Outside a repair shop in rural southeastern Illinois, the parts of a massive 3D construction printer sat disassembled on a flatbed trailer, weeds climbing the wheels.

The $1.1 million investment wasn’t meant to end up there, abandoned.

Two local men had taken out a loan from a tiny bank to buy the printer, promising it would spark an affordable-housing revival across hard-pressed southern Illinois. Their first stop was Cairo, at the state’s southern tip — a historic river town beset by the loss of jobs and safe housing, now home to fewer than 2,000 mostly Black residents.

In August 2024, after months of negotiations, the city finalized a deal with their company, Prestige Project Management Inc., to build 30 duplexes. Days later, the printer arrived and crews assembled it on a vacant corner lot at 17th Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.

More than 100 people showed up for the groundbreaking. Children clutched cotton candy and popcorn. Pallets of Amazon giveaways spilled from a truck. Behind a chain-link fence, the towering printer hummed to life, two American flags clipped to its steel legs, laying down the base of what was billed as the first new home built in Cairo in at least 30 years. The crowd cheered.

Kaneesha Mallory pressed against the fence. She had grown up in Cairo, moved away, then returned after her daughter was born. Living in a cramped one-bedroom public housing unit across town, she imagined a bedroom her 6-year-old could finally call her own.

Mayor Thomas Simpson called the project “just the beginning.” State Sen. Dale Fowler, whose district incorporates some of Illinois’ most destitute counties, described it as an “extraordinary project” — the start of more development to come. His nonprofit organization, which serves low-income children and families, had secured a $40,000 donation to help pay for the event.

Mallory couldn’t bring herself to leave while her future seemed to be taking shape. She stayed in the August heat so long that she fainted and was taken to the emergency room by ambulance.

Crews worked overnight to avoid the heat. Within about a month, the walls went up. Interior work followed.

But then the work stopped before the duplex was finished. The owners would later say cracks — dozens of them — had begun running through the walls and that they needed to make sure the structure was sound. The printer disappeared.

A year later, no one had moved into the duplex. It stood alone in a wide lot along a sun-bleached road.

As I began to examine what happened, the story grew complicated.

I learned that before the 3D printer arrived in Cairo, the Prestige owners had forfeited about $590,000 as a deposit for a different printer when they ended up canceling the order, a fact that would quickly turn the atmosphere tense as I pressed the company’s owners, the bank, Fowler and others for answers.

I also learned that not long after the groundbreaking, several employees left Prestige around the same time a spray of anonymous emails hit inboxes across the region. The emails called the Cairo duplex project little more than a publicity stunt and alleged fraud tied to Prestige’s other construction projects.

I also wasn’t the only one asking questions. I discovered that the FBI has launched an investigation into Prestige led by an agent in southern Illinois who specializes in white-collar and public corruption investigations. To date, there have been no charges filed or arrests made, and Prestige’s owners deny any wrongdoing.

Over the past eight months, the more questions I asked, the more public officials distanced themselves from the project and the company. The broader housing plan — the one that had fueled speeches and celebration — started to look increasingly uncertain.

I was determined to know: Was this simply another failed pitch to this dirt-poor delta town — or something more?

“God Sent Us”

Jamie Hayes, who inherited a Ford dealership from his father, and Erik Burtis, who had long supplied labor to coal mines, founded Prestige in 2021 in Harrisburg, Illinois, a town of fewer than 8,000 people about 80 miles northeast of Cairo.

It is one of seven companies Hayes has started since 2020, three of them co-owned with Burtis, according to Illinois business records. The two, business partners since 2012, have taken on an eclectic mix of projects: school construction management, solar farm fencing and the 3D printing venture. Hayes provides the capital; Burtis runs the day-to-day operations.

Burtis said he landed on 3D printing in early 2023 after asking his son Josh, who works for the company, to find out what was hot in construction. He reported back that it was 3D construction — based on trends in Europe. “Usually we’re five, maybe six, seven years behind what happens there,” Burtis said.

Burtis said God then laid it on his heart to start building in Cairo by donating the first home his company would print. Fowler, the state senator whose district office is in the same building as Prestige, said he listened to Burtis’ plan as they drove to Cairo to meet with town officials a few years ago. Fowler said he suggested building a duplex instead of a single home so two families could benefit. Burtis was moved by that idea.

“He literally started tearing up,” Fowler said. He told me the story in August as we talked in the back booth of a local barbecue restaurant.

“Did you cry, too?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Fowler said. “I’m about to right now just thinking about it.”

Cairo’s housing crisis is rooted in a long and complicated history. In 1972, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights visited the town and documented how racism had harmed Black families, including through neglect of their segregated public housing. Those problems only worsened over time.

I grew up nearby and have reported on Cairo’s housing problems for more than a decade. In 2015, I documented how conditions in those once-segregated developments had withered into mice-infested slums, overrun with mold and contaminated with lead, while federal overseers looked the other way.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took over the local housing authority and then demolished those apartment homes, displacing nearly 400 residents. In 2022, HUD evacuated another high-rise for seniors, then home to about 60 people. In less than five years, more than 300 apartment units were razed, accelerating the county’s decline into one of the fastest-shrinking places in America.

Cairo had seen ambitious promises before the 3D printer arrived. At the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, it draws entrepreneurs who see unrealized potential in its vacant storefronts and magnolia-lined streets of dilapidated mansions built by river barons in another era. Some come to help, others to take advantage — it can be hard to tell. Residents have grown wary of outsiders with big ideas.

City Council member Connie Williams, a retired school principal, said city leaders had warned the Prestige owners not to make promises they couldn’t keep.

“We kept saying to them, ‘Look, we’ve had enough people come through Cairo talking all this crazy stuff and then back out,’” she said. “And they were just like, ‘No, no, oh no, that’s not us. We are here. God sent........

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