One of the latest projects for Bill Gross and idealab, an incubator run by Gross and his wife Marcia Goodstein, is affordable housing.
As in $1,500 per house.
The new Idealab company is called WorldHaus.
WorldHaus has designed a 20-square meter house (220-square feet) built of interlocking compressed earth-bricks, steel and polystyrene roof panels, and concrete.
Most of the materials are assembled on site, and the house can be built for $1,500 in 10 days.
The houses come in 1, 2, and 3-room models, with optional toilets, LED-TV screens, solar cooling and heating, and cook-stoves. They provide solid, weather-tight housing for about half the price of a normal brick-and-mortar house.
According to WorldHaus, 1.5 billion people in the developing world live in make-shift houses built of corrugated tin, mud, boards, or whatever else their inhabitants can lay hands on. That's where the Worldhaus house comes in.
The first WorldHaus house was just completed in Chennai, India. The company hopes to build 5,000 houses by the end of next year, and a million by 2020.
