3D Printing and Housing

An interesting article came up in my feed today. This is an area I am particularly excited about because it covers one of the fundamentals of life - shelter. In later posts I plan to go into more depth on what I think the rest of the fundamentals are.

Housing is both something we cannot do without and a vehicle of speculation. This is not a good thing - lack of affordable housing and the resulting problems not only have a huge opportunity cost but also impact entire swaths of the economy and quality of life. The opportunity cost here is the productivity that the nearly/newly homeless people could have provided if they had stable shelter. The impact on other areas ranges from crime to healthcare.

I don’t think it can be questioned that having shelter practically available to all would be a good thing. It seems to me that most of the discussion centres around how we get there, not if we should get there. One major issue is that the value of housing is not independent of the housing itself, but is dependent on the value of the land underneath it as well. Even if you can build inexpensive, quality housing, if at some point the area experiences a sudden rise in desirability the benefits would be lost. Of course, if there are continuous redevelopment efforts to maintain a supply of the housing on cheaper to land to compensate then this may not be much of an issue, but I am unsure of the practicality. If redevelopment prioritizes reworking rundown areas, then I think it will be ok, especially because America is on the edge of overall population decline.

a viable solution may be something like universal basic housing. I don’t like universal basic income because all it does is move money around, which makes it sensitive to shifts in economics and politics. On the other hand universal basic housing, with the right technology, could be done with a single capital expenditure. This would require advances to minimize maintenance requirements, but the key factor is a decrease in the capital required to build and elimination (as much as possible) of recurring maintenance expenditure. This in particular is something I will be talking about later, because it is very important that we address this if we as a civilization want to be able to move forward.