Is more affordable housing just a print job away from American public media?

This is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty-Carrino.

To make housing more affordable in the U.S., we need more of it.

Millions of additional units by most estimates.

This shortage of housing has a lot of complex causes, but the high cost of construction,

which has only gotten higher thanks to pandemic labor and supply chain slowdowns, that's definitely

not helping.

An idea from the tech world promises to make the building process more efficient, 3D printing.

Startups around the world have been experimenting with using the technology in large-scale construction,

and now there's a push to take it mainstream.

It's the topic of a deep dive by Rachel Monroe in this week's issue of The New Yorker.

She says, contrary to what I imagined, we're not talking about a comically large office appliance,

spitting out full-size Cape Cods and craftsmen's.

What we're mostly talking about is these printers that are making the shell of a building,

so the wall system using typically like a concrete mixture that's coming from a nozzle,

essentially printing the house layer by layer from the bottom up.

Is it actually printing on the site?

What does the actual printer look like?

You said it's a nozzle?

It's a nozzle mounted on a gantry crane, so what you do is you have three parts.

You have a software system that's feeding the plan into the printer, which is following the plan

...