I wasn’t looking for a revelation on a country road in southeastern Illinois. But on the outskirts of Galatia, a small town where the hardships of the Appalachian Mountains seem to have drifted west and settled, that’s what I found.
It was not a burning bush in a biblical wilderness, but an industrial 3D printer the size of a small garage — a machine, I would learn, that required a $1.1 million investment to arrive in Illinois, bringing with it the promise of an affordable housing renaissance in the region known as Little Egypt.
And it called me.
I walked past it again and again. A year ago, in August 2024, this printer was the center of a groundbreaking ceremony attended by over 100 people, including myself. I covered the event for Capitol News Illinois and watched the machine lay down the first layers of what was supposed to be a new beginning. Two local men had promised to help save Cairo, Illinois, by using the machine to print new homes in a town that desperately needed them.
I watched state and local politicians ceremonially dump dirt. Officials posed for photos next to the machine, holding it up as proof that a new era had arrived. They promised fast, efficient, modern homes — and with them, the feeling that someone, finally, was paying attention to this corner of the state.
A year later, however, the printer had completed the framing of exactly one double-sided, but the project was abandoned before the interior was completed. Before anyone could move in, the walls cracked.
When I started to investigate what was wrong, I found the printer disassembled on a flatbed truck at a country repair shop that doesn’t need to advertise, because you either know it’s there or you wouldn’t go there anyway.
The more I looked at it and continued to walk past it, I wondered how a promise as big as housing could have rusted in the sun and rain. What did this abandoned printer say about the false promises so often made in the name of saving rural America? About officials who insist they’re trying to help? And, basically, how did this rather expensive modern technology get abandoned here in the first place?
For an investigation Published with ProPublica in collaboration with Capitol News Illinois, I sought answers to these questions. I followed what became one of the windiest and wildest reporting trips of my life. I learned that, behind the scenes, the Cairo 3D housing project was started by political connections: State Sen. Dale Fowler, whose district includes Cairo, helped introduce the 3D printing company to top executives, including Gov. JB Pritzker and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s office. Prestige Project Management Inc., located in the same Harrisburg, Ill., skyscraper where Fowler’s district office is located, pitched the project as part of the state’s housing future.
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A spokesperson for Pritzker said the governor’s office took no action after his meeting with Prestige. A Duckworth spokesperson said the senator’s office had just restarted discussions about how to resolve Cairo’s housing crisis when Fowler contacted it and that the office had no additional involvement with the company. Fowler played an active role in promoting the company’s Cairo project, but said he simply wanted to see housing development in the city and was not otherwise involved in Prestige’s business dealings.
What I thought was a simple story turned bizarre – part Old Testament prophecy, part bizarre Facebook rumor.
I would learn that a few months after this inauguration evening, work on the duplex had stopped. After Prestige’s owners said dozens of cracks began poking through the walls, a half-dozen employees left the company. Shortly thereafter, the FBI launched an investigation into Prestige’s broader business dealings. There have been no charges or arrests, and the owners say they cooperated fully with investigators and did nothing wrong. They also said that the actual “ink” that came with the printer was defective and that is why the printer has been sitting idle ever since. Black Buffalo 3D, the printer’s supplier, said it had offered Prestige a new concrete solution and found a buyer for the printer if Prestige no longer wanted it.
I spent months digging through archives and speaking with Prestige’s owners, former employees and others who did business with the company, trying to piece together a timeline of the company’s dealings in Cairo and beyond. Along the way, I encountered intense interviews, tearful moments, strange contradictions and a swamp of rumors.
And in the midst of it all, I found myself drawn too – whispering prayers in my car, chasing the truth like a storm rolling over the Shawnee, loving this place with all my chest and always wondering: What the hell happened here?
At the same time, maybe part of me already knew what happened, in a way. The failed promise of housing in Cairo is a story I have written repeatedly for over a decade.
I’ve written about the persistence of mold, mice, lead-contaminated water, and rot. social housing in the citywhich once housed a quarter of the city, for generations. I wrote about wasteful spending by public housing officials, the subsequent federal takeover, and the long, painful effort to demolish what couldn’t be salvaged. For years, federal officials promised, even as the housing was torn down, that it would be rebuilt. The plan, they said, depended on private companies working alongside government agencies and innovation. With this in mind, things like construction 3D printers seemed to fit their vision exactly.
So when Prestige Project Management Inc. in Harrisburg, backed by a state senator, offered to buy a printer and deliver it directly to Cairo — what one of its owners described as a mission from God — people believed.
What was the alternative?
In Cairo, I learned that progress (and the illusion of it) brings its own kind of sorrow. The demolition of social housing, less than a decade earlier, emptied a city already on its knees. People were forced to choose between opportunities elsewhere and at home, between safer housing and the place that created them.
And the emotional gravity of this story came not from the strangest things I encountered, but from the ones that were the most real and heartbreaking: a city that had raised its hopes, only to have them, once again, dashed. A mother living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment across town who dreamed of moving into one of the two-bedroom duplexes and could finally give her 6-year-old daughter her own space.
Some cities, I’ve heard people say, can’t be saved.
I understand the argument. I felt it myself as I drove the back roads of southern Illinois, between the two great rivers that meet at Cairo, through a landscape marked by poverty, abandonment and a fierce struggle to hang on. But Cairo has always struck me as worth saving, because of its history, its suffering, and its resilience, a word that may seem too pretty for what black residents endured: the racism and exclusion that persisted long after much of the South began to change.
Is an unfinished 3D printed home show really the best we have to offer?
I have already written thousands of stories. Most disappear as soon as they are deposited. But a few remain in the bones.
This is one of them.