The Colorado Sun dropped a fascinating piece on Vero Touch, a company flexing some high-tech muscle with 3D-printed homes. Reporter Sue McMillin walked through how this startup is trying to solve our state’s out-of-control housing costs using giant printers that spit out concrete walls instead of more pipe dreams.
The Bullet Point Brief
- A Salida company is 3D-printing houses because building them like it’s 1920 clearly isn’t cutting it.
- Colorado housing is so unaffordable our kids can’t afford to live here—unless their full-time job is being your grandkid.
- Water in the high desert isn’t exactly a free-flowing resource, and yet we’re all irrigating Kentucky Bluegrass like we own Augusta National.
- Labor, land, materials, and government hoops are all ridiculous, and they’re only getting worse.
- Maybe not everyone gets to live here. That’s reality, not cruelty.
My Bottom Line
Let me put it plainly: I love Colorado. I’ve raised my family here. Julie and I bought the home we live in almost two decades ago, before prices ballooned bigger than an Aspen homeowner’s ego. And guess what? If we tried to buy our place today? We probably couldn’t even afford it ourselves. It’s a hard pill to swallow: Colorado may just be pricing itself out of reach for more folks than we’d like to admit.
But here comes Vero Touch with one hell of a swing at that problem, printing affordable homes in my own backyard right here in Weld County. That’s creativity with concrete, and I’m applauding every layer they print. Because unlike the government throwing Band-Aids on bullet wounds (translation: subsidies and red tape), these guys are doing something actionable. And they’re just one such company. I have toured companies right here in Weld County that are doing the same thing.
Now let’s get real uncomfortable: maybe the bigger question we need to face isn’t how we make it cheap for everyone, it’s whether everyone should expect to live here in the first place. Look, I can’t afford Jackson Hole, Aspen, or the Denver Country Club. So I don’t live there. That ain’t oppression, it’s math.
Yes, water matters. Yes, zoning regs are killing us and labor costs are through the roof. But cool your jets before screaming for more top-down planning from some bureaucrat who works a block away from a Whole Foods and has never lifted a hammer in their life. Affordable housing? It takes all of us—industries innovating, communities rethinking expectations, governments streamlining nonsense… and yeah, maybe a little humility about where we can actually afford to live.
Let’s talk about it. Let’s innovate through it. Just don’t expect utopia in a desert, you’ll run out of water long before you run out of whining.
