In Houston, the city’s first hybrid 3D-printed housing community is now taking shape. Zuri Gardens will be a 100-percent affordable subdevelopment in the city’s Minnetex neighborhood that will eventually comprise 80 detached homes built from a combination of low-carbon concrete mixes produced by Eco Material Technologies and resilient siding, subflooring, and other products made by LP Building Solutions. Zuri Gardens is durable and energy efficient. The development team is rounded out by Texas-based HiveASMBLD, which provides the 3D-printing technology, and Cole Klein Builders, two companies committed to making housing more attainable in Texas.

The 2-story, 1,360-square-foot homes strike a simple silhouette, with 12/12 pitched roofs and efficient, elongated floorplans that suggest a familiarity with urban infill development. Their facades showcase an innovative materiality featuring vertical wood siding stacked atop a first story of grooved concrete.

According to HiveASMBLD’s co-CEO Ethan Wong, the use of 3D-printing tech and affordable home building go hand in hand. “The big advantage is you can have economies of scale,” he told AN. “You have high-quality homes built out of concrete that are energy efficient and low carbon, that are going to be more comfortable and durable over time but also don’t look like they just rolled out of the factory.” This outlook helps the company stand apart from ICON, another Texas home builder combining 3D-printing robotics with a proprietary low-carbon concrete mix, its homes sell for prices well above any threshold for affordability. (Wong briefly worked at ICON before founding ASMBLD Modular in 2022.) Home prices in Zuri Gardens will start at $280,000, and qualified buyers will be able to receive up to $125,000 in down payment assistance from the city. Eighty percent of the homes are reserved for buyers earning less than 120 percent of area median income.

Wong stresses the importance of scalability with this technology. This has been a unique challenge among 3D-robotics companies, which understand how housing constructed with this nascent technology can be superior to traditional stick-built homes in terms of both costs and construction time but also must contend with builders that are highly risk averse. Wong, however, says his company is uniquely positioned to meet that challenge.

High-emission Portland cement is increasingly being phased out for more sustainable options in large-scale infrastructure projects in the U.S., and there is arguably no bigger player in this space than Eco Material Technologies. “Rather than disrupting the cement industry, Eco Material’s approach strengthens it, preserving performance and reliability while materially reducing the carbon footprint of concrete at commercial scale,” a company representative told AN over email.

The Utah-based company’s near-zero-carbon PozzoSlag is a pozzolanic cement manufactured in room temperature conditions and made largely from upcycled fly ash sourced from legacy landfills around the country. Eco Material’s closest production plant to Zuri Gardens is in Jewett, Texas, about 140 miles north of Houston, where the company operates one of the biggest “green” cement manufacturing hubs in the country. The company, which was acquired by CRH last summer, also makes a product called PozzoCem, a quick setting pozzolanic mix that can replace Portland cement, which is what is being fed through HiveASMBLD’s printing systems at Zuri Gardens. “3D printing has the potential to reduce construction timelines, labor requirements, and material waste—three of the largest cost drivers in affordable housing,” the representative said. “Zuri Gardens reflects a shared goal of demonstrating that advanced tech can work together to deliver practical, scalable, affordable housing solutions.”

This partnership isn’t exactly new. In 2023, Eco Material supplied PozzoCem to Hive 3D (prior to its merger with ASMBLD Modular) to build five 3D-printed rental homes in Round Top, Texas. This development was precedent setting. “We want to be low carbon as much as we can, so long as there’s enough scale and functionality to back that,” Wong said.

Scalability is very much integral to Eco Material’s long-term goals. In addition to its vast sourcing and manufacturing operations, which span more than two dozen states, the company has been gradually building out its rail distribution network to serve various regions. Last May, Eco Material opened its Blissville Terminal in Queens, New York, which is equipped to supply roughly 50,000 tons annually of its low-carbon supplementary cementitious materials, and in October, it cut the ribbon on the Lebanon Rail Terminal, just outside Nashville, which aims to supply 85,000 tons annually to the southeast. These are just two examples among more than 100 distribution terminals operated by Eco Material and its partners across the U.S.

Leveraging rail infrastructure to regionalize products indicates a keen awareness of the embodied impacts of transporting vast quantities of cement. It’s a game changer on multiple scales. And if the fortuitous marriage of 3D printed homes and low-carbon concrete has any chance of scaling up, it will be thanks to the building industry’s wherewithal to source, produce, and deliver said products on a regional scale.

Justin R. Wolf is an independent journalist who writes about sustainable design, regenerative materials, and energy policy. He is the author of the 2025 report “Design to the Nines: Using Regenerative Materials to Restore Earth’s Nine Planetary Boundaries,” published by Living Future/Ecotone, as well as two books in the Living Building Challenge series.