germany and the Netherlands.

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And now, the era of the 3D-printed community has arrived. Mr Hernandez's home is one of 500 being built by New Story, a San Francisco non-profit organisation focused on providing housing solutions to communities in extreme poverty, in partnership with Echale, a social housing production company in Mexico, and Icon, a construction technology company in Austin, Texas.

When New Story broke ground on the village in 2019, it was called the world's first community of 3D-printed homes. Two years and a pandemic later, 200 homes are either under construction or have been completed, 10 of which were printed on site by Icon's Vulcan II printer. Plans for roads, a football field, a school, a market and a library are in the works.

Single-family homes are a good testing ground for the durability of 3D-printed construction because they are small and offer a repetitive design process without much height, said Henry D'Esposito, who leads construction research at JLL, a commercial real estate firm. They can also be constructed to tolerate natural disasters: Nacajuca sits in a seismic zone, and the homes there have already withstood a magnitude 7.4 earthquake.

The technology is promising, but some investors remain wary, and they are watching the emergence of 3D housing clusters closely.

In March, Palari Homes and construction company Mighty Buildings announced a US$15 million planned community of more than a dozen 3D-printed homes in Rancho Mirage, California. The community has a waiting list of more than 1,000.

The same month, Icon announced it had teamed up with developer 3Strands and DEN Property Group on four 3D-printed homes in Austin, priced at US$450,000-795,000. Icon has also printed homes in the Community First Village in Austin, a project of the non-profit organisation Mobile Loaves & Fishes that provides permanent housing to homeless men and women.

The 3D-printing market grew 21 per cent last year, and manufacturing platform Hubs projects that it will double in size over the next five years.

"It really is a very effective and efficient way to build a small segment of properties, but it's not something that applies across the broader commercial real estate ecosystem," Mr D'Esposito said. "We don't know exactly how these buildings will perform over decades or what the long-term value retention will be for them. So if you're talking to an investor or lender, that's a big yellow flag."

In Nacajuca, building a home with Icon's Vulcan II printer looks much like a massive soft-serve ice cream cone: layers of lavacrete, the company's proprietary concrete mix, are poured one after another in long swirls. The printer is controlled by a tablet or smartphone, requires as few as three workers and can complete a home in less than 24 hours.

"We know that being able to build more quickly, without sacrificing quality, is something that we have to make huge leaps on if we're going to even make a dent on the issue of housing in our lifetime," said Brett Hagler, New Story's chief executive officer and one of four founders.

The organisation was started in 2015, shortly after Mr Hagler took a trip to Haiti and saw families still living in tents years after the 2010 earthquake there. Across the globe, 1.6 billion people live with inadequate housing, said Habitat for Humanity.

"We're really looking at the biggest opportunities to have both impact and efficiency gains," said Alexandria Lafci, one of the New Story founders. "There is a very significant gain in speed that you get with 3D printing, without sacrificing quality."

Speed is only one factor in bringing a village to completion - New Story has teamed up with local officials in Tabasco to bring sewage services, electricity and water to the community.

Mr Hernandez, who has plans to expand his construction business to a larger space in his new home, said he was not focused on a move-in date. He cares about the long-term impact the home will have for his daughter, who is studying to become a nurse.

"When we receive the house, my daughter will be able to rely on it," he said. "She won't have to worry anymore."

Echale, which has been operating in Mexico for 24 years, helped New Story select residents for the new homes based on need. It decided to sign the titles of each home not to a whole family but to the woman of the house.

"It's to protect the family," said Francesco Piazzesi, Echale's CEO. "A man will sell a house if they need to. A woman will do whatever she needs to do to save the house for her children and her family."

Icon has delivered more than two dozen 3D-printed homes across the US and Mexico. Its coming projects run the gamut from social housing to disaster relief housing to market-rate real estate. A project is also in the works with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) to develop space-based construction systems that it hopes will eventually serve as habitats on both the moon and Mars.

When Icon was founded, its biggest hurdle was convincing sceptics, said Jason Ballard, one of Icon's founders and its CEO.

"I had builders and developers explaining to me how it's not possible to get concrete to do that, even as I walked them up to our 3D-printed house," he said. "Now our biggest challenge is we've just got to make more printers." NYTIMES