Housing – Page 8 – Impact Lab

Can’t find an affordable home? Try living in a pod

October 29, 2018

It’s dorm life for adults: A PodShare co-living building in Venice Beach, Calif., where dorm beds go for about $1,400 per month with shared kitchens and bathrooms.

The cost of housing is out of reach for many residents in cities such as Los Angeles and Seattle. One solution is called co-living, and it looks a lot like dorm life. Co-living projects are trying to fill a vacuum between low-income and luxury housing in expensive housing markets where people in the middle are left with few choices.

Nadya Hewitt lives in a building in Los Angeles run by a company called PodShare, where renters (or “members,” in company lingo) occupy “pods.” The grand tour of 33-year-old Hewitt’s home takes place sitting on her bed as she points out the various things she keeps within arm’s reach: a lamp, sunglasses, a water bottle, a jar of peanut butter.

Continue reading… “Can’t find an affordable home? Try living in a pod”

3D Printer, Big Problems, Housing, Inventions

Will 3D printing solve the affordable housing crisis?

October 15, 2018

3D printing’s impact on construction is slowly materializing.

Owning one’s own house—a dream of human beings ever since Cro-Magnons looked out of their caves at the retreating glaciers—has been sometimes more, sometimes less affordable. Currently, we’re in one of the less affordable phases. With construction accounting for almost 60 percent of the cost of a new single-family home, measures that reduce labor and simplify material needs may make the dream more accessible for many.

Cue the 3D-printing evangelists. The 2010s have been ringing with the hosannas of houses extruded from a 3D printer in hours, sometimes many of them per day. The options seem limitless, with made-to-order versions in concrete, like Icon’s tiny house in Austin; ABS plastic and carbon fiber, like Branch Technology’s prototype home in Chattanooga; and recycled materials, like Chinese manufacturer WinSun’s five-story apartment building in Suzhou. By simplifying construction, we’re told, 3D printing can provide affordable shelter to everyone from the working poor to refugees.

Continue reading… “Will 3D printing solve the affordable housing crisis?”

Automation, Housing, Robots

Watch this humanoid robot install drywall

October 12, 2018

The HRP-5P is a humanoid robot from Japan’s Advanced Industrial Science and Technology institute that can perform common construction tasks including — as we see above — install drywall.

HRP-5P — maybe we can call it Herb? — uses environmental measurement, object detection and motion planning to perform various tasks. In this video we see it use small hooks to grab the wallboard and slide it off onto the floor. Then, with a bit of maneuvering, it’s able to place the board against the joists and drill them in place.

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Advertising, Housing, Latest Trend

The next industry to be disrupted by technology: real estate

October 9, 2018

Eric Wu, founder and chief executive of Opendoor, a startup company that flips homes, at its San Francisco headquarters.

Many venture capitalists have homed in on real estate as a big opportunity for tech startups because parts of the industry — like pricing, mortgages and building management — have been slow to adopt software that could make business more efficient.

SAN FRANCISCO — Opendoor, a startup that flips homes, attracted attention in June when it announced it had raised $325 million from a long list of venture capitalists. The financing valued the 4-year-old company at more than $2 billion.

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3D Printer, Architecture, drones, Housing

Five technologies changing construction

September 7, 2018

Technology is changing every industry, but what are the top technologies accelerating construction?

The construction industry, in general, suffers from a traditional hesitancy to embrace nascent technologies, caused partly because projects take years to plan and complete. Recently, however, progressive construction honchos have begun to harness and realise the potency of tech – whether it’s virtual reality, autonomous drones, artificial intelligence, concrete three-dimensional (3D) printing and much more.

Thanks to incredible tech advancements, great value is generated by optimising efficiency and productivity – at every stage, from planning to construction. Indeed, many within the industry predict that in a decade a building site will look very different. Here follows five of the most game-changing technologies in the construction world.

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Architecture, Breakthrough Thinking, Engineering, Great New Product, Housing

New “Super Wood” is as strong as steel

September 3, 2018

Wood is great. It looks nice as a building material. It grows right out of the ground. But compared to things like concrete, marble, and steel, it’s not all that strong. Well, it didn’t used to be, anyway. Scientists have now created a “super wood” that’s strong enough to stop a bullet.

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3D Printer, Automation, Housing, Military, Science & Technology News

The Marines 3D printed a concrete barracks

August 31, 2018

Letting robots do construction jobs on the battlefield frees Marines to fight.

Forging ahead with plans to have robots do “dull, dangerous and dirty” jobs, the U.S. Marine Corps used a 3D printer to create a barracks building out of concrete. The process, which took less than two days, created a hardened living space capable of resisting enemy fire, a real improvement over canvas and nylon tents.

The U.S. Marine Corps moves around a lot, deploying worldwide, often to dusty, remote locations for months at a time. As a consequence, they tend to build a lot of housing for themselves, and it takes a team of ten Marines five days to build a barracks from wood. Not only is construction dangerous, it also prevents those ten Marines from doing other things during those five days.

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3D Printer, Architecture, Housing, NASA

Here’s what NASA thinks Mars houses could look like

August 3, 2018

They’ve awarded cash prizes as part of an ongoing competition.

NASA has selected five winners in an ongoing contest it has been running to get smart ideas about how to build a 3d-printed habitat on Mars.

The winners have passed level one of the 3D-Printed Habitat Centennial Challenge, which required developing about 60 percent of the design. Level Two will require greater complexity with 100 percent completion and an understanding of the hydraulics of each build. The teams will then create virtual structures and, on April 29, build them for real on the campus of Bradley University in Peoria, Ill.

The teams have different approaches and their video entries reflect that. First-place Team Zopherus, for example, highlights the autonomous robots that build out their modular structures. Using the Martian soil, their robots would build structures from the ground up.

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Housing, Latest Trend, New Viewpoints

Are real estate agents still relevant in the age of tech?

August 2, 2018

Technology has forever changed how Americans shop for homes. Thanks to sites like Zillow, Trulia and the dozens of others like them, buyers can now brown se listings, find homes and narrow their search all on their own—without ever calling in an agent.

And with online mortgage lenders cropping up left and right, they can even take it a step further, getting pre-qualified for a loan long before they’ve honed in on that dream home.

But though tech has allowed homebuyers to do all this legwork themselves, in most cases, they’re still forced to go through agents to finalize the transaction. And those agents? They get the same 3% commission they did decades ago—for seemingly doing a fraction of the work.

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Augmented Reality, Business, Housing, Science & Technology News, Virtual Reality

Inside a $1 Billion real estate company operating entirely in VR

July 25, 2018

Born during the aftermath of the financial meltdown a decade ago, a publicly-traded real estate brokerage called eXp Realty is establishing itself as one of the brightest rising companies in its industry—and one of the most creative users of digital technology today.

By several measures, the company is experiencing a moment of true exponential growth.

Since last October, eXp Realty’s stock price has surged more than 300 percent, and this year the company announced they had doubled their number of real estate agents in just seven months. At the beginning of the year, they had roughly 6,500 brokers, but today they have over 12,000 operating in more than 300 markets across the US and Canada. This pace of growth is unprecedented for a single national brokerage and almost unthinkable for a real estate company not structured as a collection of local franchises.

Continue reading… “Inside a $1 Billion real estate company operating entirely in VR”

City Planning, Google, Housing, Science & Technology News

Google is building a city of the future in Toronto. Would anyone want to live there?

July 8, 2018

It could be the coolest new neighborhood on the planet—or a peek into the Orwellian metropolis that knows everything you did last night.

TORONTO—Even with a chilly mid-May breeze blowing off Lake Ontario, this city’s western waterfront approaches idyllic. The lake laps up against the boardwalk, people sit in colorful Adirondack chairs and footfalls of pedestrians compete with the cry of gulls. But walk east, and the scene quickly changes. Cut off from gleaming downtown Toronto by the Gardiner Expressway, the city trails off into a dusty landscape of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials. Toronto’s eastern waterfront is bleak enough that Guillermo del Toro’s gothic film The Shape of Water used it as a plausible stand-in for Baltimore circa 1962. Says Adam Vaughan, a former journalist who represents this district in Canada’s Parliament, “It’s this weird industrial land that’s just been sitting there—acres and acres of it. And no one’s really known what to do with it.”

Continue reading… “Google is building a city of the future in Toronto. Would anyone want to live there?”

Automation, Big Problems, Housing, Robotics, Science & Technology News

With construction workers scarce, homebuilders turn to robots, software

June 30, 2018

BALTIMORE – The construction of an American house embodies the spirit of the nation’s workers and the dreams of its citizens.

It’s also perhaps the least-efficient endeavor in the U.S. economy.

Dozens of workers turn a plot of land into a small factory, sawing wood, nailing it together, cutting holes for windows, running wires and pipes and installing drywall and other finishes. Four months or so later, voila: A home for generations of families.

Continue reading… “With construction workers scarce, homebuilders turn to robots, software”