Exclusive — HUD Secretary Scott Turner: High-Tech Construction Can Lower Housing Costs

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Scott Turner told Breitbart News on Wednesday that high-tech construction methods, if permitted by local regulations, could lower housing costs nationwide.

Turner spoke alongside Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) of the Senate Banking Committee at HUD’s Innovative Housing Showcase on the National Mall, where entrepreneurs and innovators exhibited their models.

One house, two stories high, was assembled in ten hours by eight people using prefabricated panels. Another house, manufactured by the Azure company in California, used robots and 3-D printing from recycled plastic  to lower costs per square foot by some 30%, after the costs of permits and laying foundations was added.

Turner said:

This is HUD’s Innovative Housing Showcase. And as you can see, this is the genius and the brilliance of the private sector in our country, people who really want to provide for the American people, as it pertains to affordable housing and housing overall. We need about 7 million units of housing in our country right now. And housing affordability, as the Senator knows, is a big topic and issue. And so you come out to the Mall and you see manufactured housing and modular housing and 3-D printing, and really seeing public-private-partnerships come together to not only create housing, but give them speed-to-market for the American people for less cost, less waste, less material. And so we’re really excited to have this here.

Hagerty added:

As you know, the housing stock is something that is a big priority in Tennessee. One of the major manufacturers of manufactured housing, Clayton Homes, is headquartered in my home state of Tennessee, and I’d like to think we’re at the forefront of this new technology. The Secretary just described the speed-to-market for technologies that are being brought to bear on a real pain point here in America right now, and that’s having adequate housing supply, to see that technology being deployed in such a proactive manner by the private sector. As the Secretary said, again, it checks all the right boxes for what American innovation can deliver to make American citizens lives better.

Asked what to do about local zoning and permitting rules that might hold up the adoption of technological innovation — as in the fire zones of Los Angeles, where rebuilding is being delayed by bureacracy, Hagerty said that he and Turner would do “everything that we can do at the federal level … to support that type of [local regulatory] streamlining and make the process more efficient and effective,” and cheaper as well.