8 ms·

Construction Time Again: The quality crisis in American building

46 points by NN88 3y ago

KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
The author seems to be tiptoeing around the real issues in the room, a combination of over regulation, need for well protected union jobs, and a refusal to embrace cheap labor. EU may have a bureaucracy but they are plenty happy to abuse cheap eastern European manpower when it comes to building things. Talk to some construction people in the US (many are Uber drivers, ask them), and they all have stories about how supervisors instruct them to take plenty of coffee breaks and do the minimum amount of work possible. In other countries building fast with good quality is perfectly doable. American housing and zoning laws are overly focused on compliance with issues like wheel chairs that significantly drive up costs. Go back to the bread and butter, as long as it pass civil engineering safety standards and emergency regulations, let it be built. Forget everything else, import labor from mexico and el Salvador if necessary. For every lazy unioned worker, there are plenty who want a slice of the American dream. Until computer vision can replace them, more competition in the labor market is the best solution to shoddy and overpriced workmanship.
- pilotneko 3y ago
  Do you typically run your market research on Uber drivers? Maybe you ask the bathroom attendant for tips on Crypto to purchase? There are physical limitations to construction. Sometimes things take time to set and/or cure. Even when doing the work, it’s not like you can have five guys working on a single pipe at the same time, hence the “breaks.”
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- fader 3y ago
  > American housing and zoning laws are overly focused on compliance with issues like wheel chairs that significantly drive up costs. Most accessibility affordances have a negligible cost when designed in from the beginning and are significantly more expensive to retrofit. (E.g. designing a staircase with an integrated ramp is cheap; adding a ramp to an existing staircase often is not.) Ensuring that everyone has equal access to society seems like a pretty worthwhile goal and I'd hate to see people locked out of it to save a fraction of a percent in costs.
- flangola7 3y ago
  My sister is in a wheelchair and will be for the rest of her life. Lack of accessibility is already a major hurdle, we should be making it better, not worse.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    I mean, being in a wheelchair is not ideal. But if only 1 person was in a wheelchair it wouldn't make sense to spend trillions of dollars making the world accessible to that person. There's tons of people with tons of disabilities. It just so happens that there's lots of people with certain disabilities, and if we can do things that aren't too cost prohibitive to make life way easier for a lot of people than we should. But it's still a debate about cost. And obviously different people will have different views.
- lmm 3y ago
  And yet the EU generally has stronger and more respected unions than the US. So it seems unlikely that's the issue.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > American housing and zoning laws are overly focused on compliance with issues like wheel chairs My EU aparment has an elevator, and you can get to every room in a wheelchair. Can you get into the upstairs bedroom on an average american home in a wheelchair?
  - mitchdoogle 3y ago
    What is your point? American apartment buildings also have elevators that can accommodate wheel chairs
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  Go back to 2007 with this rhetoric... this "cheap eastern European manpower" easily earns multiples of your US minimum wage.
kylehotchkiss 3y ago
some of the arguments about unified regulation here don’t seem to account for the many peculiar problems American homes need to solve… From hurricane resistance in Florida (tying the roof to the building) to lightning rods up a little north. Midwestern basements for tornado protection to east coast stilts for avoiding floods. To northeastern fireplaces and furnaces for keeping warm to insulation and good ductwork for keeping cool in Arizona. To earthquake resistance in California to keeping the house dry in Washington. And roofs to hold the load of snow in Montana. It’s incredible we have a common resource (timber) to solve the large number of needs our collective housing market requires. And even with those unique needs, houses will feel quite similar and consistent throughout the country. Prefabrication would be a different market for every need, not a massive win in market efficiency (trailer homes for example were an attempt to accomplish this but didn’t provide a format better than a stationary house) I wish they used heavier lumber to build homes and treated it for flame resistance better. I lived in a concrete apartment in Asia for a few years. The walls were hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and there were so many crevices in the wall for bugs to colonize. I very very quickly appreciated the wood homes I grew up in - even the kitchen floor being wooden and not concrete is such a nice comfort for my feet and knees
- DigiDigiorno 3y ago
  "From hurricane resistance in Florida (tying the roof to the building) to lightning rods up a little north." Why are lightning rods needed up north, or at least moreso, compared to Florida? The area between Orlando and Tampa in FL is the lightning capital of the US. As in, it gets the most strikes per square mile in the US.
  - kylehotchkiss 3y ago
    Unique to my own experience with them as a kid, when I realized how common they were on homes in Virginia Beach
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  > I wish they used heavier lumber Softwood lumber, especially Douglas Fir, grows so fast that we farm it here. It's a crop! Thirty or forty year cycle. This is what Europeans never understand, because they have no native Douglas Fir over there. The mutation that lets them grow so fast isn't found in any of Europe's native species (which are mostly hardwoods anyways): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5592940 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5592940 > and treated it for flame resistance better. I don't. Almost all wood treatments off-gas toxic chemicals. The floor of my wellhouse is treated lumber and I don't care to spend much time in there. It's great for making decks though. Downside is that the treatments corrode screws and nails, so you have to use epoxy-coated fasteners but even those don't last more than a decade or two. Flame resistance is what sheetrock is for.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Nice Depeche Mode reference here; caught my eye for sure.
GenerWork 3y ago
I find the articles take on the quality of wood used for framing to be strange. They talk about how Europe does it (kiln dried), but they don't mention how it's done here in the US. It seems that the author is suggesting that houses here in the US are built primarily out of green wood (i.e. wood that hasn't been air or kiln dried). I also think that the author needs to come to Florida and look at new home construction. The vast majority of new SFH homes being built are concrete block due to various factors (hurricanes, termites, etc).
- ohthatsnotright 3y ago
  I've bought a lot of "kiln dried" lumber in the US that has a moisture content well above allowable limits. Don't get me started on how wet PT lumber is here. Frankly, green wood would probably be better or easier to manage than the over-wet garbage available.
wunderland 3y ago
> From building codes to systems of labor and construction, everything is designed with the detached single-family home in mind: zoning that bans apartments (and density and affordability) over large swaths of urban America; a mortgage, financing, and appraisal system with a long history of inequity and racism; and systems of neighborhood government and community feedback that favor homeowners. Changing this system, from both a cultural and construction perspective, is like “turning around a tanker ship,” Hogan says. This nails it. American “cities” are mostly low-density sprawls where everyone has a useless yard surrounding their home which serves as mostly an aesthetic flourish. But rebuilding American cities with functional parks and high-density housing and everything in walking distance is deeply unpopular because, like most of this, Americans just don’t know what they’re missing because they’ve been sold a dead-end dream.
- throwawa14223 3y ago
  It isn't just aesthetic. I can't stand living in dense housing because, always knowing there are people nearby takes such a mental toll. I finally live somewhere not at all dense and it is paradise by comparison.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  > But rebuilding American cities with functional parks and high-density housing and everything in walking distance is deeply unpopular because Because you'd need to bulldoze everyone's existing houses to replace them with the high density housing to be able to use that city space.
  - anon291 3y ago
    No you actually do not. My neighborhood is an old late 19th century suburb that slowly urbanized and is now "downtown". A lot of the original housing is still there but now converted to an office building or restaurant with a facade. The only thing stopping this in many modern American suburbs are useless zoning codes. When you mention allowing businesses in subdivisions people act as if you're suggesting a McDonald's and a Walmart instead of a local breakfast shop and cafe and a small salon and a cute general store. But that's really all thats necessary. It takes just a tiny bit to turn a house into a suitable business.
shrubble 3y ago
Blaming single family homes is a crowd-pleaser; but the first example mentioned is of a house that cut energy use by 85% while still being a single family home. The problems are not a lack of regulation but too much, which drives the push for all the sameness you see in construction methods; it's stagnation. If you don't believe me, go to your library and leaf through the IRBC, the international residential building code, which is incorporated by reference into building code ordinances everywhere...
- jamilton 3y ago
  IMO that points to the problem being incorrect regulation, not too much or too little.
  - KirillPanov 3y ago
    This is sort of like "communism works, but everybody who's tried it so far was doing it wrong". Regulations lack any kind of competitive mechanism to forcibly correct them, even in the face of unwilling regulators. This is the fundamental problem. Note that competition doesn't have to mean markets. Universities compete fiercely with each other for the best students, and it works. Researchers compete with each other for space in the most prestigious journals (and journals with each other to attract the best articles!). None of these are markets, but they are competitive, which regulatory apparatus is not.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > a house that cut energy use by 85% while still being a single family home. > The problems are not a lack of regulation but too much Name one example in the past 50 years when the marlet has improved energy efficiency of a consumer product without government intervention. Britain was building houses without insulation in the walls, manufacturers were building dishwashers and other household appliances that would consume over 10 W when they are switched off. Vacuum cleaner manufacturers still routinely commit fraud, because nobody tests this stuff
  - shrubble 3y ago
helen___keller 3y ago
There’s a lot of comments posting personal preference in housing, but that’s basically irrelevant. Density and urban planning basically comes down to freedom. How much freedom do we allow? On one end of the spectrum, the fully suburban city (like your average American city) allows virtually no freedom. As land value rises, you hit a maximum density (prescribed by minimum lot size, maximum height, minimum lot setbacks, parking requirements, and maximum number of housing units) and this becomes the shape of the city. If you allow more freedom on some or all of these dimensions, then as land value rises developers will purchase lots and infill or redevelop. The rest of the city stuff that urbanists talk about (trains, bike lanes, parks and walkability, etc) all become increasingly valuable to everybody as density goes up. So the options are freedom or suburbs. Many Americans prefer suburbs, which is understandable. The American suburban dream is a beautiful one, but undoubtedly built to suppress freedom (from inception: a way to allow middle class white people to escape the minorities and poors of the city in post-war america, keeping them away through redlining first and then by stringent zoning and expensive housing later)
apatil 3y ago
Two questions for people who live in rural areas in homes that were built in a more modern way. - Do you have issues with pests? More precisely, how often do you have to use mousetraps or call an exterminator? - What's your recurring home maintenance schedule like? Two things that really bother me about American-style homes are the seemingly rapid deterioration and the failure to design out pests. It's easy for a stick-frame building to develop a defect sufficient to allow mouse ingress, and once inside, the hollow walls afford them many inaccessible places to nest. I really hate having to regularly kill, or at best relocate and traumatize, creatures that are just looking for a safe place to spend the winter. I have imagined that European-style concrete buildings, with tight-fitting prefab components, would be easier to own, but I have never actually asked anyone with a comparably located home.
bradreaves2 3y ago
The article focuses on macro-level construction techniques and materials. As an American, the thing I find most unnerving is the low standard of workmanship and materials in 21st century homes of middle-class neighborhoods. Incompetent installation of plumbing, electrical, and HVAC lead to all sorts of problems for the homeowner soon after purchase. Finish materials -- even safety critical ones like railings and bannisters -- are the cheapest possible and need replacing within the first decade of ownership. "Builder-grade" means "barely serviceable." I bought a house built in the late 1970's -- late enough that there's no lead or asbestos, but early enough that material quality and construction was still decent. The cabinets are original and look new. The trim material throughout is all real wood. It was hit by a tornado before I was born and everything is still solid. A friend has bought several "newer" houses and is always complaining about how nothing works right and is always breaking. I suggested he look into an older home, but he was priced out in his town. He also was unwilling to exchange home size for build quality like I was. I'm told that if you hire custom builders you can get better craftsmanship and materials, but it's unclear if good build quality is actually reflected at sale time.

46 points by NN88 3y ago

The author seems to be tiptoeing around the real issues in the room, a combination of over regulation, need for well protected union jobs, and a refusal to embrace cheap labor. EU may have a bureaucracy but they are plenty happy to abuse cheap eastern European manpower when it comes to building things. Talk to some construction people in the US (many are Uber drivers, ask them), and they all have stories about how supervisors instruct them to take plenty of coffee breaks and do the minimum amount of work possible. In other countries building fast with good quality is perfectly doable. American housing and zoning laws are overly focused on compliance with issues like wheel chairs that significantly drive up costs. Go back to the bread and butter, as long as it pass civil engineering safety standards and emergency regulations, let it be built. Forget everything else, import labor from mexico and el Salvador if necessary. For every lazy unioned worker, there are plenty who want a slice of the American dream. Until computer vision can replace them, more competition in the labor market is the best solution to shoddy and overpriced workmanship.

pilotneko 3y ago
Do you typically run your market research on Uber drivers? Maybe you ask the bathroom attendant for tips on Crypto to purchase? There are physical limitations to construction. Sometimes things take time to set and/or cure. Even when doing the work, it’s not like you can have five guys working on a single pipe at the same time, hence the “breaks.”
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
fader 3y ago
> American housing and zoning laws are overly focused on compliance with issues like wheel chairs that significantly drive up costs. Most accessibility affordances have a negligible cost when designed in from the beginning and are significantly more expensive to retrofit. (E.g. designing a staircase with an integrated ramp is cheap; adding a ramp to an existing staircase often is not.) Ensuring that everyone has equal access to society seems like a pretty worthwhile goal and I'd hate to see people locked out of it to save a fraction of a percent in costs.
flangola7 3y ago
My sister is in a wheelchair and will be for the rest of her life. Lack of accessibility is already a major hurdle, we should be making it better, not worse.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  I mean, being in a wheelchair is not ideal. But if only 1 person was in a wheelchair it wouldn't make sense to spend trillions of dollars making the world accessible to that person. There's tons of people with tons of disabilities. It just so happens that there's lots of people with certain disabilities, and if we can do things that aren't too cost prohibitive to make life way easier for a lot of people than we should. But it's still a debate about cost. And obviously different people will have different views.
lmm 3y ago
And yet the EU generally has stronger and more respected unions than the US. So it seems unlikely that's the issue.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> American housing and zoning laws are overly focused on compliance with issues like wheel chairs My EU aparment has an elevator, and you can get to every room in a wheelchair. Can you get into the upstairs bedroom on an average american home in a wheelchair?
- mitchdoogle 3y ago
  What is your point? American apartment buildings also have elevators that can accommodate wheel chairs
KptMarchewa 3y ago
Go back to 2007 with this rhetoric... this "cheap eastern European manpower" easily earns multiples of your US minimum wage.

kylehotchkiss 3y ago

some of the arguments about unified regulation here don’t seem to account for the many peculiar problems American homes need to solve… From hurricane resistance in Florida (tying the roof to the building) to lightning rods up a little north. Midwestern basements for tornado protection to east coast stilts for avoiding floods. To northeastern fireplaces and furnaces for keeping warm to insulation and good ductwork for keeping cool in Arizona. To earthquake resistance in California to keeping the house dry in Washington. And roofs to hold the load of snow in Montana. It’s incredible we have a common resource (timber) to solve the large number of needs our collective housing market requires. And even with those unique needs, houses will feel quite similar and consistent throughout the country. Prefabrication would be a different market for every need, not a massive win in market efficiency (trailer homes for example were an attempt to accomplish this but didn’t provide a format better than a stationary house) I wish they used heavier lumber to build homes and treated it for flame resistance better. I lived in a concrete apartment in Asia for a few years. The walls were hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and there were so many crevices in the wall for bugs to colonize. I very very quickly appreciated the wood homes I grew up in - even the kitchen floor being wooden and not concrete is such a nice comfort for my feet and knees

DigiDigiorno 3y ago
"From hurricane resistance in Florida (tying the roof to the building) to lightning rods up a little north." Why are lightning rods needed up north, or at least moreso, compared to Florida? The area between Orlando and Tampa in FL is the lightning capital of the US. As in, it gets the most strikes per square mile in the US.
- kylehotchkiss 3y ago
  Unique to my own experience with them as a kid, when I realized how common they were on homes in Virginia Beach
KirillPanov 3y ago
> I wish they used heavier lumber Softwood lumber, especially Douglas Fir, grows so fast that we farm it here. It's a crop! Thirty or forty year cycle. This is what Europeans never understand, because they have no native Douglas Fir over there. The mutation that lets them grow so fast isn't found in any of Europe's native species (which are mostly hardwoods anyways): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5592940 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5592940 > and treated it for flame resistance better. I don't. Almost all wood treatments off-gas toxic chemicals. The floor of my wellhouse is treated lumber and I don't care to spend much time in there. It's great for making decks though. Downside is that the treatments corrode screws and nails, so you have to use epoxy-coated fasteners but even those don't last more than a decade or two. Flame resistance is what sheetrock is for.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

Nice Depeche Mode reference here; caught my eye for sure.

GenerWork 3y ago

I find the articles take on the quality of wood used for framing to be strange. They talk about how Europe does it (kiln dried), but they don't mention how it's done here in the US. It seems that the author is suggesting that houses here in the US are built primarily out of green wood (i.e. wood that hasn't been air or kiln dried). I also think that the author needs to come to Florida and look at new home construction. The vast majority of new SFH homes being built are concrete block due to various factors (hurricanes, termites, etc).

ohthatsnotright 3y ago
I've bought a lot of "kiln dried" lumber in the US that has a moisture content well above allowable limits. Don't get me started on how wet PT lumber is here. Frankly, green wood would probably be better or easier to manage than the over-wet garbage available.

wunderland 3y ago

> From building codes to systems of labor and construction, everything is designed with the detached single-family home in mind: zoning that bans apartments (and density and affordability) over large swaths of urban America; a mortgage, financing, and appraisal system with a long history of inequity and racism; and systems of neighborhood government and community feedback that favor homeowners. Changing this system, from both a cultural and construction perspective, is like “turning around a tanker ship,” Hogan says. This nails it. American “cities” are mostly low-density sprawls where everyone has a useless yard surrounding their home which serves as mostly an aesthetic flourish. But rebuilding American cities with functional parks and high-density housing and everything in walking distance is deeply unpopular because, like most of this, Americans just don’t know what they’re missing because they’ve been sold a dead-end dream.

throwawa14223 3y ago
It isn't just aesthetic. I can't stand living in dense housing because, always knowing there are people nearby takes such a mental toll. I finally live somewhere not at all dense and it is paradise by comparison.
giantrobot 3y ago
> But rebuilding American cities with functional parks and high-density housing and everything in walking distance is deeply unpopular because Because you'd need to bulldoze everyone's existing houses to replace them with the high density housing to be able to use that city space.
- anon291 3y ago
  No you actually do not. My neighborhood is an old late 19th century suburb that slowly urbanized and is now "downtown". A lot of the original housing is still there but now converted to an office building or restaurant with a facade. The only thing stopping this in many modern American suburbs are useless zoning codes. When you mention allowing businesses in subdivisions people act as if you're suggesting a McDonald's and a Walmart instead of a local breakfast shop and cafe and a small salon and a cute general store. But that's really all thats necessary. It takes just a tiny bit to turn a house into a suitable business.

shrubble 3y ago

Blaming single family homes is a crowd-pleaser; but the first example mentioned is of a house that cut energy use by 85% while still being a single family home. The problems are not a lack of regulation but too much, which drives the push for all the sameness you see in construction methods; it's stagnation. If you don't believe me, go to your library and leaf through the IRBC, the international residential building code, which is incorporated by reference into building code ordinances everywhere...

jamilton 3y ago
IMO that points to the problem being incorrect regulation, not too much or too little.
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  This is sort of like "communism works, but everybody who's tried it so far was doing it wrong". Regulations lack any kind of competitive mechanism to forcibly correct them, even in the face of unwilling regulators. This is the fundamental problem. Note that competition doesn't have to mean markets. Universities compete fiercely with each other for the best students, and it works. Researchers compete with each other for space in the most prestigious journals (and journals with each other to attract the best articles!). None of these are markets, but they are competitive, which regulatory apparatus is not.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> a house that cut energy use by 85% while still being a single family home. > The problems are not a lack of regulation but too much Name one example in the past 50 years when the marlet has improved energy efficiency of a consumer product without government intervention. Britain was building houses without insulation in the walls, manufacturers were building dishwashers and other household appliances that would consume over 10 W when they are switched off. Vacuum cleaner manufacturers still routinely commit fraud, because nobody tests this stuff
- shrubble 3y ago

helen___keller 3y ago

There’s a lot of comments posting personal preference in housing, but that’s basically irrelevant. Density and urban planning basically comes down to freedom. How much freedom do we allow? On one end of the spectrum, the fully suburban city (like your average American city) allows virtually no freedom. As land value rises, you hit a maximum density (prescribed by minimum lot size, maximum height, minimum lot setbacks, parking requirements, and maximum number of housing units) and this becomes the shape of the city. If you allow more freedom on some or all of these dimensions, then as land value rises developers will purchase lots and infill or redevelop. The rest of the city stuff that urbanists talk about (trains, bike lanes, parks and walkability, etc) all become increasingly valuable to everybody as density goes up. So the options are freedom or suburbs. Many Americans prefer suburbs, which is understandable. The American suburban dream is a beautiful one, but undoubtedly built to suppress freedom (from inception: a way to allow middle class white people to escape the minorities and poors of the city in post-war america, keeping them away through redlining first and then by stringent zoning and expensive housing later)

apatil 3y ago

Two questions for people who live in rural areas in homes that were built in a more modern way. - Do you have issues with pests? More precisely, how often do you have to use mousetraps or call an exterminator? - What's your recurring home maintenance schedule like? Two things that really bother me about American-style homes are the seemingly rapid deterioration and the failure to design out pests. It's easy for a stick-frame building to develop a defect sufficient to allow mouse ingress, and once inside, the hollow walls afford them many inaccessible places to nest. I really hate having to regularly kill, or at best relocate and traumatize, creatures that are just looking for a safe place to spend the winter. I have imagined that European-style concrete buildings, with tight-fitting prefab components, would be easier to own, but I have never actually asked anyone with a comparably located home.

bradreaves2 3y ago

The article focuses on macro-level construction techniques and materials. As an American, the thing I find most unnerving is the low standard of workmanship and materials in 21st century homes of middle-class neighborhoods. Incompetent installation of plumbing, electrical, and HVAC lead to all sorts of problems for the homeowner soon after purchase. Finish materials -- even safety critical ones like railings and bannisters -- are the cheapest possible and need replacing within the first decade of ownership. "Builder-grade" means "barely serviceable." I bought a house built in the late 1970's -- late enough that there's no lead or asbestos, but early enough that material quality and construction was still decent. The cabinets are original and look new. The trim material throughout is all real wood. It was hit by a tornado before I was born and everything is still solid. A friend has bought several "newer" houses and is always complaining about how nothing works right and is always breaking. I suggested he look into an older home, but he was priced out in his town. He also was unwilling to exchange home size for build quality like I was. I'm told that if you hire custom builders you can get better craftsmanship and materials, but it's unclear if good build quality is actually reflected at sale time.