You can build your own starter house  for $25,000. Here's how

Modular homes are 21st answer to the housing crisis.  3D printing and shipping parts to build on-site has drastically reduced the cost of housing construction (as well as the time it takes to build).

With the population continuing to proliferate, free and cheap housing is the key to a stable future for us humans.  Maybe it is coincidence, or maybe we designed it this way, that we can quickly and affordably build mass housing.

One key, is the open sourcing of the building plans. Marcin Jakubowski and Catarina Mota have spearheaded this with Open Source Ecology and the Open Building Institute, in which they provide a template of how to create and run your own housing creation company.

1) Create an open source library of modules.

This is the stage where you compile a list of modules, or features, you'd like to add to your house.  Things like rainwater catchment, water filtration, solar panels, efficient LED lighting, bricks made from your own soil, passive solar heating and biogas in a 700-square-foot starter home will cost you less than $25,000 in materials. 

Keep in mind, you will be able to continue to add modules as you decided to build your house out in the future.

2) Train people to build in this way.

Jakubowski and Mota have provided a training program so that, not only can you hire people to help you construct, but you can become one of the constructors.  In what  Jakubowski calls “a large parallel swarming process” — so a house can be erected in as little as five days.

3) Construction pays for itself.

“All you need is a plot of land connected to a utilities infrastructure and a workshop space. A group of people — around 35 — who have signed up for an OBI immersion course show up to learn,” says Marcin.  This is the stage where people pay a fee to learn how to build; reducing the cost for the homeowner who is providing the course.

4) Get people out of debt.

Because the houses can start small and grow, they work for those that don't want to throw a huge down payment on a mansion.  "We’re creating a bridge between the tiny house and the mansion,” says Catarina. “The system is designed to grow towards the bigger house that you may need one day down the road. Right now, the housing market only has one offering, which is a really big, expensive house. There’s a lack of starter homes. The incremental build approach offers an alternative.”

5) Build in open source hardware — and aesthetic design.

Because the entire project is open source, architects and engineers continually update and create new ideas with new technologies, making the existing designs cheaper and more reliable.  In addition, the new ideas for modules that are created are immediately shared with the world and the existing model is almost instantly upgraded.