SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
This is a great affordable housing idea that Seattle likely won’t use
Mar 15, 2018, 12:36 PM | Updated: Mar 16, 2018, 7:46 am
Dave Chung, who says he has been homeless for five years on the streets of California and Washington state, eats a meal before bedding down in a bus shelter in view of Seattle’s Space Needle in October 2017. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)
(AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)
Affordable housing. It’s the bane of our existence around here.
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Today, on behalf of the Ron & Don Show, I appoint myself to my very own Blue Ribbon Panel (a panel of one) with a new idea.
3D printed affordable housing
A construction start up called ICON just demonstrated a 3D printed home at South by Southwest. They can print a 350 square foot home in about a day. Impressive, right?
Now here’s the kicker. They can do it for $6,000 to $10,000 per house. They forecast when it gets to scale, they will be able to print a home for about $4,000.
In the elevator pitch for the 3D printed house, they talk about bringing this technology to the developing world and mention places like El Salvador, Bolivia, and Haiti. But why shouldn’t a city like Seattle at least look into this technology to solve our current homelessness crisis? A little back-of-the-napkin math has 1,000 printed homes coming in at $4-6 million dollars. Remember, we just passed a $390 million dollar levy to fund homelessness. Oh, and the city just asked for $75 million more about two weeks ago.
Where’s the progress?
I guess my question at this point is what is holding up action in our area? I have talked about a bunch of different technologies over the years, and yet nothing ever happens in a substantive way: The Block Project; Tiny Homes; 3D Printed Homes; Paul Allen offered up container homes. Not to mention the ideas that have come out of the University of Washington, complete with volunteer labor.
It doesn’t make any sense.
So the real answer must be that our elected officials don’t really want to fix this. They say they want to, but their actions speak louder than words. Officials are more invested in their committees and action groups. They are more beholden to the “Homeless Industrial Complex,” as Don likes to call it.
Are you telling me that there’s not one hunk of land controlled by the city where you couldn’t try a pilot program? Build a few 3D printed homes, a few BLOCK homes, ask Paul Allen for a couple of his container homes that he’s been experimenting with, and then assign a few staff members to run the pilot. Why is that such a mountain to climb?
As the old saying goes: watch what people do, not what they say.
You can hear “What are we talking about here?” everyday at 4:45 p.m. on 97.3 FM.
