While volunteering at a Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Greeley last fall, Rachel Borum heard the craziest thing. She, a single mother, could become a homeowner! Some of the families she met at the home-improvement thrift store had bought a house through Habitat for Humanity’s home ownership program. They encouraged her to apply.
Around the same time, she attended an event where she met the CEO of Alquist 3D, a startup using 3D-printing technology to build houses faster. The company had just announced it was moving its headquarters to Greeley and collaborating with Habitat.
“I followed him out and went to talk to him and I said, ‘Excuse me, did you mean Habitat for Humanity?’ He said yes and I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? … How do I get one of these,’” she recalled with a laugh. “It just all came together really.”
Borum gets by enough as a business operations manager at the University of Northern Colorado to support herself and her teenage son. But buying a house always seemed out of reach, especially as median sales prices climbed in Weld County to a half-million dollars. So, Borum applied for a Habitat home and recently learned she’s not only getting one, but will become the first to get one of those 3D-printed houses, which Alquist began printing on Thursday.
How’d she get so lucky?
“I actually didn’t even know I would get a 3D-printed house but when I was interviewing to see if I qualified for a home, I just put it out there that I’d heard about it and if there is any possibility, I would be very, very interested in seeing if I could get one,” Borum said. “I would have accepted any house but this was just like the icing on the cake.”
Asking, apparently, was key, said Cheri Witt-Brown, CEO of Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity.
“In her interview, she was the one that said, ‘Can I have the 3D printed house?’ Most of our families, frankly, that are in our queue are going there,” Witt-Brown said, as she pointed to the empty lot where 37 two-story duplexes will be built by Baessler Homes over the next 12 months. “They’re larger and in many cases, they’re multigenerational as well.”
Borum’s future home is the first 3D-printed house in the mix with traditionally-built duplexes and Habitat single-family homes in the Hope Springs development behind the Walmart Supercenter on 23rd Avenue. The 42-acre site, which will also include 320 apartment units, is also getting two soccer fields, multi-use courts, a community garden, a nature discovery park and an on-site child care center.
As Habitat’s largest development in the West, it’s getting a lot of attention — and not just because of the 3D-printed homes. Normally, local Habitat chapters build three to five houses a year. But the ambitious Weld-Greeley Habitat plans to build 50 in the next year, which includes the 37 by Baessler, Alquist’s 3D house and between 10-to-15 traditional Habitat homes by the organization’s local crew.
“This is an innovative, climate-friendly, waterwise partnership whose model has attracted national attention,” Witt-Brown said during the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday. “After presenting this model at a Habitat conference in Atlanta, there are now hundreds of Habitat affiliates trying to replicate this development and it all started right here in Greeley, Colorado.”
But another reason why others have taken notice is the local generosity. The Richmark Companies, owned by the Richardson family in Greeley, donated $8.8 million in land and water, sewage and other infrastructure. That helped Habitat attract other financial supporters like Impact Development Fund, the Weld Trust, JBS Foods, oil company Oxy and others. The property’s “horizontal construction” is now complete, with paved streets and infrastructure.
“Hope Springs in the next four years will invest, between Richmark Companies and Habitat for Humanity, $100 million — that’s actual dollars — that will be invested here in civil and new construction dollars,” Witt-Brown said. “We will be going into vertical construction debt-free.”
Greeley has 15,500 houses on the way
Like many communities in Colorado, Greeley needs more housing and sooner rather than later, Mayor John Gates said, because the city’s population is expected to grow to 250,000 people from its current 113,000 in the next few decades.
“We’re growing about 3% a year, which is far more than most other communities are growing. And I think the reason is twofold. We have room to grow,” Gates said. “The other part is if you look at median home prices, I never thought in a million years that our median home price would hit $450,000. It’s sad because I don’t know how people are affording homes. But that being said, we’re still $100,000 to $200,000 lower than our neighbors.”
The growth in housing prices has slowed in the past year in the state but even in Weld County , they’re still increasing. In April, the county’s median sales price hit $515,000, up 5.1% in a year and 43% in five years.
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Affordable housing goes 3D with efforts focused on building a hub in Greeley
Alquist 3D, which is partnering with Habitat for Humanity on 100 3D-printed homes, is also teaming up with Aims Community College on a 3D-printing workforce program.
Read moreGates said there are 15,500 “rooftops” on the drawing board, primarily in the western part of the city, that are in some stage of development, though some are still working on securing land. It’s a reason why the city offered $2.85 million in incentives to Alquist 3D to relocate its headquarters.
“The (Hope Springs) project is going to take a while to build, but it’s starting now,” Gates said. “And the 3D-printed homes go up in a hurry.”
Alquist 3D has already built houses with Habitat in Virginia and elsewhere. Its average-sized home of less than 1,500 square feet is estimated to take less than 48 hours to print. Windows and doors are not 3D printed and are added later in the process.
Zack Mannheimer, the company’s founder, said the Greeley home is still a prototype. The plan is to build one, actually a duplex, with potentially many more depending on funding, demand and support.
On Thursday as the printing began on the first wall of Borum’s future home, the 80-degree weather and prior night’s storm contributed to delays of more than an hour. By the time printing restarted, most of the crowds that showed up for the ribbon-cutting ceremony had skadoodled.
“We’re still at the beginning of this technology. We learn more every day but we can print homes in about 20 hours, the walls of the home,” Mannheimer said. “We need fewer people on the job site once they’re well trained.”
And it’ll take an army of trained employees to build hundreds more homes. They’ll need to know how to mix the material correctly, make sure it’s the right consistency and control the robotic arm spitting out the concrete-looking layers into neatly stacked layers like the frosting on a cake.
That’s another reason why Mannheimer picked Greeley. Aims Community College had a 3D concrete printing curriculum and Alquist was able to create a training course for future workers. Last week, Aims announced that the 30-hour course starts in July for $250 tuition. Students can earn a certificate and will collaborate with Alquist on future projects.
“What we want to do is train a local workforce,” Mannheimer said. “This 3D printing is not just about printing a home or printing infrastructure or playing with giant robots that print out concrete. That’s part of it but it’s also about a revolution in workforce development.”
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How Habitat home ownership works
Habitat’s mission is to build affordable houses for low-income families who need a decent place to live. But current home prices make it challenging even for folks who earn a decent wage to save up enough to buy a home. Like Borum.
“My job is wonderful. It means the world to me and I feel like I could own a home and qualify. But the housing market is just unaffordable. If I could buy something on the lower end, it would need so much work,” she said. “But I don’t have extra money to do that extra work. It didn’t make sense.”
“I said, ‘Excuse me, did you mean Habitat for Humanity?’ He said yes and I was like … How do I get one of these?’”
– Rachel Borum, picked to be Hope Spring’s first 3D-printed house owner
By low end, she meant somewhere in the $250,000 range. Even a condo in Weld County had a median sales price of $375,300 in April, according to the Colorado Association of Realtors.
By going through Habitat, Borum’s mortgage winds up being 30% of her salary and that’s it. To qualify, she had to live in the area, work in the same job for at least a year and put in 300 hours of sweat equity. She’s unsure if her volunteering at Habitat’s architectural salvage retail operation, ReStore, contributes to that but she’s game to work on her own house or others.
“I get volunteer hours to prepare my speech,” said Borum, who spoke during the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
There are other requirements for Habitat homeowners — such as no bankruptcy filings for the past four years, income between 30 to 80% of HUD’s area median income and a credit score of at least 620.
“Our families (mortgages) are based on what they can afford to pay,” or 30% of their income, Witt-Brown said. “For us, these homes will cost around $400,000 to build. But our families can’t afford a $400,000 mortgage.”
The rest is subsidized by Habitat and donors. But when the homeowner pays back the loans, the money returns to the pot for the next applicant.
“When we could only build five homes a year, there was a ranking system of who had the highest need and who was living in the most vulnerable situation,” she said.
For Hope Springs, 20 applicants have been approved and are in the queue for a new home.
“It’s a never ending sea of applicants,” Witt-Brown said. “It won’t be hard for us to fill.”