Imagine if you could buy a home for less than $100,000. A Connecticut native thinks he has found an answer to the affordable housing crisis and homelessness.
He has developed technology to mass produce tiny homes, looking for a creative solution to housing.
It’s an out of the box idea: building a home on an assembly line. Yet that is exactly what’s happening at Boxabl.
“Our goal here is to just produce housing on a scale that's never been done before,” Galiano Tiramani, Boxabl founder, said.
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Much like Henry Ford built factories to mass-produce Model Ts, Boxabl is mass producing tiny homes.
“Our first product is a 20-by-20 room, it's like a little studio apartment,” Tiramani said.
The 400-square-foot home is called the "Casita."
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“Kitchen, bathroom, bed and couch. So I think a couple could live comfortably in there,” Tiramani said. “We now have a waitlist that actually has over 160,000 names on it for these Casitas.”
Boxabl is the brainchild of Greenwich native Galiano Tiramani and his dad, Paolo.
“We're getting everything done in the factory we possibly can: kitchen, bathroom, electric, pluming, flooring, windows,” Tiramani said. “These assembly line principles are proven in almost every other industry. Every other modern product is built in a factory on an assembly line. Housing’s the last big one that hasn't made it yet there yet.”
Boxabl has built 300 houses, producing two per day, over 14 months of production at its Las Vegas factory. Then each of the houses is folded up in a box, and they are sent all across the country.
“What we've done is got all the heavy lifting done for the builder developer,” Tiramani said. “They prepare the land, they drop down the Casita, they set it up in just a few hours. A traditional house might take six months to build, with Boxabl, maybe they can do it in under one month.”
The average cost of buying a home in the United States is $367,000, according to the National Association of Realtors. In Connecticut, that average is roughly $320,000, according to Connecticut Realtors.
Tiramani says the Casita sells for about $60,000. He predicts that as operations scale up, prices will go down, hoping this model will offer solutions to homelessness and the lack of affordable housing.
“We're going to end up with workforce housing, low cost little villages, all sorts of different use cases,” he said.
The company is looking to change the precedent when it comes to keeping roofs over heads.
“The demand for housing in the United States is off the charts,” Tiramani said. “Really no amount of money is going to solve that if we keep building houses the traditional way.”
For more information about Boxabl, you can visit their website.
