Your Future Home Could Be 3D-Printed

We don’t have enough homes for everybody. And the available homes are too expensive.

Makes sense, considering the United States is building more apartments than ever. Sadly, those apartments are almost exclusively for the wealthy.

Some (the wealthy) want to get rid of environmental and safety regulations to remove some of the regulatory hurdles that prevent homes from being built more quickly. Others are proposing more novel ideas, like 3D-printed homes, factory-built homes, and homes made of sturdy, affordable materials like hemp.

Are 3D-Printed Homes the Future?

The Associated Press reports on the rise of homes that can go from nothing to having a family living under its roof in a fraction of the time it takes to build a traditional home.

If you want to know how long it takes to build some of these homes, take a look at the homes built by a company called Fading West in Colorado. They can build an entire home in about a week.

These smaller, more nimble homebuilders still have to contend with the laws and regulations of whatever town or county they’re building in, which requires customizing the building process for each new project. But that’s only a minor hurdle that has not gotten in the way of the construction of around 100,000 manufactured homes that were shipped in the United States in 2024.

If you’re not interested in a manufactured home and would rather feel like you live in the Star Trek universe where you can ask a computer to print whatever you want, you can get yourself a 3D-printed home.

The technology is still in its early stages but it promises to be a lot less costly than a traditional home since labor costs are lower. Robotic arms that lay concrete to form walls are relatively inexpensive compared to the cost of human labor. Things are cheaper when you don’t pay people. What a novel concept.

The downside is that since the technology is still in its infancy, there is a high-cost barrier to entry. Equipment is expensive, the human labor required to make sure the machines run smoothly is also quite expensive, and there are plenty of practical and regulatory issues to work out before 3D printing can really take off.

Finally, there’s hempcrete, a mixture of hemp and lime that is a relatively inexpensive and surprisingly sturdy home-building material of the future that provides natural insulation, is mold and fire-resistant, and can be used as every layer needed to build a sturdy home wall. That includes the outer wall, insulation, and inner wall, allowing homebuilders to use one material instead of three.

The best part about hempcrete? Hemp is inexpensive to grow and it grows very quickly. Plant some hemp on a single acre of land, and in about a month, you’ll have a million hemp plants ready to be turned into a versatile home-building material.

Hempcrete doesn’t replace every part of a home. You still need wood studs to frame the walls—for now. Engineering experts are already working on ways to use hempcrete as a stud.