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Construction costs for housing are pretty non-negligible in these cities, I spent a few hours reading about the situation in NYC; this article (based on a priva

by Eridrus 10y ago

Construction costs for housing are pretty non-negligible in these cities, I spent a few hours reading about the situation in NYC; this article (based on a private report) puts average costs in Manhattan of $400-600 per square foot: https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/nycs-construction-craze/ https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/nycs-construction-cr... I couldn't figure out if this included the cost of land, but I saw other estimates put the hard construction cost (i.e. not including insurance, etc) at ~$330/sqft in NYC (not just Manhattan). With those sorts of prices, it's clear why people are building luxury condos. I spent some time looking at prefab construction costs for sky scrapers to see if they could be part of the solution, and in NYC they were targeting cost reductions in the 20% range (even with union concessions), but ended with huge cost overruns and ended construction at ~60% of the planned height. So, I'm all for building more housing, it's really the only thing that can fundamentally fix things, but it sounds like we need to get better at building cheaper housing. A lot of that might end up as making people want to spread out, by building more transit (which also needs to get cheaper) or convincing people that they should spread out and build their own communities; they don't have to look like the suburbs, Brooklyn certainly doesn't.

yardie 10y ago
$400x1000 sqftx50% markup is around $600k. Which seems reasonable to me for NYC. But the real prices are way above that.
- Eridrus 10y ago
  600k seems like a best case estimate here. Given that $400 is the low end of Manhattan construction and these projects are definitely not risk free. Even at 600k per apartment, you're not going to solve housing for everyone, you're still only hitting a price point that is good for the upper middle class. I wish I had a clearer breakdown of costs, but most of Manhattan is built up, so land costs are going to be huge in most areas; you know that developers are looking at the least developed areas because that's where land is cheapest, so if you start building in places that are already expenses your costs will go up.
  - avn2109 10y ago
    There is an absolute ton of open land on Manhattan island, waiting to be built on. It's the hilariously-too-wide streets and especially our Avenues. We should infill these like crazy, leaving little ten-foot wide streets basically where the current sidewalks are. This would have the effect of 1) reducing rents, 2) giving us Really Narrow Streets (tm), an excellent idea I stole from [0], and 3) sending property tax revenue through the roof while reducing road-maintenance expenditures so we can spend more money on subways. Density doesn't have to mean expensive vertical construction. Instead we could just make better use of our existing land by not wasting so much of it on low-bandwidth automobile transit infrastructure. (Side rant: Have you ever counted how many humans in cars get through a crosstown intersection in one traffic light cycle? It's literally ones or tens of people, a pathetically low number). [0] http://newworldeconomics.com/the-eco-metropolis/ http://newworldeconomics.com/the-eco-metropolis/
    - Eridrus 10y ago
      NYC just built the most expensive few miles of subway in the upper east side, the next mile or two will be even more expensive. I'm sort of hoping that we get on-demand self-driving buses at some point and add a toll on vehicles driving into lower Manhattan, but I don't know if that will be enough. Bus tunnels also seem interesting, particularly when the buses are self-driving, but I don't know if they'd be any cheaper to build for us. As much as I do think that streets are too wide and we should almost certainly get rid of on-street parking, and the front yard in front of most Brooklyn brownstones being a huge waste of space; I'm not sure you can really plonk down a new building in the space we could reclaim from roads (on most streets), which means the way you make use of that space is by knocking down old buildings and building further into the street, which is again expensive. I wonder a little about delivery and construction in these scenarios; if the streets are that small, can you even get a crane in there? How do you do deliveries to businesses if you only have a single lane and you need to stop a truck for 15+ mins to unload? Supposedly people in Barcelona use hand carts for the last few hundred meters to get into the old town/super blocks, but that seems horribly inefficient. I don't know what the answer is, especially with the legacy infrastructure, but nothing in this space seems super simple even if you're not a fan of cars.
bigger_cheese 10y ago
>So, I'm all for building more housing, it's really the only thing that can fundamentally fix things, but it sounds like we need to get better at building cheaper housing. I don't disagree but I think people will object to "cheap" based on aesthetics. The closest thing I can think of is Soviet Union I know they used prefabricated elements in their building construction. People love to complain about the ugliness of Soviet style architecture.
- Eridrus 10y ago
  Prefabricated doesn't have to mean ugly, it doesn't have to mean it's made out of concrete. It doesn't mean that everything has to look the same either. I think the industry prefers the term "modular" due to the stigma, but they're the same thing. While I'm not a huge fan of how this turned out, here's a recent modular high-rise in Manhattan that doesn't look hideous: http://narchitects.com/work/carmel-place/ http://narchitects.com/work/carmel-place/ This doesn't really argue against your soviet comments either, but you can see that you can do a lot with the idea (though the complicated form lead and uilders' inexperience to pretty high costs): http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-innovative-homeless-housing-20141008-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-innovative-homel... But you can stick whatever facade you want onto this. I've read quite a few comments about sticking brick veneer onto these to make them look just like regular buildings. Using modules means you can build the modules off-site in a factory, rather than on a construction site, and maybe we can eventually bring some automation into how those modules are built.

by Eridrus 10y ago

yardie 10y ago

$400x1000 sqftx50% markup is around $600k. Which seems reasonable to me for NYC. But the real prices are way above that.

Eridrus 10y ago
600k seems like a best case estimate here. Given that $400 is the low end of Manhattan construction and these projects are definitely not risk free. Even at 600k per apartment, you're not going to solve housing for everyone, you're still only hitting a price point that is good for the upper middle class. I wish I had a clearer breakdown of costs, but most of Manhattan is built up, so land costs are going to be huge in most areas; you know that developers are looking at the least developed areas because that's where land is cheapest, so if you start building in places that are already expenses your costs will go up.
- avn2109 10y ago
  There is an absolute ton of open land on Manhattan island, waiting to be built on. It's the hilariously-too-wide streets and especially our Avenues. We should infill these like crazy, leaving little ten-foot wide streets basically where the current sidewalks are. This would have the effect of 1) reducing rents, 2) giving us Really Narrow Streets (tm), an excellent idea I stole from [0], and 3) sending property tax revenue through the roof while reducing road-maintenance expenditures so we can spend more money on subways. Density doesn't have to mean expensive vertical construction. Instead we could just make better use of our existing land by not wasting so much of it on low-bandwidth automobile transit infrastructure. (Side rant: Have you ever counted how many humans in cars get through a crosstown intersection in one traffic light cycle? It's literally ones or tens of people, a pathetically low number). [0] http://newworldeconomics.com/the-eco-metropolis/ http://newworldeconomics.com/the-eco-metropolis/
  - Eridrus 10y ago
    NYC just built the most expensive few miles of subway in the upper east side, the next mile or two will be even more expensive. I'm sort of hoping that we get on-demand self-driving buses at some point and add a toll on vehicles driving into lower Manhattan, but I don't know if that will be enough. Bus tunnels also seem interesting, particularly when the buses are self-driving, but I don't know if they'd be any cheaper to build for us. As much as I do think that streets are too wide and we should almost certainly get rid of on-street parking, and the front yard in front of most Brooklyn brownstones being a huge waste of space; I'm not sure you can really plonk down a new building in the space we could reclaim from roads (on most streets), which means the way you make use of that space is by knocking down old buildings and building further into the street, which is again expensive. I wonder a little about delivery and construction in these scenarios; if the streets are that small, can you even get a crane in there? How do you do deliveries to businesses if you only have a single lane and you need to stop a truck for 15+ mins to unload? Supposedly people in Barcelona use hand carts for the last few hundred meters to get into the old town/super blocks, but that seems horribly inefficient. I don't know what the answer is, especially with the legacy infrastructure, but nothing in this space seems super simple even if you're not a fan of cars.

bigger_cheese 10y ago

>So, I'm all for building more housing, it's really the only thing that can fundamentally fix things, but it sounds like we need to get better at building cheaper housing. I don't disagree but I think people will object to "cheap" based on aesthetics. The closest thing I can think of is Soviet Union I know they used prefabricated elements in their building construction. People love to complain about the ugliness of Soviet style architecture.

Eridrus 10y ago
Prefabricated doesn't have to mean ugly, it doesn't have to mean it's made out of concrete. It doesn't mean that everything has to look the same either. I think the industry prefers the term "modular" due to the stigma, but they're the same thing. While I'm not a huge fan of how this turned out, here's a recent modular high-rise in Manhattan that doesn't look hideous: http://narchitects.com/work/carmel-place/ http://narchitects.com/work/carmel-place/ This doesn't really argue against your soviet comments either, but you can see that you can do a lot with the idea (though the complicated form lead and uilders' inexperience to pretty high costs): http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-innovative-homeless-housing-20141008-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-innovative-homel... But you can stick whatever facade you want onto this. I've read quite a few comments about sticking brick veneer onto these to make them look just like regular buildings. Using modules means you can build the modules off-site in a factory, rather than on a construction site, and maybe we can eventually bring some automation into how those modules are built.