Elon Musk wants to address housing crisis with low-cost bricks

In his spare time, Elon Musk is going to try to tackle the housing crisis.

The billionaire entrepreneur wants to use leftover muck from his tunneling company to create low-cost bricks to be used in housing, Bloomberg News reported.

“The Boring Company will be using dirt from tunnel digging to create bricks for low-cost housing,” Musk tweeted.

A company spokesperson said the bricks will come from the “excavated muck,” and that “there will be an insane amount of bricks.”

But others are skeptical.

Juan Matute, a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and associate director of UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies, said that at least in California, hosing prices are driven up by the costs of land and labor, not building materials.

And brick construction tends to be expensive, in part because of the labor that goes in to assembling the walls. One other big problem is the fact that California is prone to earthquakes, and bricks don’t hold up so well when the ground underneath is shaking.

Earlier this year, The Real Deal took a look at where Musk’s Hyperloop might go in New York City. [Bloomberg] — Rich Bockmann