It's A Great Time Not to Own a House: The 3D-Printed Housing Market is About to Kill a Bunch of Banks and Make Houses Actually Affordable

Know that old saying about housing always appreciating? Not anymore

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If 3D printing makes homes suddenly cheap and abundant we could have another financial crisis on our hands. But once we're past that nasty bit, we'll be better off for it.

Exploring the academic literature surrounding 3D printing exposes a lot of concern about patents and copyrights as this nascent technology seeks to digitize the physical world. You like the Rodin in the park? Somebody has come up with the recipe for you to make your own, at home, in minutes. The other concern, of course, is guns. With a 3D printer you can make a gun. Forget the background checks and waiting periods.

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Now, says University of Southern California Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis, you can print a house to store your black market guns and ripped off artwork. His experimental printing technology, called "contour crafting," would enable the assembly of stylish, 2,000 square foot concrete dwellings in less than 24 hours. Khoshnevis envisions that the technology will someday be used to build structures on the Moon or Mars and that relief agencies and governments could use the technology to quickly build homes for people displaced by political events, natural disasters or extreme poverty.

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Khoshnevis has been evangelizing for his project in TED talks and the like. For you tech-minded people, the best explanation of it comes from 3D Printing Industry, a trade publication that covers the craft. Khoshnevis believes his technology will disrupt the construction industry, driving the corruption and incompetence out of home construction, bringing prices down and saving people from injury or worse since they will no longer have to work dangerous construction jobs.

Historically, residential investment, which covers new home construction, accounts for about 5% of GDP in the U.S. Khoshnevis' invention could take $780 billion out of the economy while displacing 5.8 million workers who will presumably move into this new low cost housing.

Americans don't just spend to build homes, they spend to decorate and maintain them. Add that to the construction total and you have a just under a fifth of GDP, or $2.6 trillion potentially at risk. After all, if 3D Printers can make you a reliable home in a day, they can certainly decorate your walls and craft ironic tchotchkes for your coffee table.

So that's the typical disruptive technology scenario – a lot of workers used to doing one thing will have to do something else. No doubt, some homebuyers will resist. Everybody won't want to live in a concrete house, after all, and bespoke luxury will probably go along with the word "handmade." But that's not going to sustain an industry any more than building Ferraris can keep autoworkers employed.

Now, for the winners and the losers. If you don't own a home, you win, big time.

Imagine that a majority of Americans embrace the idea of a printed home. They won't be free, but they will be cheap. Perhaps the cost of a new home drops from something that requires a 30-year mortgage to a more doable, five year commitment akin to buying a new car. That is not Khoshnevis' estimate, by the way. It seems he expects this might make homes a good deal cheaper even than that. But let's stay conservative and bring the costs of a new home down from six figures to five.

Prices for existing homes would plummet, too. Sellers will face a buyer's market as the supply of homes, or of potential homes put up quickly, swells. Some local zoning boards will probably try to slow the progress but they are unlikely to succeed. If Khoshnevis gets what he wants, owning a home no longer becomes a life's quest. It becomes a far more casual decision.

There is currently $9.8 trillion in mortgage debt outstanding and the value of all the residences in the U.S. is over $25 trillion, combined according to That's not bad. The homes are worth more than the debt. Except that the debt is the debt, it doesn't change. If printed houses sell at vehicle prices, then we can figure every home out there would be worth a tenth of what it is now. Whoops, now Americans owe $9.8 trillion to the banks while all the homes in the country are worth $2.5 trillion. That's going to freak some people out. Either the debts will have to be written down or Americans who own homes will have to give up the notion of ever selling them.

Now the banks are in huge trouble. Commercial banks currently hold $3.6 trillion worth of home mortgages on the books. This drastic cut in home values makes the banks collectively insolvent. Oh, and Fannie Mae is also insolvent again. It's on the hook for another $3 trillion in mortgage debt.

The bright side is that people who do not currently own homes will be able to obtain them and they will not be locked into 30 year financing contracts with faceless lending institutions ready to seize their assets over a brush of bad financial luck. Printed homes might bring a lot of sudden pain but in the long run might free us from the ridiculous arrangement we have now, where people work for three decades just to be able to claim ownership of the roofs over their heads.

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