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Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

184 points by johnny313 8y ago

sjg007 8y ago
Great idea.. still unlikely to bring down rent prices I assume without zoning changes.
- maxk42 8y ago
  This is the real factor at play: Bodies are moving to the area faster than new units are being constructed because of zoning laws an other regulations which limit the speed at which new developments can be made. In Los Angeles it takes 2 - 3 years to break ground on a new apartment complex because of all the regulations mandating permits, surveys and reports that must be complied with prior to construction. This ensures only very large players can enter the market and raises the costs to develop new units, keeping prices high.
- rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
  In some cases, your conclusion is correct while the problem is completely different. I live in a college town, where rent and housing prices obey different laws of economics. Unlike the Bay Area, a brisk 15 minutes drive in any direction will bring you to dirt cheap rural property, but because a huuuuuuge proportion of renters are college students, they tend to live in the city and put the rent on their student loans instead of moving further out and spending time (and money, on a car) commuting. It’s not as if a college student is going to throw in their hands and say “well, I could get an Ivy League degree at the school I was accepted to, or I could get a second-Tier degree somewhere else and pay half the rent.” Case in point, Ithaca’s Collegetown neighborhood used to be a sleepy community of large rental houses, but over the last 20 years it’s been heavily developed into very large, tall apartment blocks, all while Cornell built massive developments of dorms and grad student housing complexes. And rents just keep climbing higher and higher...
  - osdiab 8y ago
    I've always been surprised by how expensive Princeton is even though short drives in any direction can be much cheaper. Students seem to be mostly in student housing anyway, and anybody who lives there in any other capacity probably has a car, is it just prestige of being there that pumps up the rent?
    - jseliger 8y ago
      I've always been surprised by how expensive Princeton is even though short drives in any direction can be much cheaper AAA estimates the TCO of a car to be $8,500/yr: https://newsroom.aaa.com/auto/your-driving-costs https://newsroom.aaa.com/auto/your-driving-costs. Even if you're only "a short drive away," you then have to pay for parking on or near campus, which is likely dear: https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/7/19/15993936/high-cost-of-free-parking https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/7/19/15993936/high-cost-of-f.... Finally, commuting sucks: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/there-and-back-again https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/there-and-back... from a social and psychological perspective. People love living around other people who can they chat with and befriend; that's why current zoning laws prohibiting such developments are so pernicious.
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edmundhuber 8y ago
The problem is the price of buildable land, not the buildings on it.
- kurthr 8y ago
  Exactly... when an uncovered parking space rents for $400-1k/mo it's hard to see how building practices are going to help. Outside of towncenter land costs are lower, but transportation is lacking. Really, it's driven by a combination of growth in high paying tech jobs, restricted geography, and tax/financing structures, as much as, zoning laws or building costs.
  - StudentStuff 8y ago
    Parking is often one of the most expensive things to build in land constrained areas due to the dead load of cars that parking structures must support, with a standard spot requiring 200sqft itself, add to that 50% for ingress/egress space. Generally parking spots cost a fraction of what that space would go for if it were allowed to be lived in.
- siliconunit 8y ago
  Absolutely, land estate prices are totally insane in the more gentrified areas. The building itself is nearly irrelevant, see Vancouver rare land plots for measure... or most of the UK. What is in dire need is a fundamental legislation change, where the entirety of the real estate is no longer a market open to speculation, but a fundamental right of the individual and is well proportioned to any income range within a very reasonable 2:1 ratio and this even if it means depricing the already bought properties and cutting corporations out of the building business and of course limiting the amount of houses in possession to a single individual to maybe 2 and eliminate speculators/investors completely.
  - ksec 8y ago
    Hong Kong has been breaking records after records in the most unaffordable places on earth to live, ranked by Median Income and Median Price of Housing. Agreed. I think the solution is, Property should not be an investment vehicle. At least it should be taxed and regulated. Although another / the major reason to what we have now is QE, pushing asset prices up.
Joeri 8y ago
I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. All that pouring and sawing and drilling and slathering of raw materials to do one-off designs for houses that are then filled with standardized ikea furniture which fits the custom room shape poorly. Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach. Either we make carpenter and bricklayer robots to do the bespoke work cheaply, or we build homes from standardized parts.
- jgibson 8y ago
  I'm not so sure. Whats the average lifespan of a house? 50-80 years? To me it makes sense to invest the time to optimize design to make best use of the land area. I guess you could still use somewhat standarized parts though, spend more effort in the design phase.
  - kazen44 8y ago
    > I'm not so sure. Whats the average lifespan of a house? 50-80 years? make that a 100 years easily. (atleast in my country). Heck, some houses don't even have architectural drawings because of their age.
    - Jarb 8y ago
      My architecture wife said houses today are designed (in the US) to last at least 50 years. However I seriously have my doubts that a house could make it that long without some major renovations/overhauls along the way, given that they're essentially built as plywood sheets, stapled to wood planks, protected by plastic siding, and covered with a tar sheet roof down here where I live. I wish the developers invested more into the longevity of a house instead of pinching every penny they can.
      - lallysingh 8y ago
        My house is 65 years old, built like this. The wood's kept dry, and the rest of the house is just gypsum, wire, and pipe. As long as the roof and exterior walls hold up, there's not much to it. And the roof you change every dozen years or so.
ohazi 8y ago
I find it hilarious that a CA company is leading the charge in new, efficient, high-quality pre-fab design and construction. These units are going to improve construction quality and lower costs in every state except CA, thanks to our asinine zoning laws.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  What are the state zoning laws? As far as I know, the state constitution leaves zoning as an issue for the cities/counties to handle. Is that your beef or are there laws on the books I'm ignorant of?
  - jimrandomh 8y ago
    Yes, the problematic zoning laws exist mainly at the city level. The problem is that the decisions about key areas are being made by people who are incentivized to make housing prices go up (because they own property), which they do by severely restricting construction of dense housing.
    - ajmurmann 8y ago
      Even that seems super short sighed though isn't it? If an area turns into the next Manhattan all land owners win big time. I'd love it if it became economically desirable to build a 100 story skyscraper next to my house and someone went ahead and did it!
      - baybal2 8y ago
        This idea is entirely alien to majority of American high class suburbians. My sorries to people insulted by this statement.
  - JohnnyConatus 8y ago
    See this AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_architect_in_la_specializing_in_multifamily/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar...
sithadmin 8y ago
Here's a cool video of ToyotaHome (yes, that Toyota) assembling a modular home in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzpv47o80eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzpv47o80eg Their website: http://www.toyotahome-aichi.co.jp/ http://www.toyotahome-aichi.co.jp/ (JP only, no English)
mdjasper 8y ago
And have been since the 60's. Here an interesting article about one building, modularly constructed for 1968 World's Fair: https://www.mysanantonio.com/150years/major-stories/article/How-a-gamble-changed-the-San-Antonio-skyline-6105562.php https://www.mysanantonio.com/150years/major-stories/article/... And a fascinating documentary https://youtu.be/D7shgCkCfhU?t=573 https://youtu.be/D7shgCkCfhU?t=573. I've skipped to the fun part with people riding their hotel rooms up to the building on a crane... but the whole thing is worth a watch if you've got the time.
- kazen44 8y ago
  This is just "plattenbau" but done by californians? Like, prefab highrise has existed for more then 60 years, it is not a new thing?
  - notahacker 8y ago
    The Plattenbau were mostly composed of system built concrete panels and frames assembled into rooms onsite, with only the small bathrooms being delivered to site as complete units. These appear to be structures composed entirely of stacked full-size room unit completed before site delivery and winched into place; but that technique's been around (especially in the hotel industry) for a good while too, although it's only in the last 20 years people have started to build structures of over 10 storeys that way Nothing's ever truly new. The Romans used prefabricated elements to speed up fort construction in the first century AD.
- joezydeco 8y ago
  Kind of surprised nobody has mentioned the Contemporary Resort at DisneyWorld: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWdCdP3m9Cs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWdCdP3m9Cs
tomatotomato37 8y ago
I wonder how hard it would be for mobile home manufactors to support the modular stacking of units. It would look redneck as hell, but could probably go up even faster then wooden prefabs that still needs a building finished around it
- isaiahg 8y ago
  Like the stacks in ready player one?
- noir_lord 8y ago
  You could build the external structure and a "floor" (steel plate) for each level, then you could swap out trailers if needed, a vertical trailer park. Would need some way to get up and down and toilet/water. Tbh by the time you've done all that you might as well just build a normal modular high rise (that's how the local budget hotel did it, nearly whole thing turned up as a series of containers each prefitted with plumbing and power, then stacked together, hooked up and done, it went up insanely fast).
- Blackthorn 8y ago
  Isn't that how modular homes already work? My house is a modular. The two floors are pretty much identical under the drywall and flooring; it comes as a one or two floor option and from what I've been told they just slap the same floor on top of the first in the latter case.
- pauldprice 8y ago
  It's already being done, and doesn't look redneck at all: http://indiedwell.com/ http://indiedwell.com/
- paulie_a 8y ago
  There are some gorgeous homes made out of shipping containers, the best ones I've seen probably were not cheap but the design is modular and relatively simple.
drawkbox 8y ago
Reminds me of Sears Catalog Home prefabricated homes. [1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home [2] http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm
jpao79 8y ago
It's also gaining popularity in the hotel industry. Inspiring video: http://www.guerdonmodularbuildings.com/modular-now-marriotts-modular-initiative/ http://www.guerdonmodularbuildings.com/modular-now-marriotts... It has many benefits for the construction teams. They can work in a controlled environment, and focus on technical skills versus getting through urban commutes, live in lower cost of living areas (in this case Idaho), all the tools/materials are there, have quality assurance processes, etc. I think the key is its for condos/apartments which will look virtually indistinguishable from a conventional apartment building, then you escape the stigma of mobile trailer home.
- jpao79 8y ago
  Here's an advocate in the Bay Area: Solving the housing part of homelessness through the construction of modular, micro-housing is described in the above video by Patrick Kennedy, founder of Panoramic Interests https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC0fyFtbaQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC0fyFtbaQk And here's an example in Sunnyvale: http://www.palisadebuilders.com/projects/domain/ http://www.palisadebuilders.com/projects/domain/
  - DrScump 8y ago
    And here's an example in Sunnyvale: All 3 are in San Jose, according to the page.
- petra 8y ago
  Sadly, the job market is pretty simple: when you make a job easier, workers earn less. And it's true for pre-fab, which replaced unionized trades with automation and non-union factory workers, cutting wages drastically. One can imagine the salary difference.
- ksec 8y ago
  Thanks for the Video Link. It answer a lot of the question I had previously. One problem I thought that was not solved were finishing. It turns out they actually do all the finishing before it is shipped. And because the finishing, construction, are all done indoor and in house, my guess is that with Air Condition they will / could work much faster, higher efficiency, and more importantly, there should be less sloppiness. But then Another question I had as shown in the video, wouldn't all the room be limited by the 40Ft Container Size that fits in the truck? How much of those labour, once moved indoor, could be full automated? Can you built a 50 floor + building / Hotel with these modular tech? How does it work in area where you have special construction requirement like earth quake zone. Are the factory mobilise? i.e, Assuming this take mainstream, would a manufacture of those unit have to ship 100s of containers across the country to have these fitted? Because all the time saved are now bottlenecked by transportation of these blocks. Are we going to ship them overseas? Making the hotel from 2 years to 9 months sounds like a big Win. But in places like China or Japan. No one has 9 month to wait for a construction. China has a 30 floor hotel built from Zero to fully working hotel in less then 3 months. Other then time and quality, are there any actual cost savings?
danschumann 8y ago
What I want is an MVP house (room + bathroom + kitchen), which I can expand ( extra rooms, extra bathrooms, etc ). Normally with construction, when you add stuff, you need to break stuff, but if there could be a modular housing system that would let you expand without destruction, while being competitively priced, I'd do that. In Elon Musk fashion, it would have to be better than a normal house, right? A modular house ( like a mobile home ), which is expandable, which is simultaneously better than a normal house. Maybe for my next startup idea ( since this is a problem I have and I would use ). The end goal would be a transition from a tiny house to a mansion, with each state being as good as a comparable house, and about as cheap. Maybe some panels they could sell back?
- jpao79 8y ago
  If you have land and looking at somewhat high-end: https://www.bluhomes.com/homes-landing/origin https://www.bluhomes.com/homes-landing/origin These are popular in Tahoe and Napa.
  - Jarb 8y ago
    2 Bed, 2 Bath with a combined kitchen and living room, all for the low, low price of $330k? For what is essentially a double-wide with fancy siding and big windows? Haha, nope. If I had land, I could easily build something twice the size or plop down a mobile home for 1/10 of the cost. But that is the true issue with housing these days: finding affordable, available land in a desirable area.
- rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
  I grew up playing The Sims so my ideal housing situation is essentially the same as your comment. There are companies that build custom manufactured houses, like Carina Construction[1] in Ithaca, NY. I haven’t looked into how modifications like those you mention might work, but the prices are competitive and the modular customization is pretty extensive. All-in-all a good deal, if you don’t mind a house that looks slightly plastic. [1] https://carinaconstruction.com https://carinaconstruction.com
- pilingual 8y ago
emptybits 8y ago
Here in Vancouver, we have been building apartments to house homeless using modular construction. http://vancouver.ca/people-programs/temporary-modular-housing.aspx http://vancouver.ca/people-programs/temporary-modular-housin... Start-to-finish I believe the timeframe is about six months and one of the benefits of modular is that they can reconfigure or move these buildings in several years as needs and neighbourhoods change.
maerF0x0 8y ago
China has been able to do this for at least 7 yrs now. 30 Story building in 15 days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY
- molszanski 8y ago
  Yes, they build 30 story building faster then most single family homes take to do the foundation.
  - maerF0x0 8y ago
    My suspicion is that its under the following constraints: 1) Site is cleared, maybe foundation complete (which means excavation done etc) 2) All prefab pieces are done 3) No restrictions of number of people on site (besides physical realities) #3 is no small case. I've often noticed that construction companies in the west have very few people on site. Certainly not 50 people per floor, for example. IMO this is due to wages and contracts. a) wages are too high to risk idle people and b) contracts are insufficiently written to incentivize speed of delivery (probably in favor of cost).
    - yrb 8y ago
      I would say the biggest factor is that it is a very repetitive rectangular box. Overall design and how it is detailed is the dominant factor in time it takes to build things. Do I have lots of joints that have to be perfect or can they be rough cut and covered with trim? Do things assembly easily without having to fiddle due to having the correct tolerances? Cuts and joins are what take the most time. The less cuts and joins you have the cheaper and faster things will be. Also cuts and joins that have to be done to high tolerances take a lot longer.
- petra 8y ago
  Does anybody know how's the quality of that building ?
  - 8y ago
kpil 8y ago
I think that maybe the last thing humanity needs is high density- low quality- apartment blocks, built in ill-planned areas that promotes anonymity and does not promote socially sound communities. Especially when sold at a high margin, because land value is high.
gondo 8y ago
personally, I don't consider those USA wooden houses to be a real house. there is a company in UAE doing this for quite some time from concrete: http://www.gulfprecast.ae/ http://www.gulfprecast.ae/
- whatsstolat 8y ago
  A real house provides safe shelter for its occupants. Being made of wood don't matter
- pests 8y ago
  You should tell that to my house.
bpicolo 8y ago
I lived directly across from the Berkeley one shown in the article while they were building it. I wonder how significant the cost benefits were - the time to build didn't seem substantively different (another apartment complex a couple blocks away went up in fairly comparable time it felt like), but I could definitely imagine it being faster
John_KZ 8y ago
Did this article just presented prefabricated housing as an innovative and novel way of building, and a solution to the housing crisis? Am I really reading NYtimes?
Dowwie 8y ago
There already are prefab towers in Brooklyn, some prefabbed in warehouse(s) somewhere in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Here's one of the older stories: https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20131211/navy-yard/worlds-tallest-prefab-building-leads-nycs-boom-modular-housing/ https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20131211/navy-yard/worlds-t... I haven't been closely following the Atlantic Yards project, but to my knowledge it's had quite a few setbacks.
walrus01 8y ago
Too much particleboard, chipboard, oriented strand board, MDF board and cheap shit that is used as an alternative to real plywood. I've seen what happens to those particleboard nightmares when construction is temporarily paused in a wet climate, for unforeseen reasons, and it gets rained on before the roof and cladding are on.
reeddavid 8y ago
Quality prefabricated homes and apartments are a great idea. There's a negative association with prefabricated homes, but I've seen a lot of newer companies that seem to be focusing on quality and efficiency, often targeting the higher end of the market. And lots of new homes built on-site are of very poor quality these days: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/where-we-live/wp/2017/05/23/new-home-build-quality-standards-are-slipping-and-how-you-can-protect-yourself https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/where-we-live/wp/2017/05... This approach doesn't seem like a solution to affordable housing, even though many of these companies use that concept in their marketing. In the least affordable housing markets with worsening trends, including Seattle and San Francisco, construction cost is a tiny fraction of the problem. Efficient, prefabricated housing isn't going to make housing meaningfully more affordable in places where the majority of the cost of a dwelling is its land.
- pxeboot 8y ago
  The article claims a per unit cost of almost $800k in SF. Cheaper, prefabricated units could make a significant difference here.
  - davmre 8y ago
    That per-unit development cost is almost certainly including the cost of acquiring the land. Labor in SF is expensive, but not that expensive.
    - epistasis 8y ago
      Labor is hugely under supplied in SF. I hear it's really hard to get on a contractor's docket these days without a really big project.
- Eridrus 8y ago
  > This approach doesn't seem like a solution to affordable housing, even though many of these companies use that concept in their marketing. It's not a complete solution, but construction costs provide a floor on the price of new housing. Even if we solve all the other issues around zoning, impact fees (https://letsgola.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/impact-fees-are-bad-taxes-are-good/ https://letsgola.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/impact-fees-are-ba...), approval times, NIMBYs, etc, the price of dense, new housing is going to provide a floor on how much it costs to house people. It's also super important for construction to be cheap for it to make sense to build denser housing where moderately dense housing exists, because in those cases the value of the building over the cost of land is significant, e.g. I live in a 4 story building, but I live right on top of a subway station where we should probably have far more density, but my landlord is deriving value from all the occupants, but not the land. So, it's not going to solve the housing issue by itself, but like the Ben Horowitz saying, there are no silver bullets, only lead bullets. And making construction costs cheaper is one of them.
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jmkb 8y ago
The New York City Office of Emergency Management has a "pre-fab brownstone" demo assembled in downtown Brooklyn. They're hoping to be able to relocate entire neighborhoods when another event like Sandy hits. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6996729,-73.9898138,3a,65.6y,88.6h,94.55t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s0VN2kZuJCN_tD-9RIK0_5A!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D0VN2kZuJCN_tD-9RIK0_5A%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D6.3159122%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6996729,-73.9898138,3a,65.6y...
bane 8y ago
I think it's very interesting how prefab construction seems to pop up from time to time in the media. I grew up in a prefab house, trucked to the property in two halves and bolted together on a poured concrete foundation -- it's incredibly common. Apartment blocks however, they seem to be locked in a perpetual demonstrator state. One, maybe two prefab buildings will go up, and then no more, eliminating the point of the effort. All kinds of stats will be provided, "built in 30 days", "providing housing for 100 families" and so on. Decades later they'll lay forgotten, or in disrepair, or make for interesting background scenery in dystopian cinema. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower It seems that when populations have to have lots of housing, now and fast, they go more with some kind of semi-prefabbed mobile factory approaches and stamp the buildings out on site. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/wn20130918n2a-870x580.jpg https://www.japantimes.co.jp/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/wn20... My guess is that it's a logistics thing. You can more efficiently move 10,000 tons of concrete and rebar to a site packed in sacks and bound in sets, on fewer trucks and in less space, than you can move the same in prefabbed boxes full of mostly empty air. Converting that raw material into the same boxes of air isn't particularly complicated or difficult and can be done at high quality on site anyways, and now you also don't have to pay to have a factory and factory workers.
- tsenkov 8y ago
  Interesting points. I doubt the logistics would make the task of prefabrication not worth doing, though. The analogy in software that first came to mind was server vs. client-side rendering of websites. (I think much of it holds true for physical construction, too.) This topic seem to reappear every few years (2010 -> everything on the server; 2014 -> everything on the client; 2018 -> everything BACK on the server.) It will likely cycle for at least an iteration more (especially if someone finds a way to advance CPU's vertically, once again), but I believe in future, the consensus will settle to: if you can afford it -> do it on the server. (maybe it already has?) In the web world, the "builder" would be paying a larger bill, if they would "prefabricate" what they serve to the world, but customers will be happier to get their product/service faster. On the other side - the builder will be able to get to a larger audience with smaller investment into infrastructure, if much of that computation is off-loaded to the clients. But if we look at the overall cost of those computations - the servers should execute the same amount of computation cheaper (being a dedicated infrastructure for this specific purpose), (generally) it should be in everyone's best interest that computation happens on the server, because overall it costs less for everybody. Which means that all that it comes down to, would be the question - how critical is this decision, in growing the service/product's customer/user-base and does the RoI make sense (i.e. would that company make more profit getting larger portion of the computation along with a larger userbase, or does it only make sense with lesser server bill)? So while it would be cheaper, logistically, for facebook to serve their content in a completely raw format (to be fully rendered on the client), would they've still been able to grow their product to what it is right now, if they never made the switch. (I'm speculating about facebook, but I thought it was a safe bet that they do much of the rendering on the server, without confirming that first elsewhere)
gerardnll 8y ago
That reminds me of the Portal 2 intro scene.
icc97 8y ago
I thought the title was some metaphor for explaining what modern JavaScript developers do when making applications
nottorp 8y ago
That's very interesting. As an eastern european, my idea of prefabricated apartment buildings is something like this: http://s2.ziareromania.ro/?mmid=5d9526e31d488caac http://s2.ziareromania.ro/?mmid=5d9526e31d488caac It's about the worst kind of home you could live in. No one wants it if they can afford better.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Pre-fab is a thing in the USA because our building codes and permitting process are ridiculously complex, and also actually building a building is also complex with lots of labor and risk and so on. I absolutely love pre-fab everything-- long live pre-fab that is customized afterwards.
  - nottorp 8y ago
    Is it also synonymous with low quality (down to 'shitty') housing?
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      Partially but not for any physical reasons, just "social status" reasons. Like, the quality of the construction is really good and these days is very modern and stylish. Maybe in 1985, pre-fab houses were crappy mobile homes that fell apart easily. But these days, no, pre-fab is much nicer than a normal home constructed in the 1960s (most homes in NYC metro are very old). However, if you are at the country club, and you mention that your house is a pre-fab... well... the vieux-riche people will have a very negative opinion of you.

184 points by johnny313 8y ago

sjg007 8y ago

Great idea.. still unlikely to bring down rent prices I assume without zoning changes.

maxk42 8y ago
This is the real factor at play: Bodies are moving to the area faster than new units are being constructed because of zoning laws an other regulations which limit the speed at which new developments can be made. In Los Angeles it takes 2 - 3 years to break ground on a new apartment complex because of all the regulations mandating permits, surveys and reports that must be complied with prior to construction. This ensures only very large players can enter the market and raises the costs to develop new units, keeping prices high.
rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
In some cases, your conclusion is correct while the problem is completely different. I live in a college town, where rent and housing prices obey different laws of economics. Unlike the Bay Area, a brisk 15 minutes drive in any direction will bring you to dirt cheap rural property, but because a huuuuuuge proportion of renters are college students, they tend to live in the city and put the rent on their student loans instead of moving further out and spending time (and money, on a car) commuting. It’s not as if a college student is going to throw in their hands and say “well, I could get an Ivy League degree at the school I was accepted to, or I could get a second-Tier degree somewhere else and pay half the rent.” Case in point, Ithaca’s Collegetown neighborhood used to be a sleepy community of large rental houses, but over the last 20 years it’s been heavily developed into very large, tall apartment blocks, all while Cornell built massive developments of dorms and grad student housing complexes. And rents just keep climbing higher and higher...
- osdiab 8y ago
  I've always been surprised by how expensive Princeton is even though short drives in any direction can be much cheaper. Students seem to be mostly in student housing anyway, and anybody who lives there in any other capacity probably has a car, is it just prestige of being there that pumps up the rent?
  - jseliger 8y ago
    I've always been surprised by how expensive Princeton is even though short drives in any direction can be much cheaper AAA estimates the TCO of a car to be $8,500/yr: https://newsroom.aaa.com/auto/your-driving-costs https://newsroom.aaa.com/auto/your-driving-costs. Even if you're only "a short drive away," you then have to pay for parking on or near campus, which is likely dear: https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/7/19/15993936/high-cost-of-free-parking https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/7/19/15993936/high-cost-of-f.... Finally, commuting sucks: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/there-and-back-again https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/there-and-back... from a social and psychological perspective. People love living around other people who can they chat with and befriend; that's why current zoning laws prohibiting such developments are so pernicious.

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edmundhuber 8y ago

The problem is the price of buildable land, not the buildings on it.

kurthr 8y ago
Exactly... when an uncovered parking space rents for $400-1k/mo it's hard to see how building practices are going to help. Outside of towncenter land costs are lower, but transportation is lacking. Really, it's driven by a combination of growth in high paying tech jobs, restricted geography, and tax/financing structures, as much as, zoning laws or building costs.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  Parking is often one of the most expensive things to build in land constrained areas due to the dead load of cars that parking structures must support, with a standard spot requiring 200sqft itself, add to that 50% for ingress/egress space. Generally parking spots cost a fraction of what that space would go for if it were allowed to be lived in.
siliconunit 8y ago
Absolutely, land estate prices are totally insane in the more gentrified areas. The building itself is nearly irrelevant, see Vancouver rare land plots for measure... or most of the UK. What is in dire need is a fundamental legislation change, where the entirety of the real estate is no longer a market open to speculation, but a fundamental right of the individual and is well proportioned to any income range within a very reasonable 2:1 ratio and this even if it means depricing the already bought properties and cutting corporations out of the building business and of course limiting the amount of houses in possession to a single individual to maybe 2 and eliminate speculators/investors completely.
- ksec 8y ago
  Hong Kong has been breaking records after records in the most unaffordable places on earth to live, ranked by Median Income and Median Price of Housing. Agreed. I think the solution is, Property should not be an investment vehicle. At least it should be taxed and regulated. Although another / the major reason to what we have now is QE, pushing asset prices up.

Joeri 8y ago

I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. All that pouring and sawing and drilling and slathering of raw materials to do one-off designs for houses that are then filled with standardized ikea furniture which fits the custom room shape poorly. Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach. Either we make carpenter and bricklayer robots to do the bespoke work cheaply, or we build homes from standardized parts.

jgibson 8y ago
I'm not so sure. Whats the average lifespan of a house? 50-80 years? To me it makes sense to invest the time to optimize design to make best use of the land area. I guess you could still use somewhat standarized parts though, spend more effort in the design phase.
- kazen44 8y ago
  > I'm not so sure. Whats the average lifespan of a house? 50-80 years? make that a 100 years easily. (atleast in my country). Heck, some houses don't even have architectural drawings because of their age.
  - Jarb 8y ago
    My architecture wife said houses today are designed (in the US) to last at least 50 years. However I seriously have my doubts that a house could make it that long without some major renovations/overhauls along the way, given that they're essentially built as plywood sheets, stapled to wood planks, protected by plastic siding, and covered with a tar sheet roof down here where I live. I wish the developers invested more into the longevity of a house instead of pinching every penny they can.
    - lallysingh 8y ago
      My house is 65 years old, built like this. The wood's kept dry, and the rest of the house is just gypsum, wire, and pipe. As long as the roof and exterior walls hold up, there's not much to it. And the roof you change every dozen years or so.

ohazi 8y ago

I find it hilarious that a CA company is leading the charge in new, efficient, high-quality pre-fab design and construction. These units are going to improve construction quality and lower costs in every state except CA, thanks to our asinine zoning laws.

tomjakubowski 8y ago
What are the state zoning laws? As far as I know, the state constitution leaves zoning as an issue for the cities/counties to handle. Is that your beef or are there laws on the books I'm ignorant of?
- jimrandomh 8y ago
  Yes, the problematic zoning laws exist mainly at the city level. The problem is that the decisions about key areas are being made by people who are incentivized to make housing prices go up (because they own property), which they do by severely restricting construction of dense housing.
  - ajmurmann 8y ago
    Even that seems super short sighed though isn't it? If an area turns into the next Manhattan all land owners win big time. I'd love it if it became economically desirable to build a 100 story skyscraper next to my house and someone went ahead and did it!
    - baybal2 8y ago
      This idea is entirely alien to majority of American high class suburbians. My sorries to people insulted by this statement.
- JohnnyConatus 8y ago
  See this AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_architect_in_la_specializing_in_multifamily/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar...

sithadmin 8y ago

Here's a cool video of ToyotaHome (yes, that Toyota) assembling a modular home in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzpv47o80eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzpv47o80eg Their website: http://www.toyotahome-aichi.co.jp/ http://www.toyotahome-aichi.co.jp/ (JP only, no English)

mdjasper 8y ago

And have been since the 60's. Here an interesting article about one building, modularly constructed for 1968 World's Fair: https://www.mysanantonio.com/150years/major-stories/article/How-a-gamble-changed-the-San-Antonio-skyline-6105562.php https://www.mysanantonio.com/150years/major-stories/article/... And a fascinating documentary https://youtu.be/D7shgCkCfhU?t=573 https://youtu.be/D7shgCkCfhU?t=573. I've skipped to the fun part with people riding their hotel rooms up to the building on a crane... but the whole thing is worth a watch if you've got the time.

kazen44 8y ago
This is just "plattenbau" but done by californians? Like, prefab highrise has existed for more then 60 years, it is not a new thing?
- notahacker 8y ago
  The Plattenbau were mostly composed of system built concrete panels and frames assembled into rooms onsite, with only the small bathrooms being delivered to site as complete units. These appear to be structures composed entirely of stacked full-size room unit completed before site delivery and winched into place; but that technique's been around (especially in the hotel industry) for a good while too, although it's only in the last 20 years people have started to build structures of over 10 storeys that way Nothing's ever truly new. The Romans used prefabricated elements to speed up fort construction in the first century AD.
joezydeco 8y ago
Kind of surprised nobody has mentioned the Contemporary Resort at DisneyWorld: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWdCdP3m9Cs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWdCdP3m9Cs

tomatotomato37 8y ago

I wonder how hard it would be for mobile home manufactors to support the modular stacking of units. It would look redneck as hell, but could probably go up even faster then wooden prefabs that still needs a building finished around it

isaiahg 8y ago
Like the stacks in ready player one?
noir_lord 8y ago
You could build the external structure and a "floor" (steel plate) for each level, then you could swap out trailers if needed, a vertical trailer park. Would need some way to get up and down and toilet/water. Tbh by the time you've done all that you might as well just build a normal modular high rise (that's how the local budget hotel did it, nearly whole thing turned up as a series of containers each prefitted with plumbing and power, then stacked together, hooked up and done, it went up insanely fast).
Blackthorn 8y ago
Isn't that how modular homes already work? My house is a modular. The two floors are pretty much identical under the drywall and flooring; it comes as a one or two floor option and from what I've been told they just slap the same floor on top of the first in the latter case.
pauldprice 8y ago
It's already being done, and doesn't look redneck at all: http://indiedwell.com/ http://indiedwell.com/
paulie_a 8y ago
There are some gorgeous homes made out of shipping containers, the best ones I've seen probably were not cheap but the design is modular and relatively simple.

drawkbox 8y ago

Reminds me of Sears Catalog Home prefabricated homes. [1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home [2] http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm

jpao79 8y ago

It's also gaining popularity in the hotel industry. Inspiring video: http://www.guerdonmodularbuildings.com/modular-now-marriotts-modular-initiative/ http://www.guerdonmodularbuildings.com/modular-now-marriotts... It has many benefits for the construction teams. They can work in a controlled environment, and focus on technical skills versus getting through urban commutes, live in lower cost of living areas (in this case Idaho), all the tools/materials are there, have quality assurance processes, etc. I think the key is its for condos/apartments which will look virtually indistinguishable from a conventional apartment building, then you escape the stigma of mobile trailer home.

jpao79 8y ago
Here's an advocate in the Bay Area: Solving the housing part of homelessness through the construction of modular, micro-housing is described in the above video by Patrick Kennedy, founder of Panoramic Interests https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC0fyFtbaQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC0fyFtbaQk And here's an example in Sunnyvale: http://www.palisadebuilders.com/projects/domain/ http://www.palisadebuilders.com/projects/domain/
- DrScump 8y ago
  And here's an example in Sunnyvale: All 3 are in San Jose, according to the page.
petra 8y ago
Sadly, the job market is pretty simple: when you make a job easier, workers earn less. And it's true for pre-fab, which replaced unionized trades with automation and non-union factory workers, cutting wages drastically. One can imagine the salary difference.
ksec 8y ago
Thanks for the Video Link. It answer a lot of the question I had previously. One problem I thought that was not solved were finishing. It turns out they actually do all the finishing before it is shipped. And because the finishing, construction, are all done indoor and in house, my guess is that with Air Condition they will / could work much faster, higher efficiency, and more importantly, there should be less sloppiness. But then Another question I had as shown in the video, wouldn't all the room be limited by the 40Ft Container Size that fits in the truck? How much of those labour, once moved indoor, could be full automated? Can you built a 50 floor + building / Hotel with these modular tech? How does it work in area where you have special construction requirement like earth quake zone. Are the factory mobilise? i.e, Assuming this take mainstream, would a manufacture of those unit have to ship 100s of containers across the country to have these fitted? Because all the time saved are now bottlenecked by transportation of these blocks. Are we going to ship them overseas? Making the hotel from 2 years to 9 months sounds like a big Win. But in places like China or Japan. No one has 9 month to wait for a construction. China has a 30 floor hotel built from Zero to fully working hotel in less then 3 months. Other then time and quality, are there any actual cost savings?

danschumann 8y ago

What I want is an MVP house (room + bathroom + kitchen), which I can expand ( extra rooms, extra bathrooms, etc ). Normally with construction, when you add stuff, you need to break stuff, but if there could be a modular housing system that would let you expand without destruction, while being competitively priced, I'd do that. In Elon Musk fashion, it would have to be better than a normal house, right? A modular house ( like a mobile home ), which is expandable, which is simultaneously better than a normal house. Maybe for my next startup idea ( since this is a problem I have and I would use ). The end goal would be a transition from a tiny house to a mansion, with each state being as good as a comparable house, and about as cheap. Maybe some panels they could sell back?

jpao79 8y ago
If you have land and looking at somewhat high-end: https://www.bluhomes.com/homes-landing/origin https://www.bluhomes.com/homes-landing/origin These are popular in Tahoe and Napa.
- Jarb 8y ago
  2 Bed, 2 Bath with a combined kitchen and living room, all for the low, low price of $330k? For what is essentially a double-wide with fancy siding and big windows? Haha, nope. If I had land, I could easily build something twice the size or plop down a mobile home for 1/10 of the cost. But that is the true issue with housing these days: finding affordable, available land in a desirable area.
rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
I grew up playing The Sims so my ideal housing situation is essentially the same as your comment. There are companies that build custom manufactured houses, like Carina Construction[1] in Ithaca, NY. I haven’t looked into how modifications like those you mention might work, but the prices are competitive and the modular customization is pretty extensive. All-in-all a good deal, if you don’t mind a house that looks slightly plastic. [1] https://carinaconstruction.com https://carinaconstruction.com
pilingual 8y ago

emptybits 8y ago

Here in Vancouver, we have been building apartments to house homeless using modular construction. http://vancouver.ca/people-programs/temporary-modular-housing.aspx http://vancouver.ca/people-programs/temporary-modular-housin... Start-to-finish I believe the timeframe is about six months and one of the benefits of modular is that they can reconfigure or move these buildings in several years as needs and neighbourhoods change.

maerF0x0 8y ago

China has been able to do this for at least 7 yrs now. 30 Story building in 15 days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY

molszanski 8y ago
Yes, they build 30 story building faster then most single family homes take to do the foundation.
- maerF0x0 8y ago
  My suspicion is that its under the following constraints: 1) Site is cleared, maybe foundation complete (which means excavation done etc) 2) All prefab pieces are done 3) No restrictions of number of people on site (besides physical realities) #3 is no small case. I've often noticed that construction companies in the west have very few people on site. Certainly not 50 people per floor, for example. IMO this is due to wages and contracts. a) wages are too high to risk idle people and b) contracts are insufficiently written to incentivize speed of delivery (probably in favor of cost).
  - yrb 8y ago
    I would say the biggest factor is that it is a very repetitive rectangular box. Overall design and how it is detailed is the dominant factor in time it takes to build things. Do I have lots of joints that have to be perfect or can they be rough cut and covered with trim? Do things assembly easily without having to fiddle due to having the correct tolerances? Cuts and joins are what take the most time. The less cuts and joins you have the cheaper and faster things will be. Also cuts and joins that have to be done to high tolerances take a lot longer.
petra 8y ago
Does anybody know how's the quality of that building ?
- 8y ago

kpil 8y ago

I think that maybe the last thing humanity needs is high density- low quality- apartment blocks, built in ill-planned areas that promotes anonymity and does not promote socially sound communities. Especially when sold at a high margin, because land value is high.

gondo 8y ago

personally, I don't consider those USA wooden houses to be a real house. there is a company in UAE doing this for quite some time from concrete: http://www.gulfprecast.ae/ http://www.gulfprecast.ae/

whatsstolat 8y ago
A real house provides safe shelter for its occupants. Being made of wood don't matter
pests 8y ago
You should tell that to my house.

bpicolo 8y ago

I lived directly across from the Berkeley one shown in the article while they were building it. I wonder how significant the cost benefits were - the time to build didn't seem substantively different (another apartment complex a couple blocks away went up in fairly comparable time it felt like), but I could definitely imagine it being faster

John_KZ 8y ago

Did this article just presented prefabricated housing as an innovative and novel way of building, and a solution to the housing crisis? Am I really reading NYtimes?

Dowwie 8y ago

There already are prefab towers in Brooklyn, some prefabbed in warehouse(s) somewhere in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Here's one of the older stories: https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20131211/navy-yard/worlds-tallest-prefab-building-leads-nycs-boom-modular-housing/ https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20131211/navy-yard/worlds-t... I haven't been closely following the Atlantic Yards project, but to my knowledge it's had quite a few setbacks.

walrus01 8y ago

Too much particleboard, chipboard, oriented strand board, MDF board and cheap shit that is used as an alternative to real plywood. I've seen what happens to those particleboard nightmares when construction is temporarily paused in a wet climate, for unforeseen reasons, and it gets rained on before the roof and cladding are on.

reeddavid 8y ago

Quality prefabricated homes and apartments are a great idea. There's a negative association with prefabricated homes, but I've seen a lot of newer companies that seem to be focusing on quality and efficiency, often targeting the higher end of the market. And lots of new homes built on-site are of very poor quality these days: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/where-we-live/wp/2017/05/23/new-home-build-quality-standards-are-slipping-and-how-you-can-protect-yourself https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/where-we-live/wp/2017/05... This approach doesn't seem like a solution to affordable housing, even though many of these companies use that concept in their marketing. In the least affordable housing markets with worsening trends, including Seattle and San Francisco, construction cost is a tiny fraction of the problem. Efficient, prefabricated housing isn't going to make housing meaningfully more affordable in places where the majority of the cost of a dwelling is its land.

pxeboot 8y ago
The article claims a per unit cost of almost $800k in SF. Cheaper, prefabricated units could make a significant difference here.
- davmre 8y ago
  That per-unit development cost is almost certainly including the cost of acquiring the land. Labor in SF is expensive, but not that expensive.
  - epistasis 8y ago
    Labor is hugely under supplied in SF. I hear it's really hard to get on a contractor's docket these days without a really big project.
Eridrus 8y ago
> This approach doesn't seem like a solution to affordable housing, even though many of these companies use that concept in their marketing. It's not a complete solution, but construction costs provide a floor on the price of new housing. Even if we solve all the other issues around zoning, impact fees (https://letsgola.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/impact-fees-are-bad-taxes-are-good/ https://letsgola.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/impact-fees-are-ba...), approval times, NIMBYs, etc, the price of dense, new housing is going to provide a floor on how much it costs to house people. It's also super important for construction to be cheap for it to make sense to build denser housing where moderately dense housing exists, because in those cases the value of the building over the cost of land is significant, e.g. I live in a 4 story building, but I live right on top of a subway station where we should probably have far more density, but my landlord is deriving value from all the occupants, but not the land. So, it's not going to solve the housing issue by itself, but like the Ben Horowitz saying, there are no silver bullets, only lead bullets. And making construction costs cheaper is one of them.

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jmkb 8y ago

The New York City Office of Emergency Management has a "pre-fab brownstone" demo assembled in downtown Brooklyn. They're hoping to be able to relocate entire neighborhoods when another event like Sandy hits. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6996729,-73.9898138,3a,65.6y,88.6h,94.55t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s0VN2kZuJCN_tD-9RIK0_5A!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D0VN2kZuJCN_tD-9RIK0_5A%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D6.3159122%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6996729,-73.9898138,3a,65.6y...

bane 8y ago

I think it's very interesting how prefab construction seems to pop up from time to time in the media. I grew up in a prefab house, trucked to the property in two halves and bolted together on a poured concrete foundation -- it's incredibly common. Apartment blocks however, they seem to be locked in a perpetual demonstrator state. One, maybe two prefab buildings will go up, and then no more, eliminating the point of the effort. All kinds of stats will be provided, "built in 30 days", "providing housing for 100 families" and so on. Decades later they'll lay forgotten, or in disrepair, or make for interesting background scenery in dystopian cinema. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower It seems that when populations have to have lots of housing, now and fast, they go more with some kind of semi-prefabbed mobile factory approaches and stamp the buildings out on site. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/wn20130918n2a-870x580.jpg https://www.japantimes.co.jp/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/wn20... My guess is that it's a logistics thing. You can more efficiently move 10,000 tons of concrete and rebar to a site packed in sacks and bound in sets, on fewer trucks and in less space, than you can move the same in prefabbed boxes full of mostly empty air. Converting that raw material into the same boxes of air isn't particularly complicated or difficult and can be done at high quality on site anyways, and now you also don't have to pay to have a factory and factory workers.

tsenkov 8y ago
Interesting points. I doubt the logistics would make the task of prefabrication not worth doing, though. The analogy in software that first came to mind was server vs. client-side rendering of websites. (I think much of it holds true for physical construction, too.) This topic seem to reappear every few years (2010 -> everything on the server; 2014 -> everything on the client; 2018 -> everything BACK on the server.) It will likely cycle for at least an iteration more (especially if someone finds a way to advance CPU's vertically, once again), but I believe in future, the consensus will settle to: if you can afford it -> do it on the server. (maybe it already has?) In the web world, the "builder" would be paying a larger bill, if they would "prefabricate" what they serve to the world, but customers will be happier to get their product/service faster. On the other side - the builder will be able to get to a larger audience with smaller investment into infrastructure, if much of that computation is off-loaded to the clients. But if we look at the overall cost of those computations - the servers should execute the same amount of computation cheaper (being a dedicated infrastructure for this specific purpose), (generally) it should be in everyone's best interest that computation happens on the server, because overall it costs less for everybody. Which means that all that it comes down to, would be the question - how critical is this decision, in growing the service/product's customer/user-base and does the RoI make sense (i.e. would that company make more profit getting larger portion of the computation along with a larger userbase, or does it only make sense with lesser server bill)? So while it would be cheaper, logistically, for facebook to serve their content in a completely raw format (to be fully rendered on the client), would they've still been able to grow their product to what it is right now, if they never made the switch. (I'm speculating about facebook, but I thought it was a safe bet that they do much of the rendering on the server, without confirming that first elsewhere)

gerardnll 8y ago

That reminds me of the Portal 2 intro scene.

icc97 8y ago

I thought the title was some metaphor for explaining what modern JavaScript developers do when making applications

nottorp 8y ago

That's very interesting. As an eastern european, my idea of prefabricated apartment buildings is something like this: http://s2.ziareromania.ro/?mmid=5d9526e31d488caac http://s2.ziareromania.ro/?mmid=5d9526e31d488caac It's about the worst kind of home you could live in. No one wants it if they can afford better.

anoncoward111 8y ago
Pre-fab is a thing in the USA because our building codes and permitting process are ridiculously complex, and also actually building a building is also complex with lots of labor and risk and so on. I absolutely love pre-fab everything-- long live pre-fab that is customized afterwards.
- nottorp 8y ago
  Is it also synonymous with low quality (down to 'shitty') housing?
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    Partially but not for any physical reasons, just "social status" reasons. Like, the quality of the construction is really good and these days is very modern and stylish. Maybe in 1985, pre-fab houses were crappy mobile homes that fell apart easily. But these days, no, pre-fab is much nicer than a normal home constructed in the 1960s (most homes in NYC metro are very old). However, if you are at the country club, and you mention that your house is a pre-fab... well... the vieux-riche people will have a very negative opinion of you.