golden gates fighting for housing in america

Both work out of the firm’s studio in Los Angeles. is collaborating with AEC firm HDR and Volunteers of America, the latter acting as the developer as well as the provider of social services for the eventual occupants.īD+C last week spoke with Kate Diamond, HDR’s civic design director and design principal and Vartan Chilingaryan, director of structural engineering and associate vice president.

He estimated then that contour crafting could reduce the financing needed for new construction by 20-25%, cut materials costs by 25-30%, and lower labor costs by 45-55%.įor the L.A. In that presentation, Khoshnevis said contour crafting could feasibly include robotic installation of rebar, plumbing, and electricals as the house was being printed. In a TEDx talk he delivered in 2012, Khoshnevis claimed that a 2,500-sf house could be “printed” in 20 hours, using a computer-guided gantry that dispenses a concrete-like substance to form the house’s exterior shell. A major step toward that project occurred last June 4, when an evaluation committee of the International Code Commission approved acceptance criteria AC509 for 3D-printed construction-grade walls.īerok Khoshnevis, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California who is founder and CEO of CC Corp., has been pushing 3D printing for housing construction for the past decade.

On January 14, the county’s Development Authority awarded Los Angeles-based Contour Crafting Corporation (CC Corp.) a project for using 3D printing to construct affordable housing. Nearly three fifths of California’s estimated 108,000 homeless are located in Los Angeles County, where officials are looking at various temporary and permanent solutions that would increase the availability of affordable and low-income for-sale and rental housing. Gavin Newsom boosted funding for housing and addressing homelessness by $3 billion. Meanwhile, Californians and their lawmakers are finding it harder to avert their gazes from the ragged and destitute legions sleeping rough on sidewalks, in tent cities, inside cardboard boxes. What’s prevented that from happening so far, he points out, has been resistance among homeowners, municipalities, and environmentalists to rezoning that allows for more housing density that-the thinking goes-would devalue existing properties and/or minimize these constituencies’ political leverage. Conor Dougherty, an economics reporter for the New York Times, states, in his new book “Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America,” that 3.5 million housing units need to be built in California to ameliorate the state’s affordability and homelessness crises. California’s chronic shortage of affordable housing has been well documented.

Golden gates fighting for housing in america