Hour-Contract: Can Reversible Swarm Housing Make Private Housing Radically Affordable?

Repository abstract

Rapid spatial transformation may lower adaptation costs without lowering the full cost of a dwelling. We formulate Hour-Contract as a proposed, rights-preserving specification of access to a verified usable function, then examine the chain connecting module motion, functional capacity, serviced sites, lifecycle resources and housing markets. A targeted audit identifies 16 relevant publications or official releases first published in 2026, alongside older foundations. Existing robotic evidence does not establish a complete self-reconfiguring habitable system. Executed synthetic experiments expose three boundaries: overlapping private demands limit spatial reuse; fast motion can leave verification and services on the critical path; and construction savings need not reach households where land or supplier capture and recurrent costs dominate. A hypothetical 40 kg module moving 2 m has a 24.8 s request-to-function calculation under declared prepared-room assumptions, without structural or physical validation. A 20-year stock-flow market model evaluates seven adoption targets under two rollout speeds and three hypothetical regimes, producing both reductions and increases in service prices. These outputs are scenario sensitivity results, not national forecasts. A one-cent whole-dwelling resource cost is unsupported; marginal acts, nominal transfers and subsidized consumer prices are different propositions. The next decisive experiment is a guarded, reversible robotic partition with measured connectors, restoration and equivalent manual baselines.