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RE: $4000 3D-Printed House Could Provide Shelter To The World's Homeless

in #news7 years ago

This is really cool, and is likely to help a lot of people who have places they can put a house.

Almost all of the billion people that live in inadequate housing don't. This won't solve that problem. The biggest impediment to the homeless is where to live, not what to live in. All those who think the problem is the structure itself haven't been homeless.

This is why Seattle is at war with people living in RVs. The RVs are perfectly fine housing, if a bit cramped. The people living in them have no place to park them. RV parks are limited in how many they can take, and cost upwards of $500/mth. The poorest people in the world cannot afford that. Many of them have income less than $500/year.

Location, location, location. People with even very inadequate housing, such as tents, or cardboard boxes, can make do, and gradually improve their homes over time, if they but have a place to put them. Just laying out a grid of sites in some godforsaken desert somewhere, as refugee camps are wont to do, won't serve.

Folks need services, stores, septic/sewer, water, and communications and transport access.

That's why homeless people live in cities, rather than out in the country. Cities are where the liquor stores and drug dealers are, after all. Having been homeless, I am intimately familiar with this problem.

It's possible to lay out refugee style camps, with adequate services, where these structures, RVs, cars and trucks, or whatever homeless people wanna live in can be placed, and many will not live there, even if the rent is free, because services you don't think they need are of primary importance to them, such as the aforementioned liquor stores and drug dealers.

Cities are where the customers are also, for them as have services they offer, too. Booze and drugs cost money.

Homelessness won't be solved by structures built by robots, unless those structures are able to be sited where people can use them permanently to lead the lives they choose to.

Thanks!

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excellent points!