How Mighty Buildings Is Transforming Home Construction With Robotics To Address The Climate Crisis And Housing Affordability

The construction industry accounts for nearly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with building materials accounting for 11% and building energy use for another 28%. If the industry builds all of the homes needed to meet housing demand using traditional methods and materials, doing so will only feed the climate crisis. 

There is an affordable housing crisis in the USA. One in four housing markets are not affordable by historic standards; and this issue doesn’t just affect low-income neighborhoods but also the so-called ‘missing middle’ – middle-income earners who have extremely limited options for home ownership.

Mighty Buildings is an Oakland, CA based 3D printed home construction company that is transforming home construction with robotics, materials innovation, and a vision for addressing the dual crises of housing availability and climate. 

I caught up with, Sam Ruben, Chief Sustainability Officer and co-founder, Alexey Dubov, co-founder and Dmitry Starodubtsev, CTO and co-founder and Slava Solonitsyn, the CEO, to learn more about their groundbreaking solution.

Afdhel Aziz: Sam, welcome. I’ve been fascinated by the story of Mighty Buildings – let’s start by detailing the Purpose of the company and exactly what it does?

Sam Ruben: The purpose of our company is to unlock productivity in the construction sector while also addressing the climate implications of all that additional construction.

We believe in approaching the housing and climate crises as a both/and proposition (or “dual crises”) given the interplay between the two. The reality is that the climate crisis is impacting the built environment and driving people from their homes — whether it be due to rising sea levels, increasing number and scale of wildfires, increasingly severe storm seasons, catastrophic wind events, and more. At the same time, the housing crisis is placing more people in the face of these realities as housing costs drive construction farther away from city centers. And it is often those least able to afford it who face the brunt of these realities. 

Mighty Buildings is trying to address these dual crises by transforming how we build homes and the materials we use to build them by using 3D printing, robotics, and innovative materials. In California alone, it is estimated that we will need 3.5 million homes by 2025 to close the affordability gap, reflecting the billions of homes needed globally (both now and to address a growing population into the future). Given that the built environment accounts for nearly 40 percent of global GHG emissions, ~11% from construction and materials and ~28% from building energy use, this means that even if we build all the homes we need using traditional methods, doing so will feed the climate crisis such that we might have enough homes but not in a world fit for humans to survive, much less thrive.

The reality is that the construction industry largely still relies on the same technologies, or variations thereof, which we have been using for over 100 years (and in some cases much longer). 3D printing provides a completely new toolset for approaching issues related to all aspects of the design and build process — providing new pathways to unlock architect’s and engineer’s creativity while maintaining cost-effectiveness; solutions that can maximize the value of the human touch and create a safer working environment; opportunities to eliminate waste and reduce the amount of material needed to create buildings; and so much more, we truly are just scratching the surface.

Slava Solonitsyn: Our vision is to deploy our technology across the globe through a distributed network of factories via local partnerships with builders and developers. This will allow us to take advantage of local supply chain economics, rather than export California’s high construction costs, to ensure that we are properly meeting the local needs, bringing much needed housing to these markets, and creating new jobs that can attract a new generation of workers into the industry.

Aziz: Alexey, you’ve taken a Tesla-esque approach with your offerings – could you please explain the various products you have and how they address different needs?

Alexey Dubov: It seems that every new company in the space is laying claim to being the Tesla of housing. For us the label fits given the pathway that we’ve followed from the very beginning as we bring brand new, cutting edge technology into one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world. Our initial product, the Mighty Mod, is a product line which brings together our unique 3D printed panels and traditional steel framed construction, much as the Tesla Roadster combined the latest in electric vehicle technology with a Lotus. Our second product, the Mighty House, is a luxury home with an award winning design by EYRC architects which establishes the possibilities with our new panelized production system – much as the Model S broke the mold of what an electric vehicle could be. We are on track to bring a multi-story production system that can be deployed either as single family homes or multi-family townhouses, by 2023. We are purposefully designing this system to be cost competitive across markets, bringing high quality 3D printed homes to the masses – much as the Model 3 helped show that high-quality EVs could also be affordable. We will continue in this path as we move beyond townhomes into low-rise apartment buildings in order to deliver the density needed for 3D printed homes to be viable in urban & suburban infill.

Aziz: Dmitry, one of the main technical advancements you’ve made over concrete-based 3D printing is that a) it does not use Portland Cement which drives 8% of global emissions and b) your patented light-curing technology allows for it to cure instantly. What other technical sustainability advancements does your approach have?

Dmitry Starodubtsev: We have developed continuous fiber reinforcement of our 3D printed material as a part of the printing process with our newest material; this allows us to improve strength while reducing weight without sacrificing energy efficiency. Additionally our new formulation moves us down our Carbon Neutrality roadmap by replacing mineral fillers with sustainable materials such as recycled glass, reduces the polymeric content of the material, incorporates lower-carbon bio-based resins, requires less material due to the fiber reinforcement, and allows us to produce more of the homes using our zero waste technology. 

This is all done with 100% renewable energy at our Oakland facility, which will also be a feature of our distributed network of factories that is on track to be deployed beginning in 2023. These will allow us to serve local communities while reducing the carbon impacts of transportation & logistics.

We have also developed relationships with manufacturers on the cutting edge of low-carbon and carbon negative concrete to reduce emissions normally associated with the foundation and other non-printed elements of the home that use concrete (i.e. driveway, sidewalk, etc). Additionally, by leveraging the superior energy efficiency of our technology we are able to reduce the cost of making our units Zero Net Energy.

Aziz: Sam, I’m also excited about how your homes can solve two problems around inequality – first, by bringing young people back to the construction industry to teach them how to become building technicians and paying them a living wage and secondly, by addressing the housing needs of the ‘missing middle’ – the teachers, nurses etc for whom housing stock is limited. Was this equitable approach baked in from the beginning?

Ruben: For us it has always been important to address the housing affordability crisis as well as the climate crisis. Due to the novel nature of what we are doing our initial focus has been on the “missing middle,” those who work and serve in communities (nurses, firefighters, teachers, etc.), but in too many places (like the Bay Area) can’t afford to live in those same communities and who generally do not qualify for subsidized housing. As we continue to scale and introduce new housing solutions, such as the multi-story production system we are looking to begin delivering in 2023, our plan is to become truly market agnostic in terms of being able to provide cost-effective, high-quality homes that people can be proud of, regardless of what their price point is.

Additionally, particularly here in the U.S., we are facing a labor shortage with around 400,000 jobs available in construction that aren’t being filled and an aging workforce that is retiring and not being replaced as young people go into the gig economy, programming or other roles, but who would have seen themselves in construction in previous years. Our goal is not to replace labor but to address the shortage of labor that is a big part of the housing crisis. In doing so, we hope to actually create more work overall, by significantly increasing productivity, that will be easier, safer, and less stressful labor per unit which, combined with the chance to work with cutting edge technology, will help bring new generations of workers into the industry. We launched our Workforce Development Program (WDP), a community-based effort focusing on talent acquisition, training and job-rotation and offer a variety of full-time, non-exempt opportunities exclusively to low-income residents in the cities of Oakland, San Leandro and Berkeley. Employees brought in through this program have jobs connected to a career ladder and have opportunities to move up to higher-skill jobs with higher wages and benefits.

Aziz: Finally, I’m excited about your upcoming Coachella Valley developments – what’s available and when do they go on sale Alexey?

Dubov: We’re really excited about our partnership with our developer partner Palari Group to develop the world’s first 3D printed Zero Net Energy neighborhoods. This past July we announced the development of a community in Rancho Mirage which will initially encompass 15 lots, each with a 1440 sq ft 3B/2BA Mighty House with a 700 sq ft backyard Mighty Mod ADU. Reservations for these 15 homes sold out within the first couple of days and we were truly amazed at the amount of people who signed up to be on the waiting list. Due to the overwhelming response, we’re currently working with Palari to develop another 20+ lot zero net energy community in a nearby City, each with a Mighty House and an ADU in the backyard. The Rancho Mirage project is currently undergoing entitlements with a target groundbreaking in mid 2022, whereas the land for the other development is already entitled and that is on track to begin construction in the first part of 2022, of course this is all dependent on permits.