Construction underway on first-of-its-kind 3D-printed community in Houston

Building a Sustainable Future

Construction is underway on the sustainable 3D-printed community. Courtesy of Cole Klein Builders

Houston is putting itself front-and-center to help make sustainable, affordable housing a reality for 80 homeowners in an innovative scalable housing community. Developer Cole Klein Builders has partnered with HiveASMBLD to pioneer what’s touted as the world’s first large-scale, one-of-a-kind, affordable housing development using 3D printing technology — merging robotics, design, and sustainability.

Located across from Sterling Aviation High School, near Hobby Airport, Zuri Gardens will offer 80 two-bedroom, two-bathroom homes of approximately 1,360 square feet, situated in a park-like setting that includes walking trails and a community green space.

Homes in Zuri Gardens will hit the market in early summer of 2026. Final pricing has yet to be determined, but Cole Klein Builders expects it to be in the mid-to-high 200s.

Interestingly, none of the homes will offer garages or driveways, which the developer says will provide a cost savings of $25,000-$40,000 per home. Instead of parking for individual units, 140 parking spaces will be provided.

Each two-story home is comprised of a ground floor printed by HiveASMBLD, using a proprietary low-carbon cement alternative by Eco Material Technologies that promises to enhance strength and reduce CO2 emissions. The hybrid homes will have a second floor built using engineered wood building products by LP Building Solutions. Overall, the homes are designed to be flood, fire, and possibly even tornado-proof.

The "Zuri" in Zuri Gardens is the Swahili word for “beautiful,” a choice that is fitting considering that the parks department will be introducing a five acre park to the project — with 3D-printed pavilions and benches — plus, a three-acre farm is located right across the street. The Garver Heights area is classified as a food desert, which means that access to fresh food is limited. Residents will have access to the farm’s fresh produce, plus opportunities to participate in gardening and nutrition workshops.

zuri gardens 3d-printed housing community First large-scale affordable housing project of 3D-printed homes rises in Houston Zuri Gardens is getting closer to completion. Courtesy rendering

Cole Klein Builders created Zuri Gardens in partnership with the Houston Housing Community Development Department, who provided infrastructure reimbursements for the roads, sewer lines, and water lines. In return, CKB agreed to push the purchase prices for the homes as low as possible.

Zuri Gardens also received $1.8 million dollars from the Uptown Tourism Bond, 34 percent of which must be used with minority-owned small businesses. Qualified buyers must fit a certain area of median income according to HUD guidelines, and homes must be owner-occupied at all times. Zuri Gardens already has an 800-person waitlist.

“They’re trying to bridge that gap to make sure there is a community for the homebuyers who need it — educators, law enforcement, civil workers, etc.,” Cole Klein Builders’ co-principal Vanessa Cole says. “You have to go through a certification process with the housing department to make sure that your income is in alignment for this community. It has been great, and everyone has been really receptive.”

Cole has also brought insurance underwriters to visit the site and to help drive premiums below regular rates for Houston homeowners, as claim risks for one of the 3D homes are extremely low.

Tim Lankau, principal at HiveASMBLD, notes that the 3D hybrid design allows for a more traditional appearance, while having the benefits of a concrete structure: “That’s where the floodwaters would go, that’s where you can hide when there’s a tornado, and that’s where termites would eat. So you get the advantages of it while having a traditionally-framed second floor.”

It’s important to note that Zuri Gardens is not located in a flood prone area, nor did it flood during Hurricane Harvey — being flood-proof is merely a perk of a cement house. The concrete that Eco Material Technologies developed is impervious. The walls are printed into hollow forms, which house rebar, plumbing, and accessible conduits for things like electrical lines and smart house features. Those walls are then filled with a foamcrete product that expands to form a “monolithic concrete wall.”

David McNitt, of Eco Material Technologies, explains that his proprietary concrete is made of PCV, and contains zero Portland cement. Instead, McNitt’s cement is made from coal ash and is 99 percent green (there are a few chemicals added to the ash). Regardless, it’s made from 100 percent waste products.

“This is a product that has really been landfilled before,” says McNitt. “It’s coal ash, and it’ll set within 8-10 minutes. It’s all monolithic, and one continuous pour — it’s literally all one piece.”

Eco Material Technologies’ concrete product is impressively durable. A traditional cinderblock wall will crush at around 800 psi, while this material crushes at about 8,000 psi.

“It’s ten times stronger than a cinderblock wall that can withstand hurricanes,” claims McNitt. “I don’t think you’d even notice a hurricane. It’ll be really quiet inside, too — so you won’t get interrupted during your hurricane party. It’s way over-engineered, it really is.”

The second story is built using weatherproof and eco-friendly products by LP Building Solutions. Their treated, engineered wood products come with a 50 year warranty, and their radiant barrier roof decking product blocks 97% of UV rays, and keeps attic temperatures 30° cooler than traditional building materials. These materials, combined with the concrete first floor, will keep heating and cooling costs low — something the folks at HiveASMBLD refer to as “thermal mass performance.”

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

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First large-scale affordable housing project of 3D-printed homes rises in Houston ›

A 3-D printed home could be built in 48 hours for only $10,000. Photo courtesy of ICON Build

Texas startup receives $9M to build affordable 3-D printed houses

High-tech homes

In the not-too-distant future, a Texas company's 3-D printed homes will be popping up across the world for a fraction of the cost of traditional homes.

"It's our mission at ICON to reimagine the approach to homebuilding and construction and make affordable, dignified housing available to everyone throughout the world," says Jason Ballard, co-founder and CEO of Austin-based ICON LLC. "We're in the middle of a global housing crisis, and making old approaches a little better is not solving the problem."

The 3-D printed homes startup just raked in $9 million in seed funding from a host of investors, including Fort Worth-based homebuilding giant D.R. Horton; Vulcan Capital, a Seattle investment firm launched by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, who died October 15; Austin startup accelerator Capital Factory; Austin real estate developer Cielo Property Group; and San Francisco venture capital firm Oakhouse Partners, which is the lead investor.

At this point, ICON executives aren't sure when their homes will be popping up around town. However, Ballard tells CultureMap, "serious conversations" are underway about bringing these homes to Austin and other places around the world.

In March, ICON reaped tons of press when it unveiled a 350-square-foot 3-D home at SXSW — the first home of its kind to receive a construction permit in the U.S. At the time, ICON executives said the home — constructed of concrete and printed in less than 48 hours by 3-D printing robots — cost less than $10,000. By contrast, the median price in September 2018 of a single-family home in the Austin metro area was $302,250.

ICON's first batch of homes is planned for a project in impoverished El Salvador that's being developed in conjunction with New Story, a San Francisco nonprofit that seeks to eradicate homelessness. The first homes there are scheduled to be printed next year.

ICON is targeting a per-home cost of $4,000 in El Salvador. Relying on technology upgrades, ICON hopes to create each 3-D home in less than 24 hours.

"While prices to print homes will vary from country to country and state to state," Ballard says, "the big takeaway is that downloading and printing a home has the potential to cost half of standard construction costs."

Homes at the development in El Salvador will measure 600 to 800 square feet — around the size of a typical one-bedroom apartment. Eventually, ICON aims to print homes in the 1,500- to 2,000-square-foot range.

Among the advantages of 3-D printed homes cited by ICON are:

Speedy construction
No manual labor
Little generation of leftover construction materials
"Tremendous" design freedom

There's a positive environmental impact with this construction process as well.

"Conventional construction is slow, fragmented, wasteful, and has poor thermal properties that increase energy use, increase operating costs, and decrease comfort," Ballard says. "Also, conventional materials like drywall and particleboard are some of the least resilient materials ever invented."

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This story originally appeared on CultureMap.

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Rice student startup lands $1.85M to launch medical drone network

critical cargo

Students at Rice University have developed a medical cargo drone transport system to help deliver sensitive medical supplies and improve mobile healthcare efforts.

Haast Autonomous is the brainchild of graduating seniors Ege Halac, Jason Chen and Santiago Brent, who got their venture idea off the ground with help from the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) Summer Venture Studio. The founders have developed the prototype at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) with fellow Rice researchers Felix Hasson, Ethan Javedan, Kenna Sanders and Caden Schmidt.

The startup has raised $1.85 million in pre-seed funding, according to Rice. The founders plan to focus on Haast full-time following graduation. They said they aim to launch pilot trials in 2027 and head to market later that year.

“We need better alternatives for a fast, safe and on-demand system of transport for life-critical cargo,” Halac said in a news release from Rice.

The Haast team has developed a custom aircraft with software that manages dispatch, routes, and chain of custody to assist in how materials move between sites in centralized medical systems. Generally, the transportation of medical supplies and materials between facilities and points of care relies on ground shipping or expensive air transport.

Haast Autonomous’ aircraft can take off and land vertically, and is designed around a mission profile of 50 to 62 miles. It can carry a payload of at least 5 pounds, with future versions intended to scale up in size. It also includes a built-in payload bay that regulates temperature, pressure, vibration and tilt to protect sensitive contents such as patient samples, antivenom or poisoning kits and radioligands or other therapies, according to Rice.

At first, the company envisioned the mission to be centered around transplants, but saw the product being best suited for a variety of operations.

“What we realized is that the platform we are building is suited for medicine, but it really underlies a much larger problem of mission-critical transport across industries,” Brent added in the news release. “We are building the fastest, most secure logistics chain for the world’s most sensitive cargo.”

Haast Autonomous was recognized at the 2026 Oshman Engineering Design Showcase and Competition, where it won Best Aerospace or Transportation Technology. It also performed well in the 2026 Napier Rice Launch Challenge.

In the future, Haast Autonomous plans to deploy a fleet of aircraft. The software will be designed to assist hospitals in requesting flights and tracking deliveries in real time.

“The drone is only part of the solution,” Chen also added in the release. “What matters is moving something from point A to point B in a way that fits into how hospitals already operate.”

Houston scientist wins prestigious Pew Scholar award for brain cancer research

standout scholar

Christina Tringides, an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, is one of 21 scientists to win a prestigious Pew Biomedical Scholar award.

She is the first faculty member from Rice to win the distinction, which provides $300,000 over four years for advances in biomedicine, according to the university. The awards are granted to researchers who are in the first few years at the assistant professor level.

In Tringides’ case, the funding will support her innovative new method of modeling glioblastoma, a common and extremely aggressive form of brain cancer. Thanks to producing its own blood supply, glioblastoma spreads quickly, weaving tendrils of blighted tissue throughout the brain. Because of this, surgery is difficult and conventional therapies ineffective.

Understanding the way glioblastoma spreads is crucial to the search for a cure. Tringides is using hydrogels that mimic the brain’s extracellular matrix. Using cultures and a microscopic labyrinth, her team can see how the cancer spreads, bonds with neurons and changes cell wall activity. Essentially, Tringides has devised an intelligence test for tumors in hopes of learning how to outsmart them.

“As cancer crawls through the maze, we can look at how it is interacting with the neurons more and more, and measure how electrical activity is changing as a result,” she said in a news release from Rice.

Examining how cancer cells grow can reveal which conditional changes slow them down. Finding ways to alter the structure of brain matter in a way that makes it inhospitable to the cancer could lead to therapies that would impede growth or even reverse it. Using her custom-made ersatz brain maze makes it easier to observe changes than it would be in a patient’s brain.

“Imaging synapses is time-intensive ⎯ it can involve large data files that are hard to visualize, but if we know that the only place where we might have a synapse is this tiny 1-by-4-by-10 micron channel, it makes it much faster and reliable to image them,” Tringides said.

Born in Ames, Iowa, Tringides received her doctorate in biophysics from Harvard before joining Rice in 2024 through a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) recruitment award.

Her research was also one of the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice Brain Institute and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program.

Texas residents earn 11th highest income in U.S., says 2026 study

Money Matters

A new WalletHub study comparing income disparities across America has ranked Texas residents No. 11 on the list of states with the highest earning residents in the nation.

The report, "States Where People Have the Highest Income (2026)," analyzed U.S. Census Bureau income data in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report evaluated the average annual income of the top five percent, the median annual household income, and the average annual income of the bottom 20 percent of residents in every state, all adjusted for the cost of living.

The report's data revealed the top five percent of Texans, the highest earners, make $520,378 on average yearly after adjusting for the cost of living. That's the seventh-highest income among the top five percent of earners nationwide.

Meanwhile, the median annual income of a Texas household is just under $76,000. The bottom 20 percent of Texas residents make $17,651 a year, the report found.

For additional context, the latest data from the Federal Reserve shows an American household's median yearly income is about $83,700. WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo also found that the highest earning 10 percent of individuals in the U.S. earn over 12 times more than those in the lowest-earning 10 percent, based on the latest Census data.

"By measuring the income of various percentiles against a state's median income, we can better identify where income disparities are more prevalent, which could help us better understand why residents of certain states struggle more to make ends meet," said Lupo.

Virginia is the state where residents earn the highest income in the U.S., WalletHub said. Based on the report's findings, the top five percent of Virginians make $545,097 on average per year after adjusting for the cost of living. The median annual income of a Virginia household comes out to $95,339, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $19,671 annually on average.

Conversely, West Virginia is the state where people have the lowest income in the U.S. A West Virginia household makes a median annual income of $56,610, the third-lowest nationally, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $13,260 on average per year, which is the fifth-lowest in the nation. The top five percent of West Virginians make $372,218 on average per year.

The top 10 states where residents have the highest income are:

No. 1 – Virginia
No. 2 – New York
No. 3 – New Jersey
No. 4 – Washington
No. 5 – Connecticut
No. 6 – Utah
No. 7 – Colorado
No. 8 – Minnesota
No. 9 – Illinois
No. 10 – Massachusetts

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