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> We can build small, livable (for various definitions) homes for $50k (or less) today Not sure I agree with this. If we assume a labor at a rate in the order

> We can build small, livable (for various definitions) homes for $50k (or less) today Not sure I agree with this. If we assume a labor at a rate in the order of 1 worker-hour per square foot (this is highly variable, from 0.5 to 2 hr/ft^2), a 2000 sqf home would require 2000 hours. At minimum wage ($15/hour) that means $30K, just for labor. This does not include concrete, lumber, stucco, sheetrock, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, appliances, landscaping, etc. It also does not include permits and design fees. And of course, assuming $15 per hour would not be accurate at all. By the time you get a contractor involved and various trades you are paying significantly more than that, perhaps closer to $75 per hour on average. That gets you up to $200K, again, just in labor costs. DIY is a different matter. And yet, it isn't. At some point opportunity cost comes into the equation. It would be silly for me to DIY a home until I am retired or unemployed. The loss of income --opportunity cost-- of devoting thousands of hours to home-building would be massive. If we are talking about building homes at scale, except for some very specific locations and types (pre-fab?), I am not sure you could build something for $50K these days. For example, I have personally had to deal with LA County's Building for permits and plan-checks for my 13 kW solar array (yes, I DIY'd that). They easily added $50K, if not more, to my budget without reason or justification. The most grotesque example of this is that they made me put in 64,000 lbs of concrete into the footings for my ground-mount structure. An architect friend of mine told me I could support a four-story building with that amount of concrete. Why? Nobody knows. Once the plan checker made that decision there was no way to reason with him. Power trip? It was death by a thousand cuts.

bombcar 4y ago
"Small, livable" ... 2000 square feet ... Low-cost building is something like $85 a square, so 50k gets you about 600 square. It is totally doable and that's with "current" setups (these are often built as "cabins" etc. But the permits and other things destroy them (which is why so many "tiny homes" are technically mobile homes because then you just deal with the DMV). And you can buy brand new homes including land around here for $300k so I suspect that they didn't cost $200k in labor. But maybe they do?
- robomartin 4y ago
  Of course, these are generalizations. Also, I did say that the labor per square foot range was wide, 0.5 to 2. The truth of the matter is, as a percentage of the population, very few people live in 600 square foot homes. This is particularly true in the case of families. That's where you really have to start talking about double that space. Anyhow, all-up home construction via traditional means is not cheap. These days transportation costs likely add a non-trivial amount of money to the total. Costs do vary across the country, and so does median income. It would be interesting to find a comparison of construction costs of the kind of home the average family is looking for to the median family income for the area in question.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Ability to resell is also a huge consideration for most people, so almost everyone who is single or DINK lives in a house that ... would hold a family, because those resell the best. I don't even know if many people are building 1 bedroom houses anymore; those only seem to show up as condos now and then. Everything is built as a three bedroom and so all you have as an option is three bedroom.

bombcar 4y ago

"Small, livable" ... 2000 square feet ... Low-cost building is something like $85 a square, so 50k gets you about 600 square. It is totally doable and that's with "current" setups (these are often built as "cabins" etc. But the permits and other things destroy them (which is why so many "tiny homes" are technically mobile homes because then you just deal with the DMV). And you can buy brand new homes including land around here for $300k so I suspect that they didn't cost $200k in labor. But maybe they do?

robomartin 4y ago
Of course, these are generalizations. Also, I did say that the labor per square foot range was wide, 0.5 to 2. The truth of the matter is, as a percentage of the population, very few people live in 600 square foot homes. This is particularly true in the case of families. That's where you really have to start talking about double that space. Anyhow, all-up home construction via traditional means is not cheap. These days transportation costs likely add a non-trivial amount of money to the total. Costs do vary across the country, and so does median income. It would be interesting to find a comparison of construction costs of the kind of home the average family is looking for to the median family income for the area in question.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Ability to resell is also a huge consideration for most people, so almost everyone who is single or DINK lives in a house that ... would hold a family, because those resell the best. I don't even know if many people are building 1 bedroom houses anymore; those only seem to show up as condos now and then. Everything is built as a three bedroom and so all you have as an option is three bedroom.