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Technology has improved the cost of housing. In the USA, the average house size has grown. So has its quality. It has air conditioning standard in warm climate
by massysett 10y ago
Technology has improved the cost of housing.
In the USA, the average house size has grown. So has its quality. It has air conditioning standard in warm climates. It has safer electrical systems that handle higher loads. It has more carpeting. More bathrooms. Better appliances, with washers and dryers standard. More, bigger windows. Higher ceilings in basements. Lower-maintenance building envelopes. Better fire safety, with fire sprinklers being required in many jurisdictions. Off-street parking. The list goes on and on.
Technology helps explain why housing has improved so much. Much of the home is fabricated offsite and trucked in. Computers help make more efficient use of materials. Manufactured building products (like oriented strand board) make more efficient use of lumber, and create more durable products. The labor savings are immense: compare the labor to sweat a house of copper pipes versus using pex. Compare plastering a house versus drywall. Not even in the same league cost wise.
Do not make the mistake of looking at a few extraordinarily high cost areas like SF or NYC and believe they represent anything typical. They do not. Housing has improved dramatically in just a few decades.
- eecks 10y agoWhat's relevant is the cost of housing where people want to live.
- spoonie 10y agoYes, but that's too subjective to measure. A better proxy may be housing cost relative to wages.
- ksec 10y agoI think that is the issues that should be discussed. Housing price is Land + Building Cost + Profit with Supply and Demand. Land is politics which you cant improve much, Supply and Demand is a market force you cant change. So really the only thing you can do is Building Cost. But what i think the housing mentioned here being better really are houses, not Flat. i.e High Rise Building. And all of those Appliances has nothing to do with building itself. What i really want to see, is technology improving High Rise Building in Cites, so when the time for land approval comes, it could be built and sold ( live in ) within 6 months. Preferably even sooner. They should be durable, easy to assemble, easy to fit in floors, Windows ( Without leaking water ), Pipes, etc. I have seen Office Building being built in that time frame but not residential. In Hong Kong it is common to see these Office building built in Metal / Steel frame compared to Residential being concrete only. I guess that is a cost issues involved. At the moment, fitting pipes, Windows, and polishing etc after the block of concrete lay on each floor is still very labour intensive and slow. To me, technology hasn't improved at all in these regards.