A 3D concrete printer that Virginia Tech bought with a $1.1 million state grant finally has a job site. On Sept. 29, Richmond Metropolitan Habitat for Humanity, Virginia Tech and Virginia Housing broke ground on Carter Place I, five 3D-printed affordable homes at 1590 Darbytown Road in eastern Henrico County, near Richmond International Airport.
The first walls won’t be printed there. They’ll come out of a warehouse at 3340 Lanvale Ave. in Richmond this fall, get trucked to the lot and set. Printing directly on the site is supposed to follow later in 2026.
How the Henrico 3D-printed homes will be built
The machine is a SIRA RC mobile printer with a robotic arm, made by India-based Tvasta. Running both methods on the same five houses is the point of the exercise: the partners say they want to document where printing helps, where it doesn’t, and whether it scales for future affordable housing. Off-site printing gets a controlled environment and a predictable cure. On-site printing skips the truck and the crane pick. Nobody has published numbers yet on which one wins in central Virginia.
At a demonstration in the Richmond warehouse, a wall section printed in about 45 minutes and weighed roughly 2.5 tons, WTVR reported. That’s a single wall, not a house, and it says nothing yet about openings, MEP rough-in or inspection sequencing.
The team is small and specific. Houston-based HiveASMBLD, which has printed homes in Texas, is providing printing expertise and helping run operations. Williamsburg Builder Consultants LLC is advising on construction, structural and zoning permitting. Virginia Tech’s Myers-Lawson School of Construction, its Center for Housing Research and its civil and environmental engineering department are handling the research side, with money from the Henrico County Affordable Housing Trust Fund on top of the Virginia Housing grant.
3D concrete printing still has a schedule problem
Here’s the part the Sept. 29 announcement doesn’t dwell on. When Virginia Housing awarded the grant in November 2024, the stated goal was 10 affordable homes by 2026. It’s now late 2026, the target is five homes, and the printer is only starting production walls. That’s a normal slip for a first-of-its-kind program. It’s also a reminder that buying the machine is the easy step.
The release gives no square footage, no construction cost per home and no sale price. Without those, there’s no way to say whether printed walls beat wood framing on cost in this market. Virginia Tech’s Andrew McCoy made the labor argument directly: “3D printing lets us build durable, resilient concrete walls faster and with less skilled labor.” That’s the pitch the whole sector has been making for five years. HiveASMBLD’s Wafaey Swelim was more measured, telling WTVR the technology isn’t a silver bullet for affordability.
Code acceptance is the other open question. Alexander Brand, also of Virginia Tech, said the group wants to make sure printed homes in Virginia are built safely and reliably, which is why a permitting consultant is on the team from day one.
Where printed housing goes from here
Richmond Habitat has built 400 homes since 1986, so it knows what a conventional Habitat house costs to deliver. That baseline makes Carter Place I more useful than most printed-home pilots, which rarely publish a side-by-side comparison. Exchange has tracked similar attempts, including Sacramento’s first permitted 3D-printed home and the Cleora 3D-printed community in Colorado.
If the five Henrico houses close with real cost data attached, they’ll be worth more to the industry than the printer. Watch for the first on-site pour.