Add The New York Post on Google Forget hammer and nails — the latest trend in homebuilding involves pressing “print.”
A Florida city southwest of Tampa has broken ground on its first-ever 3D-printed home, as part of its affordable housing program, according to local Fox 13 News.
St. Petersburg city officials said the technology will cut construction time in half.
“You’re talking [about] something that might be a two — or two and a half week process — can be squeezed down into a day and a half, maybe two days,” Nick Bradford, owner of Structures Group, an engineering consultancy firm, told WFLA News Channel 8.
Developer Bright Community Trust is building the exterior walls using a robotic arm that continuously pours liquid cement layer by layer along the home’s perimeter.
The city leases its vacant lots to developers for a small cost, and they in turn sell the home to a buyer earning up to 120% of the area median income — roughly $96,300 for a single person. The 3D-printed homes still require the typical permitting process and need to satisfy state building codes the same as any standard home.
St. Petersburg’s goal is to eventually erect 150 single-family homes on city-owned land, Fox reported.
Despite the hype framing 3D printing as the “next big thing” for housing, industry skeptics caution that the technology isn’t the magic bullet it’s made out to be.
If it were, why hasn’t there been a “3D printing boom,” posed online edutainer Simon Whistler. Indeed, he said, only hundreds of such homes have been built worldwide.
In November 2023, a partially completed 3D-printed home in Muscatine, Iowa, was torn down because the concrete mix failed to hit required structural strength tests.
A deal struck in August 2024 between Prestige Project Management and Cairo, Illinois, to build 30 3D-printed duplexes ultimately didn’t materialize despite a $1.1 million investment in a printer.
On the plus side, Whistler noted, in late 2025, Japan got its first government-approved two-story 3D-printed reinforced concrete house — known as the “O House” or “Stealth House” — in Kurihara City, Miyagi Prefecture.
One of the biggest criticisms of 3D-printed homes stems from what the printer actually builds. A 3D printer cannot lay plumbing, pull electrical wiring, install drywall, frame a roof, or put in windows and doors.
In addition, concrete printers are massive, expensive, and difficult to transport between jobsites.
Skeptics also highlight significant structural and environmental concerns. Concrete is a carbon-heavy material responsible for massive global emissions and printed concrete lacks the structural ductility of framed walls.
As Bradford himself admited, having a limited number of machines creates severe scheduling bottlenecks, and the printers struggle to build multi-story structures.
“As you get more complicated, you start eliminating the cost savings,” Bradford noted.
In addition, 3D projects face regulatory hurdles and hidden costs like buying the printer, Whistler said.
Stewart Hicks said on his “Architecture with Stewart” YouTube channel that 3D-printed homes “look a little weird.”
That could be because of design limitations like the fact that the robot machine laying down the cement can’t make sharp corners.
The greatest challenge, he said, is the “relative inflexibility of the building after construction,” he said.
If anything happens to a part of the structure, it’s “almost impossible” to restore it to its original state.
“The modularity ensures that any part can just be replaced when needed and not leave any visible scars,” Hicks said. “Thinking of a building as one large seamless object is completely antithetical to the realities that buildings face.”
