The Scott donation to Habitat for Humanity attempts to help buck the housing crisis and alleviate racial disparities in home buying. For over 40 years, the organization has built homes for families in need with construction assisted by the future owner of the house and volunteers.
Habitat for Humanity International CEO Jonathan Reckford said the organization will use the donation to "meaningfully advocate for the systemic and societal changes needed to improve equitable access to affordable housing."
New technologies in recent years have also helped homes to be constructed cheaper and faster. This includes 3D printed home technology. ICON and New Story built the first permitted 3D printed house in Austin, Texas, in 2018 — a two-bed, one-bath 350 square-foot homethat was printed in mere days.
The company and nonprofit later constructed a small community of 3D-printed homes in a rural village outside Nacajuca, Mexico, — providing furnished 500 square-foot spaces to local families living in extreme poverty. They are also now working to build a 100-home community in Austin. A number of other companies have since entered the space with analyses putting the 3D printing construction market at $40 billion by 2027.
"What if we stopped trying to make crappy houses better and fundamentally re-imagined what it would be to build a better house from the ground up?" said Dmitri Julius, chief people officer of ICON 3D during a panel this month at the SXSW conference in Austin. "How can we take leading-edge technology and allow it to grow at scale and put it in the hands of the people that need housing the most?"
At the moment, though, factory-built housing, where construction components are built in a factory off-site and assembled on-site, holds more promise than 3D printing, said Marybeth Shinn, a professor at Vanderbilt University focused on homelessness policies.
Habitat for Humanity, which constructs new homes and revitalizes existing housing, intends to use the Scott donation to expand its cost of home campaign to influence federal, state and local policies that address housing affordability.
The organization's approach is a proven model, not just for building housing and promoting homeownership but for addressing primary causes of racial wealth, the homeownership gap and poverty facing cities, said Martha Galvez, executive director of the Housing Solutions Lab, part of New York University's Furman Center.
"Effective philanthropy and technological innovation are critical to address the affordable housing crisis," said Galvez. "Pairing these resources with cutting edge low-cost building techniques could provide thousands of homes."
