The pitch for 3D-printed housing has always been the same: robots build faster, waste less, need fewer humans \u2014 and therefore make homes cheaper for consumers. It\u2019s a compelling pitch, but it isn\u2019t exactly what happened in Yuba County, California, where a company called 4Dify just finished fabricating what it calls \u201cAmerica\u2019s first 3D-printed neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to the outlet SlashGear<\/a>, the neighborhood encompasses five 1,000-square-foot houses just north of Sacramento. Each domicile is produced by a hulking concrete printer worth about $1.5 million, which took about 24 days to spit out the first house.<\/p>\n In the future, 4Dify expects the whole process to take about 10 days, but that isn\u2019t what\u2019s astonishing about the Yuba County neighborhood \u2014 it\u2019s the price tag.<\/p>\n Per SlashGear, the first house went on sale last week for a price of $375,000. Given that the median price for a home in Yuba County is $450,000, that might seem like a steal. <\/p>\n The catch, however, is the price per square foot. At 1,000 square feet in size, the 4Dify homes come out to $375 per. Yuba County\u2019s median price per square foot is $268, per RedFin data<\/a>.<\/p>\n At that price tag, 4Dify\u2019s concrete yurts are comparable in cost to a 2,500 square foot custom-built home in Chicago\u2019s northwest suburbs<\/a> \u2014 and that\u2019s without getting into the risks of maintaining or insuring a new type of dwelling, which is likely to have unpredictable pain points for owners as it ages. <\/p>\n Sure, the process uses less time and labor than a typical house, and it might cut down on waste tremendously. But until companies like 4Dify can reduce their prices by building at scale, 3D printed homes remain little more than a housing experiment at best \u2014 and an expensive novelty at worse.<\/p>\n