4 ms·

I'm never quite sure what these approaches add to prefab. This process costs $10k to produce up to an 800 sq ft (74m^2) home. They say this is a fraction of the

by ch4s3 9y ago

I'm never quite sure what these approaches add to prefab. This process costs $10k to produce up to an 800 sq ft (74m^2) home. They say this is a fraction of the cost of the average American home, but the average new American home since ~2013 is 2500 sq ft (232 m^2), so of course its a fraction of that, and I guess it cuts out the labor. However, I would imagine that even in El Salvador, the principal cost of a new home is acquiring the land. Surely labor and materials are cheaper there, so what am I missing here?

maxerickson 9y ago
Outside of cities land is not a big component of the cost. There's acre lots near town here that are $10,000; further away prices go down.
- usrusr 9y ago
  But is there much homelessness to solve outside of cities? When I think of poor rural areas I think of abandoned houses, not of people sleeping under the stars for lack of novel construction techniques. The "help the poor" angle could be a clever attention hack though, if the technology is fast and cheap enough there might be a nice market in civil engineering somewhere between concrete and gabions to pivot to.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    I was just making a narrow point about construction of homes in the US. People that want to live in exclusive areas pay a lot for land, others not so much. And for homelessness, the problem isn't really that housing costs a lot to build, it's that no one wants to build it. This is probably true in a lot of places that aren't as wealthy as the US. The town planning commission here just rejected a $10 million project that was mostly low income housing. Some of them had the brass to come right out and say that they didn't want low income people living in that part of town and some of the others used the "historic character" of the shoddy commercial building presently on the site as a fig leaf. One guy dissembled, saying that the project should happen somewhere else. But of course the developer has a different set of concerns and won't necessarily be willing to make the same investment in a different location.

by ch4s3 9y ago

maxerickson 9y ago

Outside of cities land is not a big component of the cost. There's acre lots near town here that are $10,000; further away prices go down.

usrusr 9y ago
But is there much homelessness to solve outside of cities? When I think of poor rural areas I think of abandoned houses, not of people sleeping under the stars for lack of novel construction techniques. The "help the poor" angle could be a clever attention hack though, if the technology is fast and cheap enough there might be a nice market in civil engineering somewhere between concrete and gabions to pivot to.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  I was just making a narrow point about construction of homes in the US. People that want to live in exclusive areas pay a lot for land, others not so much. And for homelessness, the problem isn't really that housing costs a lot to build, it's that no one wants to build it. This is probably true in a lot of places that aren't as wealthy as the US. The town planning commission here just rejected a $10 million project that was mostly low income housing. Some of them had the brass to come right out and say that they didn't want low income people living in that part of town and some of the others used the "historic character" of the shoddy commercial building presently on the site as a fig leaf. One guy dissembled, saying that the project should happen somewhere else. But of course the developer has a different set of concerns and won't necessarily be willing to make the same investment in a different location.