El Salvador Perspectives

A very high tech solution may be coming to help ease some of El Salvador's shortage of decent housing for its poor families.   Inexpensive houses rapidly built using a 3D printer may be coming to El Salvador as soon as this year. From a report on CNN : El Salvador may be the first country to have a community of 3D-printed homes.  A nonprofit called New Story is raising $1 million to bring more than 100 3D-printed homes to the country over the next two years. The organization funds homes for families in need and people displaced by natural disasters. "We want to bring this to the families who need it the most," CEO and cofounder Brett Hagler told CNN last week. . The 3D printed home prototype was recently unveiled in Austin, Texas: The 3D printed home that ICON and New Story just unveiled in Austin is a proof-of-concept for sustainable home-building that will build safer, more affordable homes for more people at a faster rate than ever before – the Vulcan ...

Throughout El Salvador, communities of squatters, are forced to live on land which is not theirs, land which is in peril, land on the margins.   A recent article from the Episcopal News Service tells their story through the lens of one such community: One hundred eighty-nine families displaced by a natural disaster have laid claim to a narrow strip of land situated between the Pan-American Highway and a dozen abandoned, government-owned grain silos a 25-minute drive east of San Salvador.  They live in shacks constructed of tin, mud, discarded construction materials and sometimes building materials salvaged from their previous homes. Heavy rains and mudslides caused by Hurricane Ida in 2009 washed away the ground and in some cases their homes out from under them. The people fled in the night as the storm gained strength and homes crumbled off cliffs into a ravine. A 2-month-old baby, her mother and grandmother were buried alive, along with an elderly man whose body went un...