14 ms·

A housing industry of endless one-offs is holding our society back

74 points by jseliger 6y ago

HarryHirsch 6y ago
Endless one-offs? Have they ever walked through a recent development by any of the well-known residential construction companies? It's all three or four of the same! Also, have they ever walked through any European residential development of 50 years ago? People used to contract an architect for single-family dwellings then, and they would get something that was acceptable and fit their needs. What do they want to sell the people here?
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  You're concentrating on the output (what the building looks like and what people living in them think), but the actual opportunity is on the input side: what components go into those buildings, and the construction company margin achievable if they can be more standardized and mass-produced. The big boys are well aware of the potential though, and are already in on the act: https://www.lendleasepodium.com/construction-and-development/ https://www.lendleasepodium.com/construction-and-development...
  - nradov 6y ago
    The components are already standardized. You can buy almost everything you need to build a regular house in a few aisles at Home Depot.
    - winkeltripel 6y ago
      Well, those components are too small. I'd probably like to go full-sears and just have to attach the front and back half of my house together on a foundation.
      - nradov 6y ago
        You can already buy a double wide mobile home and attach the halves together if that's what you want.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
        >Well, those components are too small. When you're done handwaving, since you've hit the nail on the head (so to speak), perhaps you can expand on you think they are too small and what the optimum size really is.
  - analog31 6y ago
    Indeed, I've been watching an apartment building go up, while on my daily walk. The whole thing is coming in prefab modules on trucks and being assembled on site.
- mdgrech23 6y ago
  I do think there is something to be said here about variances in city, state and federal ordinances and code. Ideally there would be only 1 federal code to which to build to but due to regional differences I think 1 code for any given region would suffice. I'll add that getting city permits and what not is also a nightmare and it really shouldn't be. If there was a well equipped federal agency to do this through we'd all be better off.
  - nradov 6y ago
    Contractors are licensed at the state level. Most states already adopt model building codes recommended by national organizations. There is generally little variation in building codes between local governments within each state. The last thing we need is more federal government overreach. Nothing in the Constitutional gives the federal government the authority to control building permits.
    - bumby 6y ago
      I'm not saying I necessarily agree, but I think there's at least some argument that building codes/permits may fall under the general welfare clause of the Constitution
  - toast0 6y ago
    Regional codes make sense. Florida houses don't need to be ready for earthquakes, California houses don't need to be ready for Cat 5 Hurricanes (although more cat 5 or 6 in the walls would be nice). Federal permitting sounds like a nightmare too. If you need a variance, it would take an act of congress.
  - dragonsky67 6y ago
    I would expect that a lot of the variations in the code across different areas would be related to climate and geographical differences. Some areas require cyclone/huricane rating, others need to deal with earthquakes...
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  You'd be surprised by how many differences there are in new houses (or other dwellings) that were built off of the same blueprints. These are usually small things but if you live in one of the homes, it is noticeable. I lived in a midrise condo and was the first person to move into the building so I had pretty run of the entire building for a few weeks. All of the units in any given stack of units were meant to be identical but they weren't. Sometimes a cabinet over where the fridge was to go would be missing or maybe the protective lens over the light fixture in the shower ceiling. Walls that met at a non 90 degree angle sometimes had a sharp corner, other times a smooth one, and some other times a beveled corner. Most of these difference were too small to have been customizations. They were from different work crews interpreting things differently. They were from the materials on hand being slightly different between days when the interior of different units were worked on. In my last house the neighbor across the street had the same floor plan as us but once again, lots of minor difference of little consequence but noticeable. Most were obviously from the differences in materials on site and the quirks of individual workers.
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    I absolutely agree - I call this field-not-yet-factory. In a factory those sort of differences will be autoamted away In the "field" they are left to the skill, discretion, whatever of individual workforce. Frankly this costs the construction industry a fortune - work done substandard has to then be corrected later at great expense, so the driving goal will be towards a "robot construction worker" - but getting there you can imagine is problematic. Pre-fab buildings have existed for a century by now, and they do work. However, they have a negative market reaction in most locales, and the cost saving again is not huge. so here we are.
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  > What do they want to sell the people here? Know all of those small tract homes built during the 50s, 60s, and 70s that few want to live in now? That's a good approximation of what I think they're selling. The postwar housing was designed to handle the baby boom. It was cheap to build due to uniformity and it largely succeeded at its purpose. We had a huge middle class as a result. You can have speed, volume, or quality, just pick two. In the postwar period we picked speed and volume. It wasn't a bad choice given the circumstances.
gabrielsroka 6y ago
Bucky Fuller was talking about this more than 4 decades ago.
- alanbernstein 6y ago
  Sears solved this problem more than 100 years ago: http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm. I guess it just didn't catch on.
  - thatcat 6y ago
    Yea I think it did briefly bc I’ve seen several sears homes around my town and they’re pretty stylish compared to more recent homes. I wonder what happened
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    Really really interesting. The Model 147 is 900sqft and cost $872 for materials, estimated at $1,530 with labor.[0] Adjusting for inflation from 1914 to 2020, that is about $22,000 for materials and 40K with labor. Looking at 1913 US national labor statistics, the average baker in 1913 San Francisco worked 54 hrs/wk and made $0.46 per hour for an annual wage of $1,291[1] (or 33K in 2020 dollars) The median baker in 2020 California makes 36.5K/yr [2]. The cost of new housing construction is $220/sqft[3], or 200K for the same size house. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1913_0147.jpg http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1913_014... https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/union-scale-wages-hours-labor-3912/union-scale-wages-hours-labor-may-15-1913-476866?start_page=79 https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/union-scale-wages-hours-... https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/Occupations/occupation-profile.aspx?keyword=Bakers&onetcode=51301100&location=94122 https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/Occupations/oc... http://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/uploads/Hard_Construction_Costs_March_2020.pdf http://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/uploads/Hard_Construction_C...
- carapace 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house
engineer_22 6y ago
Yea... What we need is communist style housing blocks. Standardized, modular, monotonous.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  It's not that bad when you employ a competent architect. Much of Lisbon was built under Salazar in the 1960s, it doesn't look half bad and 50 years later it's holding up extremely well.
  - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    > Much of Lisbon was built under Salazar in the 1960s, it doesn't look half bad and 50 years later it's holding up extremely well. Lisbon has construction spanning from Roman times all the way to today. Most of the downtown was rebuilt after an earthquake in the 18th century. Besides public buildings, there were a few residencial neighbourhoods and social housing built by Salazar's regime, implying that 'much of Lisbon' is his legacy is factually wrong. Moreover the "Estado Novo" architectural style promoted by the fascist regime was meant to bring back themes from traditional portuguese construction, with a lot of masonry embellishments. This is the opposite of the monotone pragmatism of the soviet blocks.
    - HarryHirsch 6y ago
      Lisbon almost doubled between 1950 and 1975. The neighbourhoods from the Zoo going east are all from that era, it's a lot of the city.
      - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
        Sure the both Lisbon and Porto grew and Salazar enforced a de facto architectural style, but the regime only built public buildings and some social housing. Perhaps this is an English-as-a-foreign-language thing but to me "under Salazar" implies that the regime ordered, and payed for, most of the construction in that era which is not true.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
blhack 6y ago
Holding our society back from what?
- peterwwillis 6y ago
  Progress. It's hard to build a society when the people in it don't have anywhere to sleep, or keep their consumer products.
  - refurb 6y ago
    That’s clearly not happening in the US. Housing prices are high because so many people want to live in highly desirable areas with high paying jobs. There are plenty of less desirable places with cheap housing and ok paying jobs.
    - username90 6y ago
      Wouldn't it be better if we had more cheap dense housing near high paying jobs? Seems like it would make us progress faster, no?
      - CincinnatiMan 6y ago
        What if the high paying jobs spread out to less-dense places? Then people could get both things they want: a good job and not being on top of each other.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      "so many people" ... no, just enough over the numbers for what's actually available to drive prices up. Alternatively, just enough with just enough money (in hand, or leverageable) to drive prices up. The whole world is not rushing to places in the US with insanely high property prices. Just enough people to keep those prices up (and maybe even still rising).
    - peterwwillis 6y ago
      Please google "affordable housing crisis united states". The first 40 or so stories paint a decent enough picture so I won't link them here. > Housing prices are high because so many people want to live in highly desirable areas with high paying jobs. Young middle class white people can't find a house in San Francisco, sure, but that's not the major problem. Most of the housing problems are in places that are not desireable, and there are a myriad of different causes. > There are plenty of less desirable places with cheap housing and ok paying jobs. Not even remotely enough to fulfill all the low income housing needs in the US. Even if there were, people wouldn't be able to go there anyway, because they don't have disposable income, and there's no "let me uproot your life with $20,000 you don't have to pay back" fairies flying around. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing_by_country#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing_by_country#...
jpm_sd 6y ago
This looks like complete BS https://blokable.com/solution/ https://blokable.com/solution/ The construction of hotels and apartment buildings is already very well understood and highly modularized. Nobody needs this pie in the sky solution.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Far and away the biggest cost for housing in the West is land. It's almost 2/3rds now. We could all live in pre-fab boxes and barely shave 10% off. See Josh Ryan Collins https://youtu.be/RX-AzKgUEWk https://youtu.be/RX-AzKgUEWk https://www.ft.com/content/ffa66898-fe7b-11e6-96f8-3700c5664d30 https://www.ft.com/content/ffa66898-fe7b-11e6-96f8-3700c5664... My tldr on all this - since 1970 humanity has doubled in size - something comparabke only a couple of times in history (17C, 19C etc). A d the massive growth economically had wide ranging effects. One big one is there is a change in governmental models (autocracy to parliament, parliament to democracy) The most obvious other effect is that land prices go up as cities grow. And 80%+ of increase in house prices is increase in underlying land. This is of course massively unequal and negatively affects incentives for business and production. So to change society direction create a long term (land) wealth tax (say 75 basis points a year) and plough that into education, entrepreneurship support and industrial banks greeen energy subsidies etc.
- kiba 6y ago
  Land Wealth Tax? Don't you mean Land Value Tax? A LVT taxes the land underneath while not taxing the building on top of it. This is opposed to our current situation in which people are deincentivized from building because it'll increase taxes.
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    Yes that's right - but the point remains :-) I think taking 150 years to squeeze the "value" out via taxes feels about right - it should not be a huge rush but should be something that is inevitable and at the generational level
    - zepto 6y ago
      The problem with that is that it incentivizes work, which is the primary source of carbon emissions and global warming.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  The bigger cost is land, yes, but let's not become confused into thinking high land prices are due to natural scarcity. Land is expensive due to artificial scarcity created wholly by regulation. Usually propped up by the older generations that already have their pieces of land. Sure, dense urban areas have some scarcity, though almost all could build up. But as I look around me in this southern california suburb, surrounded by 2,500 sq foot homes on 1/4 acre built 25 years ago that go for $800k, I can see endless empty land in all directions. But you can't get a permit to build on any of it, because any requests to permit it are met with an army of residents near retirement that have lived at the edge of their means their entire life and so their only retirement plan is to sell their overpriced home and move to Texas.
zwieback 6y ago
As far as I can tell everything is pretty much standardized these days, not sure what inefficiencies these guys imagine. I live in a college town with a ongoing huge boom in student housing and I can say for sure that the process is extremely efficient. Want something personalized and craft-built? That's where you're going to spend some cash.
dirtyid 6y ago
Bring back levittown I guess. Customization/design premium is insubstantial compared to land price most of the time. That said I can see snowflake designs with no consideration for functionally leading to excessive environmental costs. Ideally the default typology should be an extremely efficient and economical net-zero rectangle oriented for maximum solar gain. People should recognize how much additional "extravagance" goes on in your typical construction, and maybe reel back a little. There should definitely be a mcmansion extra roof / unnecessary geometry tax like old window taxes.
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  Levittown is interesting because all of the houses were cookie cutter copies of each other when built but if you go look at it now, the houses vary a great deal. Some of the difference are cosmetic, such as different paint colors. But there are bigger differences in who added on a large front porch, a great room, extra bedrooms, or expanded out the kitchen to double the space. Add in differences in landscaping and it's not quite the poster child for bland tract housing that it once was.
hirundo 6y ago
Apparently "reimagining housing" means inventing the mobile home. How innovative. I live in a double wide, and wish it was many times cheaper than a site built house but sadly not. The car analogy doesn't fit. It was built in a factory and is cheaper but has definite limitations. It sure isn't a slam dunk replacement for one-offs.
peterwwillis 6y ago
How they're built has nothing to do with the immense complexity of building them, it has to do with the land. Everything about a house is tied to the land it sits on. The regulations, the building codes, the architecture, its particular uses, etc. None of that's going to get walked back because local communities won't let it. I think the best this company can do is to become a sort of SquareSpace for housing. But we've had pre-engineered houses before (remember the Sears Catalog homes?). And we have commoditized housing now, they're just called trailers. You could totally scale-up houses by stacking trailers (that's roughly how wooden homes are built today) but either nobody wants it, or nobody's been able to scale it and make it appealing/significantly less costly. But I wish them good luck! The sooner we can get city councils to start allowing "unusual" home zoning, the better. I want my Tiny House permit, god damnit.
flerchin 6y ago
Wrong premise, wrong conclusion. Land costs are the majority, not construction costs.
- bumby 6y ago
  I know HN skews toward California but surely this doesn’t generalize across all geographic areas
  - notacoward 6y ago
    Not all, perhaps, but more than you might think. If you want to see for yourself, go on Zillow and check out prices for empty lots vs. nearby lots with houses on them in different areas. When I just did that, the price ratio seemed remarkably stable anywhere near even low-demand cities. You have to get pretty far out in the sticks before it falls apart, and almost by definition that's a low percentage of homes.
    - bumby 6y ago
      So I’ve been doing a lot of this recently because I was applying for jobs across different areas of the country. It seemed to me that as long as you stay away from the coasts or major cities, land can be had for 20%-30% of the built value. Just anecdotal of course
swiley 6y ago
High rises, not mobile homes, are what economies of scale look like for housing.
brudgers 6y ago
Each piece of land is a one-off. Its non-fungibility makes it real property. Buildings are built upon foundations. Each foundation is site built. Each site must be prepared first. Building is always one off because of this. It’s why a car parked on a plot of land is not a building. Even less of a building than a tent.
- bumby 6y ago
  >Its non-fungibility makes it real property I think the alternative theory is the term was Latin real as in royal. The idea being the land is still owned by nobility. The extension now being you don’t ever fully “own” your land. If you disagree, stop paying taxes and see what happens
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    stop paying taxes and see what happens Yes, like that guy in Tennessee who didn't pay the firemen and complained that they wouldn't show up when his house was on fire. If you want civilization, pay your share. (Corollary: be extremely wary of lowtax types and their vision of society!)
  - brudgers 6y ago
    It comes from the Latin res. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_property#Historical_background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_property#Historical_backg...
    - bumby 6y ago
      That’s why I said the alternate theory. That alternate theory traces the etymology to the word rex (I.e. “king”)
    - bumby 6y ago
      From your link: "Some people have claimed that the word 'real' in this sense is descended (like French 'royal' and Spanish 'real') from the Latin word for 'king'. In the feudal system (which has left many traces in the common law) the king was the owner of all land, and everyone who occupied land paid him rent directly or indirectly (through lords who in turn paid the king), in cash, goods, or services (including military service). Property tax, paid to the state, can be seen as a relic of that system, as too is the term fee simple. Some say this derivation is a misconception; but that is countered by evidence that the earliest meaning of 'real' in English included "Of, relating to, or characteristic of a monarch, royalty, or (by extension) the nobility, esp. with regard to power, wealth, or dignity; (also) befitting a monarch."
Maarten88 6y ago
> Housing development is antiquated and the only group benefitting is the real estate development and building industry, who in fact have every incentive to restrict the supply. There is another group benefitting from high building development costs: all current owners of real estate. If new housing would become cheaper, existing property would also loose value. And there is enormous amount of money in existing real estate. Many business and individuals would be loosing a lot of money if society/politics would really create cheaper housing, i.e. by enacting policies that increase density, lower cost of land, or limit rents. I think the fundamental force of existing valuations working against lower prices is much harder to overcome than high construction costs.
- mason55 6y ago
  It’s one of the reasons that no one can stay on top forever. Neither companies nor countries. Too many entrenched interests get too much power and then it’s over. Instead of talking past each other (“millennials can’t afford houses!” Vs “boomers were counting on their house for retirement”) we should focus on long term planning with gradual changes that people can plan for. Unfortunately in a huge democracy it’s very hard to stick to any long term plan like that.
saltedonion 6y ago
Interestingly, the soviets were on a mission to provide housing for every person in the country. To be successful, they knew that bringing down cost will be key. This then led to entire cities and provinces to only build 1 or 2 floor plans. https://youtu.be/JGVBv7svKLo https://youtu.be/JGVBv7svKLo I don’t think the west is ready for this level of equality. Lol
mannykannot 6y ago
Construction is a big employer, and the way it is done now is one of the ways that wealth diffuses into society as a whole. A decade ago, I thought of efficiency as an unalloyed good, but these days I recognize how destabilizing its relentless persuit can be.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Indeed, antifragility and efficiency are often completely at odds.
- war1025 6y ago
  > I thought of efficiency as an unalloyed good This sort of efficiency is efficient in the way an uninsulated wall is efficient at moving heat from inside to outside in the winter. I think most people could agree that inefficient heat transfer is good in the case of houses in the winter. Similarly, ineffeciencies can be very good for markets to help them achieve a critical mass and viability.
projektfu 6y ago
I remember an episode of an early 90s “future show”, Beyond 2000, I think, talking about building custom homes in Japan from pre-fab modular building blocks containing all the electrical, plumbing and mechanical built in. What’s new is new again?
- bilegeek 6y ago
  Heck, you had the same hullabaloo about pre-fabs in the 40's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bf6qnM2pXY&t=2m26s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bf6qnM2pXY&t=2m26s
failuser 6y ago
People with money can buy houses, is there much interest in serving the rest of the population? There is already way more empty houses than homeless, so the problem is not is not having enough housing. No force strong enough to solve housing crisis is sees housing situation as a crisis, having affordable housing — that would be a threat.
paxys 6y ago
This is more of a sales pitch for their company than anything else, and is mostly misleading or just plain wrong. Talking about the housing crisis, the cost of the physical building is wayyy down in the list of concerns behind land value, zoning, permits and lots more.
hinkley 6y ago
I remember watching a video recently where someone was arguing for us to go back to timber and beam construction because it was substantially simpler than the stick-constructions we are doing now. Basically a lot of people agree that stick construction is a shit show, but nobody agrees how to fix it. It always has amazed me how hard it is to run an ethernet cable in a finished house, let alone a water line or a drain. And waterproofing a bathroom the way we assemble them is essentially a joke. Which puts me in a third category of people wanting something different.
- blcArmadillo 6y ago
  Wouldn't a timber and beam house still require walls with studs?
  - telchar 6y ago
    They need to be made out of something unless you like a very open plan. In the past they might have been made from wattle and daub, or you could use studs, paper, whatever you want since they're not structural.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I’m trying to remember. I believe his premise was that post and beam are the load bearing elements. The skin can be its own structure, instead of being built into the outside of the wall, and therefore you aren’t puncturing it every eighteen inches. And your insulation isn’t similarly transited by a conductor. He was calling for preformed exterior segments you bolt together.
- timw4mail 6y ago
  It's not like a finished area was so much easier to modify in the past. Plaster and lathe walls tend to have a much smaller cavity than drywall, in the same cross-section. Plaster keys take up a good amount of the space. What I find interesting is how there used to be pre-measured kits for constructing houses, so in that respect we've gone backwards.
mjh2539 6y ago
The commoditization of housing. HAHAHAHAHAHA
writimov 6y ago
The solution is to build dense housing (min. 20 story towers) with mixed commercial in the lower levels on cheap land (<1/100th the cost of city land) within 50 miles of cities and then run Boring Company tunnels to your new town at a cost of $1mil/mile. Commute time of 10-25mins. Total cost is roughly $1.8bil for a town of 30,000. Each of the condos goes for $150k. That's 12% of the price of a condo in San Francisco. Also could build down underground 10-15 stories. Unsolved problem is low-cost infrastructure (water, sewage, power). Whatever couldn't be built on site could be piped in through through additional tunnels. This would completely change housing prices in cities. If SF has around 700k residents and say another 700k people who want to live here or commute in each week, it would take 23 of these towns to accommodate demand: $46bil investment that would probably payout 25% within 5 years of construction start with all units sold, commercial leasing, naming rights, etc. (Large assumption is people would want to live in these towns). San Francisco housing prices would probably drop at least 25% in 5 years. Just like Matatu's of Kenya (http://infinitedictionary.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Matatu-4.jpg http://infinitedictionary.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...) each town would be known for its thing: TownA is known for its Opera House, TownB is known for its Basketball Team, TownC is known for its amazing Foodie Scene, etc. A successful 'Town' model could even be franchised like Burger King, repeated all over the USA or World within 50 miles of existing major cities. If you were the owner of a successful franchise, and optimized your margins (solving the electricity problem with solar panels or a cheap nuclear micro reactor), you could have 200% returns on each $1.5bil project. Even a couple of towns completing each year could be worth billions. And they would probably be less complicated to build than the average Tesla Terafactory, once the first few had been built.
- thatfrenchguy 6y ago
  You’re not going to build tunnels under the bay for 1m$ a mile with a train on it.
  - jackcosgrove 6y ago
    While I think the gp post is a bit fanciful, edge cities are a great way to handle the high land costs associated with density.
jackcosgrove 6y ago
Paying more for unique houses could be a rational strategy. Unique houses have higher resale value compared to tract houses because there is more market differentiation. Try selling a condo. It's hard to ask more if two or three other identical condos in the building are also for sale. Then try to sell a single family house in a neighborhood with diverse housing. You can charge more because you might find the buyer who really loves whatever is particular about the house. So if you pay more and sell for more it's all a wash. Unless of course the house price is so high that a down payment is unattainable. I would call that a market failure in most cases (Manhattan is an exception). Such a failure is probably symptomatic of political intervention in the market, usually in the form of restrictive zoning and development practices. By all means we should try to standardize and automate home construction. But uniqueness has value to many.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
One comment buried in this thread manages to note what I think is the key error here. The article claims that the parts for building are not sufficently standardized. That's certainly a claim to make, but you can't just accept that as-is. The parts for building almost housing stock in a given country are almost completely standardized (they may vary from country to country, of course). What the authors mean, but do not say, is really "the standardization has occured only at the smallest scales". Studs, joists, shingles, plumbing, electrical, block work, window and door sizes, plumbing connectivity, and so much more are all more or less completely standardized. There are options to break with the standards and get (for example) a one-off doorway sizing. What the authors want, but do not say, are modular components of larger scale: entire walls, or entire rooms, or entire buildings that one can put together. They might be right to want this, or they might be wrong. If software was any useful evidence, they're probably wrong. But this is not at the same thing as saying "things are not standardized and should be". The small scale components of buildings are extremely standardized in most industrial nations of the world.
- Accujack 6y ago
  Yep, probably wrong. There's a truism in architecture: "Buildings are built for people." Not to be works of art or cultural enhancements, but to serve a need. I think it applies here, too. A home is one of the most personal possessions anyone can own. Although you can make arguments all day long about efficiencies in design and mass production, I think just about everyone in the world who owns a home would much rather have one designed to fit them and their purpose, not one made from large scale standard parts. I say this as someone who has a number of unusual things desired in a home, and who has had a lot of difficulty deviating from "standards" for home use. The efficiency benefit of standardization is also a standardized jail for people who want to do something different. There's a place in the market for cookie cutter homes if costs must be reduced to minimum or construction time must be minimized, but in pretty much every other instance, people want the opposite of what this company is selling.
darod 6y ago
Everyone is promoting adding more density but I see no posts discussing quality of life with those changes. Adding a 20 story building to a neighborhood of historically single family homes impacts infrastructure, traffic, noise, etc. Adding to the fact that there are people that don't want to live in attached homes, apartments, etc.
encoderer 6y ago
So this is like Bootstrap, for buildings. Neat. Has its place. Hope it's not my neighborhood.
intrasight 6y ago
I took a tour of Pompeii a couple years ago. Two thing that struck me (beside just amazing) was a) housing hasn't changed all that much in 2000 years, and b) modular housing (of course made of stone). Modular housing has been a thing for a very long time. So has extreme opulence.
oblib 6y ago
I think the notion that "one offs" increase cost is really not nearly as big of an added cost as the article makes it out to be. I've worked on building homes and monitored the process quite a few times and while it might look chaotic to someone who doesn't build stuff the guys who do it for a living are very efficient. And the notion that homes should be mass produced from a template sounds awful to me. I think where we've blown it with home design really began in the `80s with the boom of "McMansions". They're expensive to maintain and very inefficient. In the past decade I've seen some very cool smaller home designs (as well as "tiny" homes) so, personally, I think we're doing a lot better now than we were 20-40 years ago.
noelsusman 6y ago
It's honestly refreshing to see such a clear case of Silicon Valley hubris out in the wild again. These had started to die down recently. Neither founder has any experience in real estate or construction. Their entire premise seems rest on pretending that manufactured housing doesn't already exist. I go to their "Our Solution" page and find this at the top: >Blokable creates prosperity and equity in communities by disintermediating the traditional development process and providing a vertically integrated solution to create housing at scale. Our solution is a new paradigm in development, enabled by a new building system and technology. If I didn't know any better I would think this company was generated by GPT-3.
- tolbish 6y ago
  Supporting underserved communities through vertical integration is a line straight out of Silicon Valley.
- say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
  Look a little deeper. They're creating smart multifamily rentals at market rates but including a few affordable units in each building. The affordable units are not an act of altruism but a regulatory requirement. You can't bring new multifamily to market without adding affordable units as well.
deleted 6y ago
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Kosirich 6y ago
This article seems so strange for me, as my experience is that out-of-the-catalogue houses are the first choice now (at least in EU). This is perhaps true here in Denmark, where IMO 90% of houses are catalogue houses that have been customized. That means that a variety of houses on offer from same supplier share same prefabricated walls, same type of insulation ect. Same is true for Croatia, where people usually built hollow brick rohbau (walls+roof) first according to a custom design and then settle in on everything else. Considering the difference in price between roughly the same house in Denmark in Croatia, I would say that manual labour is still a big cost driver, so most of cost reduction will either come from even more modularity (deliver an entire bathroom) or automatization.
danielEM 6y ago
What bothers me is that every year we get new, lighter, cheaper, faster, building materials, every year we improve construction processes, every year we're building more and more floors in same period of time and yet still appartments and houses are getting more and more expensive despite of all these improvement's. Can someone pls explain me how's that possible? Am I overestimating improvements?
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
Blokable is promoting itself as providing affordable housing but their buildings largely consist of market rate housing units and a percentage of affordable housing units that are compulsory -- not an act of altruism. Large cities already have requirements, or are actively developing requirements, for developing affordable housing along with market rate housing. Market rate tenants subsidize affordable housing tenants. Cities use lottery systems for the affordable housing units to prevent political insider housing opportunities, but those lottery systems aren't being audited by trusted third parties. :) Putting the PR spin aside, the company is doing phenomenally well with execution and development across many silos. I respect the hard work.

74 points by jseliger 6y ago

Endless one-offs? Have they ever walked through a recent development by any of the well-known residential construction companies? It's all three or four of the same! Also, have they ever walked through any European residential development of 50 years ago? People used to contract an architect for single-family dwellings then, and they would get something that was acceptable and fit their needs. What do they want to sell the people here?

howlgarnish 6y ago
You're concentrating on the output (what the building looks like and what people living in them think), but the actual opportunity is on the input side: what components go into those buildings, and the construction company margin achievable if they can be more standardized and mass-produced. The big boys are well aware of the potential though, and are already in on the act: https://www.lendleasepodium.com/construction-and-development/ https://www.lendleasepodium.com/construction-and-development...
- nradov 6y ago
  The components are already standardized. You can buy almost everything you need to build a regular house in a few aisles at Home Depot.
  - winkeltripel 6y ago
    Well, those components are too small. I'd probably like to go full-sears and just have to attach the front and back half of my house together on a foundation.
    - nradov 6y ago
      You can already buy a double wide mobile home and attach the halves together if that's what you want.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      >Well, those components are too small. When you're done handwaving, since you've hit the nail on the head (so to speak), perhaps you can expand on you think they are too small and what the optimum size really is.
- analog31 6y ago
  Indeed, I've been watching an apartment building go up, while on my daily walk. The whole thing is coming in prefab modules on trucks and being assembled on site.
mdgrech23 6y ago
I do think there is something to be said here about variances in city, state and federal ordinances and code. Ideally there would be only 1 federal code to which to build to but due to regional differences I think 1 code for any given region would suffice. I'll add that getting city permits and what not is also a nightmare and it really shouldn't be. If there was a well equipped federal agency to do this through we'd all be better off.
- nradov 6y ago
  Contractors are licensed at the state level. Most states already adopt model building codes recommended by national organizations. There is generally little variation in building codes between local governments within each state. The last thing we need is more federal government overreach. Nothing in the Constitutional gives the federal government the authority to control building permits.
  - bumby 6y ago
    I'm not saying I necessarily agree, but I think there's at least some argument that building codes/permits may fall under the general welfare clause of the Constitution
- toast0 6y ago
  Regional codes make sense. Florida houses don't need to be ready for earthquakes, California houses don't need to be ready for Cat 5 Hurricanes (although more cat 5 or 6 in the walls would be nice). Federal permitting sounds like a nightmare too. If you need a variance, it would take an act of congress.
- dragonsky67 6y ago
  I would expect that a lot of the variations in the code across different areas would be related to climate and geographical differences. Some areas require cyclone/huricane rating, others need to deal with earthquakes...
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
You'd be surprised by how many differences there are in new houses (or other dwellings) that were built off of the same blueprints. These are usually small things but if you live in one of the homes, it is noticeable. I lived in a midrise condo and was the first person to move into the building so I had pretty run of the entire building for a few weeks. All of the units in any given stack of units were meant to be identical but they weren't. Sometimes a cabinet over where the fridge was to go would be missing or maybe the protective lens over the light fixture in the shower ceiling. Walls that met at a non 90 degree angle sometimes had a sharp corner, other times a smooth one, and some other times a beveled corner. Most of these difference were too small to have been customizations. They were from different work crews interpreting things differently. They were from the materials on hand being slightly different between days when the interior of different units were worked on. In my last house the neighbor across the street had the same floor plan as us but once again, lots of minor difference of little consequence but noticeable. Most were obviously from the differences in materials on site and the quirks of individual workers.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  I absolutely agree - I call this field-not-yet-factory. In a factory those sort of differences will be autoamted away In the "field" they are left to the skill, discretion, whatever of individual workforce. Frankly this costs the construction industry a fortune - work done substandard has to then be corrected later at great expense, so the driving goal will be towards a "robot construction worker" - but getting there you can imagine is problematic. Pre-fab buildings have existed for a century by now, and they do work. However, they have a negative market reaction in most locales, and the cost saving again is not huge. so here we are.
jackcosgrove 6y ago
> What do they want to sell the people here? Know all of those small tract homes built during the 50s, 60s, and 70s that few want to live in now? That's a good approximation of what I think they're selling. The postwar housing was designed to handle the baby boom. It was cheap to build due to uniformity and it largely succeeded at its purpose. We had a huge middle class as a result. You can have speed, volume, or quality, just pick two. In the postwar period we picked speed and volume. It wasn't a bad choice given the circumstances.

gabrielsroka 6y ago

Bucky Fuller was talking about this more than 4 decades ago.

alanbernstein 6y ago
Sears solved this problem more than 100 years ago: http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm. I guess it just didn't catch on.
- thatcat 6y ago
  Yea I think it did briefly bc I’ve seen several sears homes around my town and they’re pretty stylish compared to more recent homes. I wonder what happened
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Really really interesting. The Model 147 is 900sqft and cost $872 for materials, estimated at $1,530 with labor.[0] Adjusting for inflation from 1914 to 2020, that is about $22,000 for materials and 40K with labor. Looking at 1913 US national labor statistics, the average baker in 1913 San Francisco worked 54 hrs/wk and made $0.46 per hour for an annual wage of $1,291[1] (or 33K in 2020 dollars) The median baker in 2020 California makes 36.5K/yr [2]. The cost of new housing construction is $220/sqft[3], or 200K for the same size house. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1913_0147.jpg http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1913_014... https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/union-scale-wages-hours-labor-3912/union-scale-wages-hours-labor-may-15-1913-476866?start_page=79 https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/union-scale-wages-hours-... https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/Occupations/occupation-profile.aspx?keyword=Bakers&onetcode=51301100&location=94122 https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/Occupations/oc... http://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/uploads/Hard_Construction_Costs_March_2020.pdf http://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/uploads/Hard_Construction_C...
carapace 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house

engineer_22 6y ago

Yea... What we need is communist style housing blocks. Standardized, modular, monotonous.

HarryHirsch 6y ago
It's not that bad when you employ a competent architect. Much of Lisbon was built under Salazar in the 1960s, it doesn't look half bad and 50 years later it's holding up extremely well.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  > Much of Lisbon was built under Salazar in the 1960s, it doesn't look half bad and 50 years later it's holding up extremely well. Lisbon has construction spanning from Roman times all the way to today. Most of the downtown was rebuilt after an earthquake in the 18th century. Besides public buildings, there were a few residencial neighbourhoods and social housing built by Salazar's regime, implying that 'much of Lisbon' is his legacy is factually wrong. Moreover the "Estado Novo" architectural style promoted by the fascist regime was meant to bring back themes from traditional portuguese construction, with a lot of masonry embellishments. This is the opposite of the monotone pragmatism of the soviet blocks.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    Lisbon almost doubled between 1950 and 1975. The neighbourhoods from the Zoo going east are all from that era, it's a lot of the city.
    - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
      Sure the both Lisbon and Porto grew and Salazar enforced a de facto architectural style, but the regime only built public buildings and some social housing. Perhaps this is an English-as-a-foreign-language thing but to me "under Salazar" implies that the regime ordered, and payed for, most of the construction in that era which is not true.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

blhack 6y ago

Holding our society back from what?

peterwwillis 6y ago
Progress. It's hard to build a society when the people in it don't have anywhere to sleep, or keep their consumer products.
- refurb 6y ago
  That’s clearly not happening in the US. Housing prices are high because so many people want to live in highly desirable areas with high paying jobs. There are plenty of less desirable places with cheap housing and ok paying jobs.
  - username90 6y ago
    Wouldn't it be better if we had more cheap dense housing near high paying jobs? Seems like it would make us progress faster, no?
    - CincinnatiMan 6y ago
      What if the high paying jobs spread out to less-dense places? Then people could get both things they want: a good job and not being on top of each other.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    "so many people" ... no, just enough over the numbers for what's actually available to drive prices up. Alternatively, just enough with just enough money (in hand, or leverageable) to drive prices up. The whole world is not rushing to places in the US with insanely high property prices. Just enough people to keep those prices up (and maybe even still rising).
  - peterwwillis 6y ago
    Please google "affordable housing crisis united states". The first 40 or so stories paint a decent enough picture so I won't link them here. > Housing prices are high because so many people want to live in highly desirable areas with high paying jobs. Young middle class white people can't find a house in San Francisco, sure, but that's not the major problem. Most of the housing problems are in places that are not desireable, and there are a myriad of different causes. > There are plenty of less desirable places with cheap housing and ok paying jobs. Not even remotely enough to fulfill all the low income housing needs in the US. Even if there were, people wouldn't be able to go there anyway, because they don't have disposable income, and there's no "let me uproot your life with $20,000 you don't have to pay back" fairies flying around. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing_by_country#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing_by_country#...

jpm_sd 6y ago

This looks like complete BS https://blokable.com/solution/ https://blokable.com/solution/ The construction of hotels and apartment buildings is already very well understood and highly modularized. Nobody needs this pie in the sky solution.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

Far and away the biggest cost for housing in the West is land. It's almost 2/3rds now. We could all live in pre-fab boxes and barely shave 10% off. See Josh Ryan Collins https://youtu.be/RX-AzKgUEWk https://youtu.be/RX-AzKgUEWk https://www.ft.com/content/ffa66898-fe7b-11e6-96f8-3700c5664d30 https://www.ft.com/content/ffa66898-fe7b-11e6-96f8-3700c5664... My tldr on all this - since 1970 humanity has doubled in size - something comparabke only a couple of times in history (17C, 19C etc). A d the massive growth economically had wide ranging effects. One big one is there is a change in governmental models (autocracy to parliament, parliament to democracy) The most obvious other effect is that land prices go up as cities grow. And 80%+ of increase in house prices is increase in underlying land. This is of course massively unequal and negatively affects incentives for business and production. So to change society direction create a long term (land) wealth tax (say 75 basis points a year) and plough that into education, entrepreneurship support and industrial banks greeen energy subsidies etc.

kiba 6y ago
Land Wealth Tax? Don't you mean Land Value Tax? A LVT taxes the land underneath while not taxing the building on top of it. This is opposed to our current situation in which people are deincentivized from building because it'll increase taxes.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Yes that's right - but the point remains :-) I think taking 150 years to squeeze the "value" out via taxes feels about right - it should not be a huge rush but should be something that is inevitable and at the generational level
  - zepto 6y ago
    The problem with that is that it incentivizes work, which is the primary source of carbon emissions and global warming.
jjeaff 6y ago
The bigger cost is land, yes, but let's not become confused into thinking high land prices are due to natural scarcity. Land is expensive due to artificial scarcity created wholly by regulation. Usually propped up by the older generations that already have their pieces of land. Sure, dense urban areas have some scarcity, though almost all could build up. But as I look around me in this southern california suburb, surrounded by 2,500 sq foot homes on 1/4 acre built 25 years ago that go for $800k, I can see endless empty land in all directions. But you can't get a permit to build on any of it, because any requests to permit it are met with an army of residents near retirement that have lived at the edge of their means their entire life and so their only retirement plan is to sell their overpriced home and move to Texas.

zwieback 6y ago

As far as I can tell everything is pretty much standardized these days, not sure what inefficiencies these guys imagine. I live in a college town with a ongoing huge boom in student housing and I can say for sure that the process is extremely efficient. Want something personalized and craft-built? That's where you're going to spend some cash.

dirtyid 6y ago

Bring back levittown I guess. Customization/design premium is insubstantial compared to land price most of the time. That said I can see snowflake designs with no consideration for functionally leading to excessive environmental costs. Ideally the default typology should be an extremely efficient and economical net-zero rectangle oriented for maximum solar gain. People should recognize how much additional "extravagance" goes on in your typical construction, and maybe reel back a little. There should definitely be a mcmansion extra roof / unnecessary geometry tax like old window taxes.

Mountain_Skies 6y ago
Levittown is interesting because all of the houses were cookie cutter copies of each other when built but if you go look at it now, the houses vary a great deal. Some of the difference are cosmetic, such as different paint colors. But there are bigger differences in who added on a large front porch, a great room, extra bedrooms, or expanded out the kitchen to double the space. Add in differences in landscaping and it's not quite the poster child for bland tract housing that it once was.

hirundo 6y ago

Apparently "reimagining housing" means inventing the mobile home. How innovative. I live in a double wide, and wish it was many times cheaper than a site built house but sadly not. The car analogy doesn't fit. It was built in a factory and is cheaper but has definite limitations. It sure isn't a slam dunk replacement for one-offs.

peterwwillis 6y ago

How they're built has nothing to do with the immense complexity of building them, it has to do with the land. Everything about a house is tied to the land it sits on. The regulations, the building codes, the architecture, its particular uses, etc. None of that's going to get walked back because local communities won't let it. I think the best this company can do is to become a sort of SquareSpace for housing. But we've had pre-engineered houses before (remember the Sears Catalog homes?). And we have commoditized housing now, they're just called trailers. You could totally scale-up houses by stacking trailers (that's roughly how wooden homes are built today) but either nobody wants it, or nobody's been able to scale it and make it appealing/significantly less costly. But I wish them good luck! The sooner we can get city councils to start allowing "unusual" home zoning, the better. I want my Tiny House permit, god damnit.

flerchin 6y ago

Wrong premise, wrong conclusion. Land costs are the majority, not construction costs.

bumby 6y ago
I know HN skews toward California but surely this doesn’t generalize across all geographic areas
- notacoward 6y ago
  Not all, perhaps, but more than you might think. If you want to see for yourself, go on Zillow and check out prices for empty lots vs. nearby lots with houses on them in different areas. When I just did that, the price ratio seemed remarkably stable anywhere near even low-demand cities. You have to get pretty far out in the sticks before it falls apart, and almost by definition that's a low percentage of homes.
  - bumby 6y ago
    So I’ve been doing a lot of this recently because I was applying for jobs across different areas of the country. It seemed to me that as long as you stay away from the coasts or major cities, land can be had for 20%-30% of the built value. Just anecdotal of course

swiley 6y ago

High rises, not mobile homes, are what economies of scale look like for housing.

brudgers 6y ago

Each piece of land is a one-off. Its non-fungibility makes it real property. Buildings are built upon foundations. Each foundation is site built. Each site must be prepared first. Building is always one off because of this. It’s why a car parked on a plot of land is not a building. Even less of a building than a tent.

bumby 6y ago
>Its non-fungibility makes it real property I think the alternative theory is the term was Latin real as in royal. The idea being the land is still owned by nobility. The extension now being you don’t ever fully “own” your land. If you disagree, stop paying taxes and see what happens
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  stop paying taxes and see what happens Yes, like that guy in Tennessee who didn't pay the firemen and complained that they wouldn't show up when his house was on fire. If you want civilization, pay your share. (Corollary: be extremely wary of lowtax types and their vision of society!)
- brudgers 6y ago
  It comes from the Latin res. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_property#Historical_background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_property#Historical_backg...
  - bumby 6y ago
    That’s why I said the alternate theory. That alternate theory traces the etymology to the word rex (I.e. “king”)
  - bumby 6y ago
    From your link: "Some people have claimed that the word 'real' in this sense is descended (like French 'royal' and Spanish 'real') from the Latin word for 'king'. In the feudal system (which has left many traces in the common law) the king was the owner of all land, and everyone who occupied land paid him rent directly or indirectly (through lords who in turn paid the king), in cash, goods, or services (including military service). Property tax, paid to the state, can be seen as a relic of that system, as too is the term fee simple. Some say this derivation is a misconception; but that is countered by evidence that the earliest meaning of 'real' in English included "Of, relating to, or characteristic of a monarch, royalty, or (by extension) the nobility, esp. with regard to power, wealth, or dignity; (also) befitting a monarch."

Maarten88 6y ago

> Housing development is antiquated and the only group benefitting is the real estate development and building industry, who in fact have every incentive to restrict the supply. There is another group benefitting from high building development costs: all current owners of real estate. If new housing would become cheaper, existing property would also loose value. And there is enormous amount of money in existing real estate. Many business and individuals would be loosing a lot of money if society/politics would really create cheaper housing, i.e. by enacting policies that increase density, lower cost of land, or limit rents. I think the fundamental force of existing valuations working against lower prices is much harder to overcome than high construction costs.

mason55 6y ago
It’s one of the reasons that no one can stay on top forever. Neither companies nor countries. Too many entrenched interests get too much power and then it’s over. Instead of talking past each other (“millennials can’t afford houses!” Vs “boomers were counting on their house for retirement”) we should focus on long term planning with gradual changes that people can plan for. Unfortunately in a huge democracy it’s very hard to stick to any long term plan like that.

saltedonion 6y ago

Interestingly, the soviets were on a mission to provide housing for every person in the country. To be successful, they knew that bringing down cost will be key. This then led to entire cities and provinces to only build 1 or 2 floor plans. https://youtu.be/JGVBv7svKLo https://youtu.be/JGVBv7svKLo I don’t think the west is ready for this level of equality. Lol

mannykannot 6y ago

Construction is a big employer, and the way it is done now is one of the ways that wealth diffuses into society as a whole. A decade ago, I thought of efficiency as an unalloyed good, but these days I recognize how destabilizing its relentless persuit can be.

jkhdigital 6y ago
Indeed, antifragility and efficiency are often completely at odds.
war1025 6y ago
> I thought of efficiency as an unalloyed good This sort of efficiency is efficient in the way an uninsulated wall is efficient at moving heat from inside to outside in the winter. I think most people could agree that inefficient heat transfer is good in the case of houses in the winter. Similarly, ineffeciencies can be very good for markets to help them achieve a critical mass and viability.

projektfu 6y ago

I remember an episode of an early 90s “future show”, Beyond 2000, I think, talking about building custom homes in Japan from pre-fab modular building blocks containing all the electrical, plumbing and mechanical built in. What’s new is new again?

bilegeek 6y ago
Heck, you had the same hullabaloo about pre-fabs in the 40's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bf6qnM2pXY&t=2m26s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bf6qnM2pXY&t=2m26s

failuser 6y ago

People with money can buy houses, is there much interest in serving the rest of the population? There is already way more empty houses than homeless, so the problem is not is not having enough housing. No force strong enough to solve housing crisis is sees housing situation as a crisis, having affordable housing — that would be a threat.

paxys 6y ago

This is more of a sales pitch for their company than anything else, and is mostly misleading or just plain wrong. Talking about the housing crisis, the cost of the physical building is wayyy down in the list of concerns behind land value, zoning, permits and lots more.

hinkley 6y ago

I remember watching a video recently where someone was arguing for us to go back to timber and beam construction because it was substantially simpler than the stick-constructions we are doing now. Basically a lot of people agree that stick construction is a shit show, but nobody agrees how to fix it. It always has amazed me how hard it is to run an ethernet cable in a finished house, let alone a water line or a drain. And waterproofing a bathroom the way we assemble them is essentially a joke. Which puts me in a third category of people wanting something different.

blcArmadillo 6y ago
Wouldn't a timber and beam house still require walls with studs?
- telchar 6y ago
  They need to be made out of something unless you like a very open plan. In the past they might have been made from wattle and daub, or you could use studs, paper, whatever you want since they're not structural.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I’m trying to remember. I believe his premise was that post and beam are the load bearing elements. The skin can be its own structure, instead of being built into the outside of the wall, and therefore you aren’t puncturing it every eighteen inches. And your insulation isn’t similarly transited by a conductor. He was calling for preformed exterior segments you bolt together.
timw4mail 6y ago
It's not like a finished area was so much easier to modify in the past. Plaster and lathe walls tend to have a much smaller cavity than drywall, in the same cross-section. Plaster keys take up a good amount of the space. What I find interesting is how there used to be pre-measured kits for constructing houses, so in that respect we've gone backwards.

mjh2539 6y ago

The commoditization of housing. HAHAHAHAHAHA

writimov 6y ago

The solution is to build dense housing (min. 20 story towers) with mixed commercial in the lower levels on cheap land (<1/100th the cost of city land) within 50 miles of cities and then run Boring Company tunnels to your new town at a cost of $1mil/mile. Commute time of 10-25mins. Total cost is roughly $1.8bil for a town of 30,000. Each of the condos goes for $150k. That's 12% of the price of a condo in San Francisco. Also could build down underground 10-15 stories. Unsolved problem is low-cost infrastructure (water, sewage, power). Whatever couldn't be built on site could be piped in through through additional tunnels. This would completely change housing prices in cities. If SF has around 700k residents and say another 700k people who want to live here or commute in each week, it would take 23 of these towns to accommodate demand: $46bil investment that would probably payout 25% within 5 years of construction start with all units sold, commercial leasing, naming rights, etc. (Large assumption is people would want to live in these towns). San Francisco housing prices would probably drop at least 25% in 5 years. Just like Matatu's of Kenya (http://infinitedictionary.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Matatu-4.jpg http://infinitedictionary.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...) each town would be known for its thing: TownA is known for its Opera House, TownB is known for its Basketball Team, TownC is known for its amazing Foodie Scene, etc. A successful 'Town' model could even be franchised like Burger King, repeated all over the USA or World within 50 miles of existing major cities. If you were the owner of a successful franchise, and optimized your margins (solving the electricity problem with solar panels or a cheap nuclear micro reactor), you could have 200% returns on each $1.5bil project. Even a couple of towns completing each year could be worth billions. And they would probably be less complicated to build than the average Tesla Terafactory, once the first few had been built.

thatfrenchguy 6y ago
You’re not going to build tunnels under the bay for 1m$ a mile with a train on it.
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  While I think the gp post is a bit fanciful, edge cities are a great way to handle the high land costs associated with density.

jackcosgrove 6y ago

Paying more for unique houses could be a rational strategy. Unique houses have higher resale value compared to tract houses because there is more market differentiation. Try selling a condo. It's hard to ask more if two or three other identical condos in the building are also for sale. Then try to sell a single family house in a neighborhood with diverse housing. You can charge more because you might find the buyer who really loves whatever is particular about the house. So if you pay more and sell for more it's all a wash. Unless of course the house price is so high that a down payment is unattainable. I would call that a market failure in most cases (Manhattan is an exception). Such a failure is probably symptomatic of political intervention in the market, usually in the form of restrictive zoning and development practices. By all means we should try to standardize and automate home construction. But uniqueness has value to many.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

One comment buried in this thread manages to note what I think is the key error here. The article claims that the parts for building are not sufficently standardized. That's certainly a claim to make, but you can't just accept that as-is. The parts for building almost housing stock in a given country are almost completely standardized (they may vary from country to country, of course). What the authors mean, but do not say, is really "the standardization has occured only at the smallest scales". Studs, joists, shingles, plumbing, electrical, block work, window and door sizes, plumbing connectivity, and so much more are all more or less completely standardized. There are options to break with the standards and get (for example) a one-off doorway sizing. What the authors want, but do not say, are modular components of larger scale: entire walls, or entire rooms, or entire buildings that one can put together. They might be right to want this, or they might be wrong. If software was any useful evidence, they're probably wrong. But this is not at the same thing as saying "things are not standardized and should be". The small scale components of buildings are extremely standardized in most industrial nations of the world.

Accujack 6y ago
Yep, probably wrong. There's a truism in architecture: "Buildings are built for people." Not to be works of art or cultural enhancements, but to serve a need. I think it applies here, too. A home is one of the most personal possessions anyone can own. Although you can make arguments all day long about efficiencies in design and mass production, I think just about everyone in the world who owns a home would much rather have one designed to fit them and their purpose, not one made from large scale standard parts. I say this as someone who has a number of unusual things desired in a home, and who has had a lot of difficulty deviating from "standards" for home use. The efficiency benefit of standardization is also a standardized jail for people who want to do something different. There's a place in the market for cookie cutter homes if costs must be reduced to minimum or construction time must be minimized, but in pretty much every other instance, people want the opposite of what this company is selling.

darod 6y ago

Everyone is promoting adding more density but I see no posts discussing quality of life with those changes. Adding a 20 story building to a neighborhood of historically single family homes impacts infrastructure, traffic, noise, etc. Adding to the fact that there are people that don't want to live in attached homes, apartments, etc.

encoderer 6y ago

So this is like Bootstrap, for buildings. Neat. Has its place. Hope it's not my neighborhood.

intrasight 6y ago

I took a tour of Pompeii a couple years ago. Two thing that struck me (beside just amazing) was a) housing hasn't changed all that much in 2000 years, and b) modular housing (of course made of stone). Modular housing has been a thing for a very long time. So has extreme opulence.

oblib 6y ago

I think the notion that "one offs" increase cost is really not nearly as big of an added cost as the article makes it out to be. I've worked on building homes and monitored the process quite a few times and while it might look chaotic to someone who doesn't build stuff the guys who do it for a living are very efficient. And the notion that homes should be mass produced from a template sounds awful to me. I think where we've blown it with home design really began in the `80s with the boom of "McMansions". They're expensive to maintain and very inefficient. In the past decade I've seen some very cool smaller home designs (as well as "tiny" homes) so, personally, I think we're doing a lot better now than we were 20-40 years ago.

noelsusman 6y ago

It's honestly refreshing to see such a clear case of Silicon Valley hubris out in the wild again. These had started to die down recently. Neither founder has any experience in real estate or construction. Their entire premise seems rest on pretending that manufactured housing doesn't already exist. I go to their "Our Solution" page and find this at the top: >Blokable creates prosperity and equity in communities by disintermediating the traditional development process and providing a vertically integrated solution to create housing at scale. Our solution is a new paradigm in development, enabled by a new building system and technology. If I didn't know any better I would think this company was generated by GPT-3.

tolbish 6y ago
Supporting underserved communities through vertical integration is a line straight out of Silicon Valley.
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
Look a little deeper. They're creating smart multifamily rentals at market rates but including a few affordable units in each building. The affordable units are not an act of altruism but a regulatory requirement. You can't bring new multifamily to market without adding affordable units as well.

deleted 6y ago

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Kosirich 6y ago

This article seems so strange for me, as my experience is that out-of-the-catalogue houses are the first choice now (at least in EU). This is perhaps true here in Denmark, where IMO 90% of houses are catalogue houses that have been customized. That means that a variety of houses on offer from same supplier share same prefabricated walls, same type of insulation ect. Same is true for Croatia, where people usually built hollow brick rohbau (walls+roof) first according to a custom design and then settle in on everything else. Considering the difference in price between roughly the same house in Denmark in Croatia, I would say that manual labour is still a big cost driver, so most of cost reduction will either come from even more modularity (deliver an entire bathroom) or automatization.

danielEM 6y ago

What bothers me is that every year we get new, lighter, cheaper, faster, building materials, every year we improve construction processes, every year we're building more and more floors in same period of time and yet still appartments and houses are getting more and more expensive despite of all these improvement's. Can someone pls explain me how's that possible? Am I overestimating improvements?

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

Blokable is promoting itself as providing affordable housing but their buildings largely consist of market rate housing units and a percentage of affordable housing units that are compulsory -- not an act of altruism. Large cities already have requirements, or are actively developing requirements, for developing affordable housing along with market rate housing. Market rate tenants subsidize affordable housing tenants. Cities use lottery systems for the affordable housing units to prevent political insider housing opportunities, but those lottery systems aren't being audited by trusted third parties. :) Putting the PR spin aside, the company is doing phenomenally well with execution and development across many silos. I respect the hard work.