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This house is 375 sq ft and uses low end materials, and it doesn't include setup, so it's going to cost ~$100k, or $266 / sq ft. Most new home construction is m

This house is 375 sq ft and uses low end materials, and it doesn't include setup, so it's going to cost ~$100k, or $266 / sq ft. Most new home construction is more like $150 / sq ft. And with this system, you're very limited in what you can build. Who's the target customer for this?

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Looking at this primarily on a cost per square foot basis seems like the famous slashdot mistake of 2 decades ago of dismissing the iPod because it had less memory than a shitty competitor. I mean, it's an ADU, designed to be small, but would basically have the same fixed costs (appliances, plumbing, electrical) of a house twice the size, and I'm sure the manufacturers could make a house twice the size with only a marginally increased cost. But keeping it small is obviously ideal for people with limited yard space who are using this as an ADU.
- monkeynotes 5y ago
  The headline touts cost, I think it's fair to look at the actual cost benefits. If Apple designed the iPod and promoted it based on cost Slashdot would have had a point. Apple never says 'hey look how affordable our product is'. This headline caught my eye as I'm interested in how the fuck people are going to afford homes in the near future. I am disappointed. The "home" is not somewhere young people can raise a family. It appears to be aimed at home owners who want more home which is entirely uninteresting to me.
  - mekkkkkk 5y ago
    I agree with your point, but you should s/cost/memory to make your comparison analogous. Slashdot was dismissing the iPod because it had less storage than a Creative Nomad and other popular players of the time.
    - monkeynotes 5y ago
      Well obviously comparing an iPod to a home is stupid in the first place. An iPod is a consumer product, where a home is a fundamental life component. Most people evaluate a home in terms of size, location, and cost alone. People will move into a dump if it's the right size, location, and cost. In other words, people have been happily living in Creative Nomads for centuries and this "iPod" home is not going to disrupt that in any way at all. The modular home does not innovate in the way an iPod uncovered a new consumer market. It does not exercise a cost advantage, or size advantage, nor does it out-compete a double-wide in terms of locatability. It's really just a stylistic advantage that wealthy people will find appealing. So putting "ONLY $50k" in the headline is misleading as that is not the real story here.
      - EricE 5y ago
        >The modular home does not innovate factory construction alone is a huge innovation - and if they have figured out a way to solve some of the transportation and assembly issues in a creative way they will literally be solving the biggest barrier to factory home construction. Factory constructed modules are far more consistent and can be of far higher quality that field construction. The biggest factor - your building indoors out of the weather! Factory constructed parts can be built on jigs, making the resulting product a lot higher quality and more consistent. Finally factory construction makes creating specialized tooling that speeds construction while increasing overall quality financially feasible. The big bugaboo with factory construction is getting the thing from the factory to the job site - and that's something they have a new take on and is what's really exciting. Within the next year or so I will be looking for a new house. If I could get a lot and plop something like that on there I would love it.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    > The "home" is not somewhere young people can raise a family. Thus is such a bizarre complaint. So what, of course not all housing types are for people in all situations. But a primary reason housing costs are so high is there is simply not enough housing. If something like this became popular and added considerable density it would make housing generally more affordable for everyone because currently unused land would have people living on it.
  - turtlebits 5y ago
    Why is this not a home? This kind of mentality is what is wrong with the US housing market. People have to have houses bigger than they actually need, maximizing square footage, with tons of features don't provide additional living space (fireplaces, walk in closets, mud rooms, giant master baths). ~400sf can be perfectly fine for a small family.
  - EricE 5y ago
    I'm a single dude with two dogs. I currently have five bedroom house - downsizing into something like this is pretty appealing. And yes, my current house is overkill and I ended up in it for a bunch of reasons unique to me - even still the majority of houses in this area have at least three bedrooms and two bathrooms; there just aren't that many smaller houses that are worth the money - which is why people end up upsizing even if it may not be the best fit. I would like something a bit bigger than the studio they are profiling - at least something with two rooms. A separate bedroom would go a long way towards making this very practical for an even bigger swath of people. They are pitching this as additional living space to an existing property. I hope they don't stop there because I think there is a huge need for simple two bedroom one bath or two bedroom one full and one half bath layouts for single people or couples where you can use the second bedroom as an office or guest room. Not everyone has herds of kids running around. Nor do I need separate formal living or dining rooms. And I absolutely do NOT need two stories. Stairs suck for everyone but the builders who get to pile more square footage onto smaller lots. This looks to be their first foray into this kind of modular housing. I will be keeping an eye on them - if they do come out with something slightly bigger like I talk about above then I could be very interested. Indeed I'm thinking of moving and there is a decent lot in the community I'm looking at where a micro house like this would be perfect. Just prepare a slab with the utilities and call them in. It's very appealing. Quality control is the biggest thing that this kind of housing solves and why I'm very keen on them being successful. I've got friends with modular homes where the modules (walls as units, entire smaller rooms, entire sections of the roof) are built in a factory and the results are a LOT more consistent and the houses go up a lot faster too. Speed of construction is significant. My current house was stick framed on site. The main subfloor in my current house was open to the elements for almost a month while it was under construction. I'm surprised my stairs look as good as they do as they were exposed for weeks too. The amount of time it takes before at least the roof sheathing goes up is pretty vexing. I was here every day as the house was being built and I got a pretty good framing crew (I also brought them snacks, water and a few cases of beer at the end of the day - building rapport with people goes a long way) - some of my neighbors who were more hands off had all kinds of structural issues later where stuff was framed wrong and wasn't caught by the building inspectors or their home inspectors. If people even bothered with a home inspector; I found one that used to be a building code inspector and he caught a load bearing wall that was under framed under my dining room - so even though I was scrutinizing the crap out of stuff and was here every day even I missed it. When you have the same components being made in factories - indoors out of the weather, on jigs with specialized tooling, etc. you get dramatically more consistent results. Factory building modular components removes A TON of variables. I could see them being able to design customizable and modular homes where you pick the various parts of your home and link them up - want three bedrooms instead of two or one? Pick a different mix of modules. Roofing would be the biggest challenge but there are probably some solutions there with a little creativity. Next to a house, a car is the 2nd biggest purchase most people make - could you imagine if four different trades showed up over a few weeks with various parts and assembled a car in your driveway? It's kind of nuts when you think about it...
- sjg007 5y ago
  And it’s modular so there’s probably the option to add on in the future for a lower cost. Adding a second story for example. I agree with the iPod analogy.
- tln 5y ago
  No, I don't think they could make it twice the size -- it has to unfold from a standard TEU size!
  - EricE 5y ago
    Why couldn't you place two (or more) modules next to each other? Certainly beats bringing a pile of raw lumber to a job site and constructing crap from scratch in the open elements for a few months before you get it closed in!
hytdstd 5y ago
In the bay area, $250-300/sq ft is a more realistic low-end of the range.
- prepend 5y ago
  So about the same as this. I love the idea of modular houses, but they seem so expensive. Especially when factoring in the inability to sell the same as houses, etc etc.
- sabujp 5y ago
  please do tell which contractor charges $250-300sq/ft?! I've contacted at least 10 different contractors and they're all in the 400-500 range
  - hytdstd 5y ago
    These are numbers from 5 years ago. I didn't increase them to be conservative. 400-500 today wouldn't surprise me.
    - foobiekr 5y ago
      A friend is getting a master bathroom redone. $100k. The bay area is insane.
pacetherace 5y ago
The construction prices you quoted are not correct at least in the Bay Area. And I am guessing $150/sq ft achievable at scale. Pricing ADUs is tricky because the some of things in a house cost same for a small to medium size home. For example, the costs of plumbing, electrical, kitchen, bathroom, etc are more of less the same between a 500 sq.ft. house and a 1000 sq. ft house.
- egman_ekki 5y ago
  > the costs of plumbing, electrical, kitchen, bathroom, etc are more of less the same between a 500 sq.ft. house and a 1000 sq. ft house. Don't larger houses have multiple bathrooms, thus not the same cost for plumbing? At least when I watched Selling sunset, it seemed it's about having at least 3-4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms in a house...
  - vel0city 5y ago
    The 1000sqft house versus a 500sqft house probably only adds a half bath. Its not like you're going to jump from one bath to five in another 500sqft. The plumbing work on adding a half bath in new construction really isn't too much when properly planned.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Proper planning generally means those bathrooms are right next to each other, so the toilets use the same drain and vent pipes and water supply except for the last 2 feet. You ideally put the kitchen and laundry close as well. Of course you often cannot put everything close and that add cost, but it is attempted.
      - handrous 5y ago
        The drain's practically the only hard/slow part these days, and it's not really that bad. PEX makes everything stupid-fast for the water lines, given unfinished walls & ceilings.
pen2l 5y ago
In the same way a lot of products have become cheaper because of some process optimization (packaged more compactly to reduce transportation costs), I'm excited to see modular homes/home 3d-printing etc. play out and become cheaper over time until they are more affordable than convention home construction or somehow unique and better in ways that conventionally constructed homes cannot be. To answer your question, one possible target customer is the rich (wo)man who wants a cabin house far away but something more comfortable than a cabin house.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  Maybe people in hurricane and flood zones? If you insist on living there, might as well live in a disposable house (Possibly want to get the price lower than 50k). Small aside, I just looked up what houses look like in other parts of the world. Very few look like houses found in the US.
- brudgers 5y ago
  If you are rich, there are a lot of options that are likely to better cater to your richness. Or why build a 50k shed on a million dollar piece of ground?
  - tim333 5y ago
    In Elon's case so you can have a few hundred on the not very expensive land at Starbase Texas.
    - brudgers 5y ago
      As always, the premise is “you should” not “I should.”
  - j45 5y ago
    Savings of time to build and use, can be removed as easily as it’s deployed.
    - 5y ago
gangstead 5y ago
I was wondering that myself. I fantasize about plopping a house down out in the desert, but their video shows a crane used to unfold it. By the time you get all the heavy machinery out there to prep the land and assemble the structure you're most of the way to just building something unique.
- brudgers 5y ago
  Once you have found the contractor to do all that, you’re all the way…and off the end of the runway with two points of failure and no single responsibility when things don’t line up. And the contractor is only making overhead and profit on half the work of a tiny budget which means that you are not a priority…even if the construction cycle was flat which it isn’t. The efficiency of the market is why people don’t build this way much. As Heinlein says every generation thinks it invented sex. They think they invented modular housing too I think.
  - robotresearcher 5y ago
    After they move in to their modular home and have sex a few times they will invent distance education.
- harmmonica 5y ago
  My friend and I were having a similar fantasy of putting places like that all over the western US so we started with a one-off project to build a tiny house so that it can just be “plopped” down (or rather rolled in). How big were you thinking? Something like 400 SF? Or a proper house? As I said in another comment on this thread I think it’s possible to build something totally custom for a similar budget (200-250 psf) as long as it’s on a trailer because you avoid most of the code and inspection issues in several western states by putting it on wheels. https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR Still working on the interior but this house is built better than my actual house in a high-cost market in California. It is super tiny though (200 sf and that includes the loft). edit: formatting
  - prawn 5y ago
nroets 5y ago
A boom town where labour is really expensive and there is an acute housing shortage ?? Or someone who thinks it's the future and love telling his or her guests about it. Or someone who's fascinated by IKEA furniture.
- tdeck 5y ago
  Interestingly IKEA has been building homes for a while in Scandinavian countries: https://www.boklok.com/ https://www.boklok.com/ They also seem to be getting into the tiny house game: https://dornob.com/flat-pack-ikea-house-built-shipped-for-under-100000/?amp https://dornob.com/flat-pack-ikea-house-built-shipped-for-un...
- shagie 5y ago
  Driving to Minot a decade ago... you'd see more modular houses on trailers on the road than cars at times. The flood of 2011 messed up a lot and this was also in the oil boom there. There were even tent cities for people there after the flooding. Yes, these modular houses would have been quite welcome there. A tangent question to this is "how easy is it to undo it?" A guy I know wants to do some major renovations on the house - gut it and fix it. It will take a year or two to do. In the meantime... where do you live? Another situation where this could have been useful would have been Biloxi after Katrina where, again, housing is needed in short order.
decebalus1 5y ago
> Who's the target customer for this? People who fall for stuff like Hyperloop. The biggest problem with housing is not the building itself, its the land and the scarcity of it. This is yet another tech 'solution' in search of a problem. And that problem is political, not technical. INB4: but we're gonna deploy these on Mars!!
- mgolawala 5y ago
  Land is not scarce. We literally make as much of it as we want. What makes it scarce is legislation and zoning. Look at Manhattan or Hong Kong. You just stack the homes and offices and stores on top of each other.
  - decebalus1 5y ago
    Allow me to rephrase: space in desirable urban areas. Land is too specific.
    - prawn 5y ago
      Also, land with services connected - water, etc. Loads of cheap blocks of land out in the deserts of Texas.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Right, which is exactly why this technology does nothing to solve the problem. The housing shortage in SF isn't because they can't build like Manhattan or Hong Kong there, it's because they choose not to.
    - onion2k 5y ago
      Certainly it would be possible to build higher than construction currently goes in SF, but permission is not the only reason why there are fewer skyscrapers. Manhattan and Hong Kong are essentially massive regions of granite that you can build pretty much anything on top of. That sort of geology is not particularly common. You can't just put up skyscrapers everywhere. They'd fall over eventually. https://blog.epa.gov/2015/07/14/the-manhattan-skyline-why-are-there-no-tall-skyscrapers-between-midtown-and-downtown/ https://blog.epa.gov/2015/07/14/the-manhattan-skyline-why-ar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Hong_Kong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Hong_Kong
gwbrooks 5y ago
Since they're very up front about referring to them as Accessory Dwelling units, the primary market is likely people who want to quickly put an ADU in place alongside a traditional single-family home for extra living space or rental income. About one-third of the cost of new multifamily development is typically tied up in zoning/permitting/planning processes. Against that backdrop, ADUs -- particularly if the city pre-approves designs, which seems like something this product would be ideal for -- are a growing part of housing inventory and housing affordability in many cities.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  'Accessory Dwelling Unit' is the most depressing way to talk about a home I've ever heard.
  - monkeynotes 5y ago
    Welcome accessory citizens to your new neighbourhood. A dystopia like this is not just on the horizon it's all but here already. "Middle class" is not meaningful any more. Working class has slipped into actual poverty and the middle class are now accessory to the wealth hoarders. Educated twenty-somethings don't have much of a future to look forward to. They can't even afford the land to put an Accessory Dwelling Unit on, they'll have to rent one from an existing home owner. They will be living on a salary that stalled in the 90s, dealing with ever rising food and environmental costs, and subsisting in a world where we have a perma-health watch reducing their freedom to socialize.
    - mekkkkkk 5y ago
      What's a "perma-health watch", and how does it the reduce ability to socialize?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - d883kd8 5y ago
f6v 5y ago
Maybe they hope to get a beefy government contract to “end homelessness”.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Finland did that and reduced homelessness by 33%. It fell short of their goal of ending homelessness entirely, but it's hard to argue that a 33% reduction is anything short of amazing. https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/eradicating-homelessness-finland-housing-first-programme https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/eradicating...
citboin 5y ago
“ Who's the target customer for this?” People who otherwise could not afford to buy a house, I assume.
- teekert 5y ago
  Personally, I don't like having neighbours, I like nature, I don't mind living small. Such a house would allow me to put more of my resources in land. Then if I need more room for stuff I can build that myself (stuff requires less isolation and there are less strict rules for it in my country, etc).
  - sva_ 5y ago
    Pretty sure you'll still need a concrete foundation, or else the house will slowly drift away. But plumbing is probably the hardest/most expensive thing about it.
    - harmmonica 5y ago
      I've said this elsewhere in the thread, but putting a small/tiny house on a trailer is a good option and won't drift away (at least not in the foreseeable future since it's on wheels with jacks to keep it in place). I think we've reached a point with composting toilets and grey water where plumbing is not that hard, nor expensive. Yes, you still need a water source, but running the actual plumbing lines is low-cost and as long as you're willing to use a composting toilet (no plumbing lines for that obviously) and make use of your grey water in/around your property (which in a lot of the western US should be the norm instead of the exception) it's pretty reasonable. Does require a different way of thinking about things and in a lot of urban areas the "state" might have regulations that prohibit some of these things.
- thesausageking 5y ago
  A single wide mobile home, which is x2-3 as big as this, is cheaper than this costs. And, in most parts of the country, you can buy a full home with land for less than this costs installed. Their advantage seems to be how quickly they can deliver and install them. Digging into their website, it sounds like they're targeting temporary housing for natural disasters, etc. which makes sense.
kbenson 5y ago
What are you basing a $50k setup cost on?
- supermatt 5y ago
  Transportation, assembly, foundation, utilities, sewage. Ive looked at similar systems myself. EDIT: They also state this in their FAQ (https://www.boxabl.com/faq/ https://www.boxabl.com/faq/): - Transportation = $2-$4 per mile from las vegas - Assembly = "Boxabl only sells room modules. We will connect you with a Boxabl certified and state licensed installer in your area." - The rest = "Whats not included in that price is your land and site setup. This can include utility hookups, foundation, landscaping, permits, and more. Depending on your location and the complexity of your site, this cost can range anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000."
  - kbenson 5y ago
    > They also state this in their FAQ $5k to $50k is a big range. In the video on the article about Musk's unit[1] they state they're initially targeting Accessory Dwelling Units, and specifically California's recently relaxed laws regarding them. I'm not sure the laws specifically regarding those (but there's info here[2]), but I suspect it's a lot cheaper when you're allowed to hook up to the existing house's sewer and power. It may well be closer to $100k all said and done for a unit not set up as an ADU, but I suspect that the answer to the original question (of who this targets) is "not the people that need to pay $50k in install fees, at least not initially". 1: https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-50k-house-texas-pictures-video/ https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-50k-house-texas-pictures... 2: https://www.hcd.ca.gov/policy-research/accessorydwellingunits.shtml https://www.hcd.ca.gov/policy-research/accessorydwellingunit...
    - supermatt 5y ago
      yeah, its a big range, depending on if most of that stuff is already in place - in which case it has (mostly) already been paid for. As for the target audience, i think it is people who want a building within a few days. As I mentioned, I looked at a number of similar systems myself (we have a number of providers of modular or flat-pack buildings in Europe). I decided against modular, and had a custom built 6x12m 1.5-story log-build. The pricing was similar - but it took months to complete.
zed88 5y ago
Apparently Elon Musk lives in one of these in TX.
ryanar 5y ago
If you think new home construction is $150 / sq ft. (in the US), you haven't been keeping up with the times. It was $220 / sq ft. before COVID, now its $300+ for stick built. Modulars are $200-$250. When material prices tripled, the cost got offloaded to the customer, and given the demand hasn't changed.. it probably isn't going to regress to the mean anytime soon.
- lftl 5y ago
  Are you quoting prices including the cost of the land? Around here there's plenty of new construction being sold at well under $200/sq. ft., and even a fair amount at or under $150 / sq. ft. This is even when you include the price of the land.
  - j45 5y ago
    Construction prices should not be assumed to be standardized, comparable or equivalent between locations.
    - lowercased 5y ago
      agreed - many medium cost places in central NC are still under $200/sqft for new builds, including the land. It's typically a smaller lot than, say, 3-4 years ago, and the construction quality is (continually?) slipping, etc, but location is still a huge factor. We were close to pulling the trigger with a builder last fall and it was going to be around $180/sqft, and it was a custom build, and included around .8 acre. Lumber and material spike through the winter here has put that on hold (and put a lot of their building on hold) and we might not be able to afford a revised price when things 'get back' to normal. We'd actually had plans sent to an engineering firm who came back and said "you have to redesign this, because some of the foundational materials aren't available, and won't be for at least 6 months". So we couldn't even get a final price had we wanted to, without revising the original plans, and... there was no guarantee that whatever the redesign included would be available at that point (possibly now it would - this was back in March/April?). We're basically in a holding pattern for a bit longer (as are some of the other customers they had lined up).
xwdv 5y ago
The target customer is people with extra land who would like to put up an ADU on their land to make extra revenue from AirBNB. It could probably pay for itself within a year.
- Mumps 5y ago
  within a year? probably pretty aggressive goal. Cheap case, $50k for the unit, $10k all setups (really really conservative). that's $5k revenue per month, or ~$165 per night averaged. Yes, some places could rent for ~$200/night, but I doubt you'll have 100% occupancy rate.
  - xwdv 5y ago
    If you go for the aggressive goal you’ll probably fail but still get farther than if you pursued the modest goal. Besides, as an Airbnb rental it would definitely pay for its own mortgage over time.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  In my CA county, the newest ADU rule states that it can't be used for short term rentals. Of course, you are grandfathered in if you already had an ADU.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
If you can get this contraption on your property (foundation, plumbing hookup, electric, all permit fees.) for under 100k in a desirable area, like the Bay Area, it's a great deal. If I had a flat lot that was accesssble, I would look into this further. In my town, even with the protections Gov. Neusome provided, getting an ADU is still a hassle. In my town, rich people are using ADU's to add square footage to their existing houses. Some are actually successful with getting a variance, if they kiss enough ass. Or, know someone on that council, but I can't prove this alleviation now. I could a few years ago. Variances are over $1000, and until recently very few, like less than 1 percent, were granted. The town kept those fees though. Gotta keep those fees, and fines. That said, it's still a rich man's game: 1. Council members go over every aspect of your ADU. 2. They even had the gall to ask an older homeowner whom will be living in the ADU. The guy said it would probally be a attendant, but felt he didn't need to discuss his medical history on tv. (San Anselmo tapes their meeting. I guess it's for litigation fend offs? If that's the case, they are not doing themself's any good. They are obviously biased.) 3. The town has a right to tell you what color paint your addition will be. 4. The town tells homeowners to go to their neighbors, and basically beg for their remodel. 5. The town can determine where you place windows. 6. The town can tell you what kind of roof they will approve. 7. The town can tell you what kind of siding to use. Better not use stucco, if they want wood? 8. The town can dictate what plants you use around unit. (I'm conflating an ADU, and a remodel--a remodel usually requiring a variance. I'm not sure how difficult is is to just put in an ADU. If any town signed off on these modular units, they are quite a buy. I have my doubts.)
- jiggliemon 5y ago
  I looked into building an adu a few years back, and I can backup most of what you said. At least in California, in an incorporated city. We worked out that it would cost us $30k in fees, and required spending before we could even dig the footers. Things like a soil test, inspections, variance’s etc. You can always build an ADU, but it’s a rich mans game. And not really accessible to most people. We calculated our unit to cost roughly $80-90k, and would be almost 2x $/sqft of our home. A remodel made more financial sense, but the above problems still persist.
RickJWagner 5y ago
Looks great for movie sets.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>Who's the target customer for this? 80% people who want the ease of setup of a double wide but really, really, really want to visibly distance themselves from the stereotypes and can afford to pay a premium and give up a lot of square footage to do so. (There's a reason this is on the front page of HN.) 20% developers who will pay big bucks to skirt some local busybody ordinance that says "no trailer homes".
- handrous 5y ago
  Bingo. Same as "tiny homes". They're not solving a problem without an existing—possibly even superior—solution. They're just solving it in a way that doesn't offend one's class self-image. Modular homes, prefabs, trailer homes, RVs, all already exist and have for a long time—but they're associated with he wrong sorts of people.
kderbyma 5y ago
people who don't think about that, but rush to sign up probably.
toss1 5y ago
The first idea that strikes me (aside form the obvious in-law apt addition) is to use this approach for the homeless. It's been shown that the best solution for many (non-mentally-ill) homeless is to literally provide a home. E.g., merely the fact of falling on enough hardships to lose a home and having no fixed address is a major impediment to getting a new job and becoming a homed, taxpaying resident. Yet I've read repeatedly that California is spending net $1 million per home to create low-standard living spaces for the homeless. This is more than a 10X improvement in these costs.
- hogFeast 5y ago
  In London, they used shipping container homes to house homeless people on unused local government-owned land. Pretty much instantly stories were in the media about how the conditions were "inhuman" (bizarrely, from people who had chosen to illegally immigrate to the UK from France, and complained that they had a nice house in Sudan or wherever). So I think the reality of these schemes is often...difficult because they are a non-ideal solution to a non-ideal problem (and unf, the alternative in the UK is sheltered housing with huge levels of crime, B&B which cost taxpayers £150-200/day, or council housing that is worth £500k-1m...again, there are no real solutions here). EDIT: btw, I should add...I have actually lived in a shipping container, I went to a boarding school and part of the school was being re-developed so a small number of proportion of the group had to spend a term in converted containers...no issue. It was totally fine. These kind of housing solutions are used pretty extensively in mining/oil and gas, and they are quite comfortable.
  - AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
    I lived in a CHU (Container Housing Unit) in Iraq... modern and comfortable enough. Only problem was when they did generator maintenance and the AC would turn off. But that's not related to the CHU itself.
  - toss1 5y ago
    Indeed! there are all kinds of advances being made in everything from container homes, modular homes, "tiny homes", yurts, and more. Although they are obviously not spacious mansions, they can be highly functional and comfortable, and obviously WAAAY better than nothing. If I were in a situation where it was that or nothing, I'd be grateful for a small spot to call home (but then I decided to live for one summer job in a tent in a secluded spot outside of town instead of getting an apartment, and it was very enjoyable and functional).
coding123 5y ago
I see everything starting at $300 / sqft. Last time I got a quote for $160/ft I called the guy 2 months later and he said he redid his construction business to focus on kitchen/bathroom remodels. Anyway, the site work for something is not going to be less than $50k. 50k if you're very lucky or are a contractor yourself.
duxup 5y ago
A lot of the modular home type solutions seem to encounter the same thing. Cost savings on the surface but when things come together they're just not there. A lot of the actual prefabricated style solutions that do save money seem to be small changes within your traditional systems.
- bluGill 5y ago
  The real cost savings is they build exactly the same 4 floor plans over an over again, and very little modifications are allowed. They then have jigs to cut the pieces to the exact size needed. Instead of a carpenter with a saw measuring a 2x4, they cut everything to the exact size needed without using a tape measure.
jws 5y ago
Tiny houses have a large cost per square foot. One of the early forces in tiny houses remarked that his house was simultaneously the smallest in his city and the most expensive per square foot. Part of it is the cube square law's little brother, the "square linear law?" You have proportionately more wall for the enclosed area. On top of that you still have the expensive bits… bathrooms and kitchens.
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  Yes this is true. $/ft2 is only really useful to realtors. Most home shoppers probably understand things more like cost per living space (rooms)
- bick_nyers 5y ago
  At that point, if you have the land for it, why not just go for an "efficiently sized" home. Like 500-700 sqft.
  - fulafel 5y ago
    It's a big waste of energy to cool and heat a house bigger than you really need, an ethical problem in this day and age (global warming).
    - bick_nyers 5y ago
      True, although a lot of smaller houses/tiny homes will use mini splits for their heating/cooling, which are significantly more energy efficient than central AC units. Insulation is also relatively cheap. Solar is an option to offset it as well, although extra insulation is a much easier and cost effective option here (at least in the short term). Most houses that are classified as tiny are in the 200-400sqft area, so while a "small home" is about twice as large at 500-700sqft, we gotta remember that most houses are 1500sqft anyways, so we are still coming out ahead. Plus, I think it's much much easier to convince the average joe to live in a 500-700sqft home than in a 200-400sqft home.
  - EricE 5y ago

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

Looking at this primarily on a cost per square foot basis seems like the famous slashdot mistake of 2 decades ago of dismissing the iPod because it had less memory than a shitty competitor. I mean, it's an ADU, designed to be small, but would basically have the same fixed costs (appliances, plumbing, electrical) of a house twice the size, and I'm sure the manufacturers could make a house twice the size with only a marginally increased cost. But keeping it small is obviously ideal for people with limited yard space who are using this as an ADU.

monkeynotes 5y ago
The headline touts cost, I think it's fair to look at the actual cost benefits. If Apple designed the iPod and promoted it based on cost Slashdot would have had a point. Apple never says 'hey look how affordable our product is'. This headline caught my eye as I'm interested in how the fuck people are going to afford homes in the near future. I am disappointed. The "home" is not somewhere young people can raise a family. It appears to be aimed at home owners who want more home which is entirely uninteresting to me.
- mekkkkkk 5y ago
  I agree with your point, but you should s/cost/memory to make your comparison analogous. Slashdot was dismissing the iPod because it had less storage than a Creative Nomad and other popular players of the time.
  - monkeynotes 5y ago
    Well obviously comparing an iPod to a home is stupid in the first place. An iPod is a consumer product, where a home is a fundamental life component. Most people evaluate a home in terms of size, location, and cost alone. People will move into a dump if it's the right size, location, and cost. In other words, people have been happily living in Creative Nomads for centuries and this "iPod" home is not going to disrupt that in any way at all. The modular home does not innovate in the way an iPod uncovered a new consumer market. It does not exercise a cost advantage, or size advantage, nor does it out-compete a double-wide in terms of locatability. It's really just a stylistic advantage that wealthy people will find appealing. So putting "ONLY $50k" in the headline is misleading as that is not the real story here.
    - EricE 5y ago
      >The modular home does not innovate factory construction alone is a huge innovation - and if they have figured out a way to solve some of the transportation and assembly issues in a creative way they will literally be solving the biggest barrier to factory home construction. Factory constructed modules are far more consistent and can be of far higher quality that field construction. The biggest factor - your building indoors out of the weather! Factory constructed parts can be built on jigs, making the resulting product a lot higher quality and more consistent. Finally factory construction makes creating specialized tooling that speeds construction while increasing overall quality financially feasible. The big bugaboo with factory construction is getting the thing from the factory to the job site - and that's something they have a new take on and is what's really exciting. Within the next year or so I will be looking for a new house. If I could get a lot and plop something like that on there I would love it.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  > The "home" is not somewhere young people can raise a family. Thus is such a bizarre complaint. So what, of course not all housing types are for people in all situations. But a primary reason housing costs are so high is there is simply not enough housing. If something like this became popular and added considerable density it would make housing generally more affordable for everyone because currently unused land would have people living on it.
- turtlebits 5y ago
  Why is this not a home? This kind of mentality is what is wrong with the US housing market. People have to have houses bigger than they actually need, maximizing square footage, with tons of features don't provide additional living space (fireplaces, walk in closets, mud rooms, giant master baths). ~400sf can be perfectly fine for a small family.
- EricE 5y ago
  I'm a single dude with two dogs. I currently have five bedroom house - downsizing into something like this is pretty appealing. And yes, my current house is overkill and I ended up in it for a bunch of reasons unique to me - even still the majority of houses in this area have at least three bedrooms and two bathrooms; there just aren't that many smaller houses that are worth the money - which is why people end up upsizing even if it may not be the best fit. I would like something a bit bigger than the studio they are profiling - at least something with two rooms. A separate bedroom would go a long way towards making this very practical for an even bigger swath of people. They are pitching this as additional living space to an existing property. I hope they don't stop there because I think there is a huge need for simple two bedroom one bath or two bedroom one full and one half bath layouts for single people or couples where you can use the second bedroom as an office or guest room. Not everyone has herds of kids running around. Nor do I need separate formal living or dining rooms. And I absolutely do NOT need two stories. Stairs suck for everyone but the builders who get to pile more square footage onto smaller lots. This looks to be their first foray into this kind of modular housing. I will be keeping an eye on them - if they do come out with something slightly bigger like I talk about above then I could be very interested. Indeed I'm thinking of moving and there is a decent lot in the community I'm looking at where a micro house like this would be perfect. Just prepare a slab with the utilities and call them in. It's very appealing. Quality control is the biggest thing that this kind of housing solves and why I'm very keen on them being successful. I've got friends with modular homes where the modules (walls as units, entire smaller rooms, entire sections of the roof) are built in a factory and the results are a LOT more consistent and the houses go up a lot faster too. Speed of construction is significant. My current house was stick framed on site. The main subfloor in my current house was open to the elements for almost a month while it was under construction. I'm surprised my stairs look as good as they do as they were exposed for weeks too. The amount of time it takes before at least the roof sheathing goes up is pretty vexing. I was here every day as the house was being built and I got a pretty good framing crew (I also brought them snacks, water and a few cases of beer at the end of the day - building rapport with people goes a long way) - some of my neighbors who were more hands off had all kinds of structural issues later where stuff was framed wrong and wasn't caught by the building inspectors or their home inspectors. If people even bothered with a home inspector; I found one that used to be a building code inspector and he caught a load bearing wall that was under framed under my dining room - so even though I was scrutinizing the crap out of stuff and was here every day even I missed it. When you have the same components being made in factories - indoors out of the weather, on jigs with specialized tooling, etc. you get dramatically more consistent results. Factory building modular components removes A TON of variables. I could see them being able to design customizable and modular homes where you pick the various parts of your home and link them up - want three bedrooms instead of two or one? Pick a different mix of modules. Roofing would be the biggest challenge but there are probably some solutions there with a little creativity. Next to a house, a car is the 2nd biggest purchase most people make - could you imagine if four different trades showed up over a few weeks with various parts and assembled a car in your driveway? It's kind of nuts when you think about it...
sjg007 5y ago
And it’s modular so there’s probably the option to add on in the future for a lower cost. Adding a second story for example. I agree with the iPod analogy.
tln 5y ago
No, I don't think they could make it twice the size -- it has to unfold from a standard TEU size!
- EricE 5y ago
  Why couldn't you place two (or more) modules next to each other? Certainly beats bringing a pile of raw lumber to a job site and constructing crap from scratch in the open elements for a few months before you get it closed in!

hytdstd 5y ago

In the bay area, $250-300/sq ft is a more realistic low-end of the range.

prepend 5y ago
So about the same as this. I love the idea of modular houses, but they seem so expensive. Especially when factoring in the inability to sell the same as houses, etc etc.
sabujp 5y ago
please do tell which contractor charges $250-300sq/ft?! I've contacted at least 10 different contractors and they're all in the 400-500 range
- hytdstd 5y ago
  These are numbers from 5 years ago. I didn't increase them to be conservative. 400-500 today wouldn't surprise me.
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    A friend is getting a master bathroom redone. $100k. The bay area is insane.

pacetherace 5y ago

The construction prices you quoted are not correct at least in the Bay Area. And I am guessing $150/sq ft achievable at scale. Pricing ADUs is tricky because the some of things in a house cost same for a small to medium size home. For example, the costs of plumbing, electrical, kitchen, bathroom, etc are more of less the same between a 500 sq.ft. house and a 1000 sq. ft house.

egman_ekki 5y ago
> the costs of plumbing, electrical, kitchen, bathroom, etc are more of less the same between a 500 sq.ft. house and a 1000 sq. ft house. Don't larger houses have multiple bathrooms, thus not the same cost for plumbing? At least when I watched Selling sunset, it seemed it's about having at least 3-4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms in a house...
- vel0city 5y ago
  The 1000sqft house versus a 500sqft house probably only adds a half bath. Its not like you're going to jump from one bath to five in another 500sqft. The plumbing work on adding a half bath in new construction really isn't too much when properly planned.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Proper planning generally means those bathrooms are right next to each other, so the toilets use the same drain and vent pipes and water supply except for the last 2 feet. You ideally put the kitchen and laundry close as well. Of course you often cannot put everything close and that add cost, but it is attempted.
    - handrous 5y ago
      The drain's practically the only hard/slow part these days, and it's not really that bad. PEX makes everything stupid-fast for the water lines, given unfinished walls & ceilings.

pen2l 5y ago

In the same way a lot of products have become cheaper because of some process optimization (packaged more compactly to reduce transportation costs), I'm excited to see modular homes/home 3d-printing etc. play out and become cheaper over time until they are more affordable than convention home construction or somehow unique and better in ways that conventionally constructed homes cannot be. To answer your question, one possible target customer is the rich (wo)man who wants a cabin house far away but something more comfortable than a cabin house.

runawaybottle 5y ago
Maybe people in hurricane and flood zones? If you insist on living there, might as well live in a disposable house (Possibly want to get the price lower than 50k). Small aside, I just looked up what houses look like in other parts of the world. Very few look like houses found in the US.
brudgers 5y ago
If you are rich, there are a lot of options that are likely to better cater to your richness. Or why build a 50k shed on a million dollar piece of ground?
- tim333 5y ago
  In Elon's case so you can have a few hundred on the not very expensive land at Starbase Texas.
  - brudgers 5y ago
    As always, the premise is “you should” not “I should.”
- j45 5y ago
  Savings of time to build and use, can be removed as easily as it’s deployed.
  - 5y ago

gangstead 5y ago

I was wondering that myself. I fantasize about plopping a house down out in the desert, but their video shows a crane used to unfold it. By the time you get all the heavy machinery out there to prep the land and assemble the structure you're most of the way to just building something unique.

brudgers 5y ago
Once you have found the contractor to do all that, you’re all the way…and off the end of the runway with two points of failure and no single responsibility when things don’t line up. And the contractor is only making overhead and profit on half the work of a tiny budget which means that you are not a priority…even if the construction cycle was flat which it isn’t. The efficiency of the market is why people don’t build this way much. As Heinlein says every generation thinks it invented sex. They think they invented modular housing too I think.
- robotresearcher 5y ago
  After they move in to their modular home and have sex a few times they will invent distance education.
harmmonica 5y ago
My friend and I were having a similar fantasy of putting places like that all over the western US so we started with a one-off project to build a tiny house so that it can just be “plopped” down (or rather rolled in). How big were you thinking? Something like 400 SF? Or a proper house? As I said in another comment on this thread I think it’s possible to build something totally custom for a similar budget (200-250 psf) as long as it’s on a trailer because you avoid most of the code and inspection issues in several western states by putting it on wheels. https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR Still working on the interior but this house is built better than my actual house in a high-cost market in California. It is super tiny though (200 sf and that includes the loft). edit: formatting
- prawn 5y ago

nroets 5y ago

A boom town where labour is really expensive and there is an acute housing shortage ?? Or someone who thinks it's the future and love telling his or her guests about it. Or someone who's fascinated by IKEA furniture.

tdeck 5y ago
Interestingly IKEA has been building homes for a while in Scandinavian countries: https://www.boklok.com/ https://www.boklok.com/ They also seem to be getting into the tiny house game: https://dornob.com/flat-pack-ikea-house-built-shipped-for-under-100000/?amp https://dornob.com/flat-pack-ikea-house-built-shipped-for-un...
shagie 5y ago
Driving to Minot a decade ago... you'd see more modular houses on trailers on the road than cars at times. The flood of 2011 messed up a lot and this was also in the oil boom there. There were even tent cities for people there after the flooding. Yes, these modular houses would have been quite welcome there. A tangent question to this is "how easy is it to undo it?" A guy I know wants to do some major renovations on the house - gut it and fix it. It will take a year or two to do. In the meantime... where do you live? Another situation where this could have been useful would have been Biloxi after Katrina where, again, housing is needed in short order.

decebalus1 5y ago

> Who's the target customer for this? People who fall for stuff like Hyperloop. The biggest problem with housing is not the building itself, its the land and the scarcity of it. This is yet another tech 'solution' in search of a problem. And that problem is political, not technical. INB4: but we're gonna deploy these on Mars!!

mgolawala 5y ago
Land is not scarce. We literally make as much of it as we want. What makes it scarce is legislation and zoning. Look at Manhattan or Hong Kong. You just stack the homes and offices and stores on top of each other.
- decebalus1 5y ago
  Allow me to rephrase: space in desirable urban areas. Land is too specific.
  - prawn 5y ago
    Also, land with services connected - water, etc. Loads of cheap blocks of land out in the deserts of Texas.
- lmm 5y ago
  Right, which is exactly why this technology does nothing to solve the problem. The housing shortage in SF isn't because they can't build like Manhattan or Hong Kong there, it's because they choose not to.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    Certainly it would be possible to build higher than construction currently goes in SF, but permission is not the only reason why there are fewer skyscrapers. Manhattan and Hong Kong are essentially massive regions of granite that you can build pretty much anything on top of. That sort of geology is not particularly common. You can't just put up skyscrapers everywhere. They'd fall over eventually. https://blog.epa.gov/2015/07/14/the-manhattan-skyline-why-are-there-no-tall-skyscrapers-between-midtown-and-downtown/ https://blog.epa.gov/2015/07/14/the-manhattan-skyline-why-ar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Hong_Kong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Hong_Kong

gwbrooks 5y ago

Since they're very up front about referring to them as Accessory Dwelling units, the primary market is likely people who want to quickly put an ADU in place alongside a traditional single-family home for extra living space or rental income. About one-third of the cost of new multifamily development is typically tied up in zoning/permitting/planning processes. Against that backdrop, ADUs -- particularly if the city pre-approves designs, which seems like something this product would be ideal for -- are a growing part of housing inventory and housing affordability in many cities.

chrisseaton 5y ago
'Accessory Dwelling Unit' is the most depressing way to talk about a home I've ever heard.
- monkeynotes 5y ago
  Welcome accessory citizens to your new neighbourhood. A dystopia like this is not just on the horizon it's all but here already. "Middle class" is not meaningful any more. Working class has slipped into actual poverty and the middle class are now accessory to the wealth hoarders. Educated twenty-somethings don't have much of a future to look forward to. They can't even afford the land to put an Accessory Dwelling Unit on, they'll have to rent one from an existing home owner. They will be living on a salary that stalled in the 90s, dealing with ever rising food and environmental costs, and subsisting in a world where we have a perma-health watch reducing their freedom to socialize.
  - mekkkkkk 5y ago
    What's a "perma-health watch", and how does it the reduce ability to socialize?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - d883kd8 5y ago

f6v 5y ago

Maybe they hope to get a beefy government contract to “end homelessness”.

onion2k 5y ago
Finland did that and reduced homelessness by 33%. It fell short of their goal of ending homelessness entirely, but it's hard to argue that a 33% reduction is anything short of amazing. https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/eradicating-homelessness-finland-housing-first-programme https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/eradicating...

citboin 5y ago

“ Who's the target customer for this?” People who otherwise could not afford to buy a house, I assume.

teekert 5y ago
Personally, I don't like having neighbours, I like nature, I don't mind living small. Such a house would allow me to put more of my resources in land. Then if I need more room for stuff I can build that myself (stuff requires less isolation and there are less strict rules for it in my country, etc).
- sva_ 5y ago
  Pretty sure you'll still need a concrete foundation, or else the house will slowly drift away. But plumbing is probably the hardest/most expensive thing about it.
  - harmmonica 5y ago
    I've said this elsewhere in the thread, but putting a small/tiny house on a trailer is a good option and won't drift away (at least not in the foreseeable future since it's on wheels with jacks to keep it in place). I think we've reached a point with composting toilets and grey water where plumbing is not that hard, nor expensive. Yes, you still need a water source, but running the actual plumbing lines is low-cost and as long as you're willing to use a composting toilet (no plumbing lines for that obviously) and make use of your grey water in/around your property (which in a lot of the western US should be the norm instead of the exception) it's pretty reasonable. Does require a different way of thinking about things and in a lot of urban areas the "state" might have regulations that prohibit some of these things.
thesausageking 5y ago
A single wide mobile home, which is x2-3 as big as this, is cheaper than this costs. And, in most parts of the country, you can buy a full home with land for less than this costs installed. Their advantage seems to be how quickly they can deliver and install them. Digging into their website, it sounds like they're targeting temporary housing for natural disasters, etc. which makes sense.

kbenson 5y ago

What are you basing a $50k setup cost on?

supermatt 5y ago
Transportation, assembly, foundation, utilities, sewage. Ive looked at similar systems myself. EDIT: They also state this in their FAQ (https://www.boxabl.com/faq/ https://www.boxabl.com/faq/): - Transportation = $2-$4 per mile from las vegas - Assembly = "Boxabl only sells room modules. We will connect you with a Boxabl certified and state licensed installer in your area." - The rest = "Whats not included in that price is your land and site setup. This can include utility hookups, foundation, landscaping, permits, and more. Depending on your location and the complexity of your site, this cost can range anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000."
- kbenson 5y ago
  > They also state this in their FAQ $5k to $50k is a big range. In the video on the article about Musk's unit[1] they state they're initially targeting Accessory Dwelling Units, and specifically California's recently relaxed laws regarding them. I'm not sure the laws specifically regarding those (but there's info here[2]), but I suspect it's a lot cheaper when you're allowed to hook up to the existing house's sewer and power. It may well be closer to $100k all said and done for a unit not set up as an ADU, but I suspect that the answer to the original question (of who this targets) is "not the people that need to pay $50k in install fees, at least not initially". 1: https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-50k-house-texas-pictures-video/ https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-50k-house-texas-pictures... 2: https://www.hcd.ca.gov/policy-research/accessorydwellingunits.shtml https://www.hcd.ca.gov/policy-research/accessorydwellingunit...
  - supermatt 5y ago
    yeah, its a big range, depending on if most of that stuff is already in place - in which case it has (mostly) already been paid for. As for the target audience, i think it is people who want a building within a few days. As I mentioned, I looked at a number of similar systems myself (we have a number of providers of modular or flat-pack buildings in Europe). I decided against modular, and had a custom built 6x12m 1.5-story log-build. The pricing was similar - but it took months to complete.

zed88 5y ago

Apparently Elon Musk lives in one of these in TX.

ryanar 5y ago

If you think new home construction is $150 / sq ft. (in the US), you haven't been keeping up with the times. It was $220 / sq ft. before COVID, now its $300+ for stick built. Modulars are $200-$250. When material prices tripled, the cost got offloaded to the customer, and given the demand hasn't changed.. it probably isn't going to regress to the mean anytime soon.

lftl 5y ago
Are you quoting prices including the cost of the land? Around here there's plenty of new construction being sold at well under $200/sq. ft., and even a fair amount at or under $150 / sq. ft. This is even when you include the price of the land.
- j45 5y ago
  Construction prices should not be assumed to be standardized, comparable or equivalent between locations.
  - lowercased 5y ago
    agreed - many medium cost places in central NC are still under $200/sqft for new builds, including the land. It's typically a smaller lot than, say, 3-4 years ago, and the construction quality is (continually?) slipping, etc, but location is still a huge factor. We were close to pulling the trigger with a builder last fall and it was going to be around $180/sqft, and it was a custom build, and included around .8 acre. Lumber and material spike through the winter here has put that on hold (and put a lot of their building on hold) and we might not be able to afford a revised price when things 'get back' to normal. We'd actually had plans sent to an engineering firm who came back and said "you have to redesign this, because some of the foundational materials aren't available, and won't be for at least 6 months". So we couldn't even get a final price had we wanted to, without revising the original plans, and... there was no guarantee that whatever the redesign included would be available at that point (possibly now it would - this was back in March/April?). We're basically in a holding pattern for a bit longer (as are some of the other customers they had lined up).

xwdv 5y ago

The target customer is people with extra land who would like to put up an ADU on their land to make extra revenue from AirBNB. It could probably pay for itself within a year.

Mumps 5y ago
within a year? probably pretty aggressive goal. Cheap case, $50k for the unit, $10k all setups (really really conservative). that's $5k revenue per month, or ~$165 per night averaged. Yes, some places could rent for ~$200/night, but I doubt you'll have 100% occupancy rate.
- xwdv 5y ago
  If you go for the aggressive goal you’ll probably fail but still get farther than if you pursued the modest goal. Besides, as an Airbnb rental it would definitely pay for its own mortgage over time.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
In my CA county, the newest ADU rule states that it can't be used for short term rentals. Of course, you are grandfathered in if you already had an ADU.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

If you can get this contraption on your property (foundation, plumbing hookup, electric, all permit fees.) for under 100k in a desirable area, like the Bay Area, it's a great deal. If I had a flat lot that was accesssble, I would look into this further. In my town, even with the protections Gov. Neusome provided, getting an ADU is still a hassle. In my town, rich people are using ADU's to add square footage to their existing houses. Some are actually successful with getting a variance, if they kiss enough ass. Or, know someone on that council, but I can't prove this alleviation now. I could a few years ago. Variances are over $1000, and until recently very few, like less than 1 percent, were granted. The town kept those fees though. Gotta keep those fees, and fines. That said, it's still a rich man's game: 1. Council members go over every aspect of your ADU. 2. They even had the gall to ask an older homeowner whom will be living in the ADU. The guy said it would probally be a attendant, but felt he didn't need to discuss his medical history on tv. (San Anselmo tapes their meeting. I guess it's for litigation fend offs? If that's the case, they are not doing themself's any good. They are obviously biased.) 3. The town has a right to tell you what color paint your addition will be. 4. The town tells homeowners to go to their neighbors, and basically beg for their remodel. 5. The town can determine where you place windows. 6. The town can tell you what kind of roof they will approve. 7. The town can tell you what kind of siding to use. Better not use stucco, if they want wood? 8. The town can dictate what plants you use around unit. (I'm conflating an ADU, and a remodel--a remodel usually requiring a variance. I'm not sure how difficult is is to just put in an ADU. If any town signed off on these modular units, they are quite a buy. I have my doubts.)

jiggliemon 5y ago
I looked into building an adu a few years back, and I can backup most of what you said. At least in California, in an incorporated city. We worked out that it would cost us $30k in fees, and required spending before we could even dig the footers. Things like a soil test, inspections, variance’s etc. You can always build an ADU, but it’s a rich mans game. And not really accessible to most people. We calculated our unit to cost roughly $80-90k, and would be almost 2x $/sqft of our home. A remodel made more financial sense, but the above problems still persist.

RickJWagner 5y ago

Looks great for movie sets.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

>Who's the target customer for this? 80% people who want the ease of setup of a double wide but really, really, really want to visibly distance themselves from the stereotypes and can afford to pay a premium and give up a lot of square footage to do so. (There's a reason this is on the front page of HN.) 20% developers who will pay big bucks to skirt some local busybody ordinance that says "no trailer homes".

handrous 5y ago
Bingo. Same as "tiny homes". They're not solving a problem without an existing—possibly even superior—solution. They're just solving it in a way that doesn't offend one's class self-image. Modular homes, prefabs, trailer homes, RVs, all already exist and have for a long time—but they're associated with he wrong sorts of people.

kderbyma 5y ago

people who don't think about that, but rush to sign up probably.

toss1 5y ago

The first idea that strikes me (aside form the obvious in-law apt addition) is to use this approach for the homeless. It's been shown that the best solution for many (non-mentally-ill) homeless is to literally provide a home. E.g., merely the fact of falling on enough hardships to lose a home and having no fixed address is a major impediment to getting a new job and becoming a homed, taxpaying resident. Yet I've read repeatedly that California is spending net $1 million per home to create low-standard living spaces for the homeless. This is more than a 10X improvement in these costs.

hogFeast 5y ago
In London, they used shipping container homes to house homeless people on unused local government-owned land. Pretty much instantly stories were in the media about how the conditions were "inhuman" (bizarrely, from people who had chosen to illegally immigrate to the UK from France, and complained that they had a nice house in Sudan or wherever). So I think the reality of these schemes is often...difficult because they are a non-ideal solution to a non-ideal problem (and unf, the alternative in the UK is sheltered housing with huge levels of crime, B&B which cost taxpayers £150-200/day, or council housing that is worth £500k-1m...again, there are no real solutions here). EDIT: btw, I should add...I have actually lived in a shipping container, I went to a boarding school and part of the school was being re-developed so a small number of proportion of the group had to spend a term in converted containers...no issue. It was totally fine. These kind of housing solutions are used pretty extensively in mining/oil and gas, and they are quite comfortable.
- AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
  I lived in a CHU (Container Housing Unit) in Iraq... modern and comfortable enough. Only problem was when they did generator maintenance and the AC would turn off. But that's not related to the CHU itself.
- toss1 5y ago
  Indeed! there are all kinds of advances being made in everything from container homes, modular homes, "tiny homes", yurts, and more. Although they are obviously not spacious mansions, they can be highly functional and comfortable, and obviously WAAAY better than nothing. If I were in a situation where it was that or nothing, I'd be grateful for a small spot to call home (but then I decided to live for one summer job in a tent in a secluded spot outside of town instead of getting an apartment, and it was very enjoyable and functional).

coding123 5y ago

I see everything starting at $300 / sqft. Last time I got a quote for $160/ft I called the guy 2 months later and he said he redid his construction business to focus on kitchen/bathroom remodels. Anyway, the site work for something is not going to be less than $50k. 50k if you're very lucky or are a contractor yourself.

duxup 5y ago

A lot of the modular home type solutions seem to encounter the same thing. Cost savings on the surface but when things come together they're just not there. A lot of the actual prefabricated style solutions that do save money seem to be small changes within your traditional systems.

bluGill 5y ago
The real cost savings is they build exactly the same 4 floor plans over an over again, and very little modifications are allowed. They then have jigs to cut the pieces to the exact size needed. Instead of a carpenter with a saw measuring a 2x4, they cut everything to the exact size needed without using a tape measure.

jws 5y ago

Tiny houses have a large cost per square foot. One of the early forces in tiny houses remarked that his house was simultaneously the smallest in his city and the most expensive per square foot. Part of it is the cube square law's little brother, the "square linear law?" You have proportionately more wall for the enclosed area. On top of that you still have the expensive bits… bathrooms and kitchens.

metalliqaz 5y ago
Yes this is true. $/ft2 is only really useful to realtors. Most home shoppers probably understand things more like cost per living space (rooms)
bick_nyers 5y ago
At that point, if you have the land for it, why not just go for an "efficiently sized" home. Like 500-700 sqft.
- fulafel 5y ago
  It's a big waste of energy to cool and heat a house bigger than you really need, an ethical problem in this day and age (global warming).
  - bick_nyers 5y ago
    True, although a lot of smaller houses/tiny homes will use mini splits for their heating/cooling, which are significantly more energy efficient than central AC units. Insulation is also relatively cheap. Solar is an option to offset it as well, although extra insulation is a much easier and cost effective option here (at least in the short term). Most houses that are classified as tiny are in the 200-400sqft area, so while a "small home" is about twice as large at 500-700sqft, we gotta remember that most houses are 1500sqft anyways, so we are still coming out ahead. Plus, I think it's much much easier to convince the average joe to live in a 500-700sqft home than in a 200-400sqft home.
- EricE 5y ago