3 ms·

I know the economics must somehow make sense, but it's still hard to wrap my head around the fact that even with quite literally once-unimaginable computing pow

I know the economics must somehow make sense, but it's still hard to wrap my head around the fact that even with quite literally once-unimaginable computing power, semi-magical modern materials, structural theory, decades of recorded research and testing, international standardisation, leaps in simulations, optimisation, robotics, pneumatics, hydraulics, electronics, networking, transmission, logistics and supply chain engineering, economies of scale that dwarf the imagination of the most ardent technologist of yesteryear....humans still can't stack bricks or nail frames cheaply enough to reliably put roofs over heads. It's a hell of a Red Queen thing.

bigbillheck 3y ago
"Won't", not "can't".
- gravescale 3y ago
  You're right, but there's a lot of people here making excuses predicated on treating entirely socially-voluntary problems (like providing no public transport, or allowing regulatory capture to inflate costs) as laws of nature.
spaniard89277 3y ago
We can do that. But we can't make new space.
- pegasus 3y ago
  If the footprint is so expensive, you'd expect more investment in building quality, not less.
  - azulster 3y ago
    bricks and wood are unable to maximize the quality of a limited footprint. an expensive plot of land in a city needs to be built to certain quality standards to make sure it is affordable and safe. this is only possible with steel and concrete. brick and wood alone can't build safely and cheaply over 3 stories
    - pas 3y ago
      Of course depending on the definition, but light-framed wood is good for around 5 stories. And mass timber (eg. CLT - cross-laminated timber) is good up to ~20. And for the foundation concrete is still needed. But a lighter one. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/mass-timber-is-great-but-it-will https://www.construction-physics.com/p/mass-timber-is-great-...
    - pchristensen 3y ago
      Much of American cities and outer areas of are 0 stories (big lots, wide roads, etc), or maybe 1-2. Building technology is not the limiting factor.
    - nick__m 3y ago
      brick and wood alone can't build safely and cheaply over 3 stories Tell that to those architects: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/worlds-tallest-wooden-skyscraper-greenlit https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/worlds-tallest-woo...
      - astrange 3y ago
        That's not plain wood like American houses are made of, it's a new kind of engineered material that's made out of wood called CLT.
  - hannasanarion 3y ago
    Because the footprint is so expensive, you don't have the cash to invest in quality without making the building too expensive for the people who are going to be using it. And the footprint isn't the only thing that's more expensive, all the cool new technologies that your grandparent comment brought up are all more expensive to implement than structures without them. The existence of those technologies implies the existence of skilled professionals to plan and install them. It used to be that you just needed to pay your architect and engineer and builders, now you gotta also pay your crane operators and electricians and plumbers and acoustic consultants, and fire protection experts, and geologists, and network engineers, and energy consultants, and accessibility consultants too and they all want to be paid well for their expertise. The proliferation of skilled professionals reduces the appetite in the population in general for unskilled manual labor, so that gets more scarce and expensive too. Gotta pay the builders well or else they'll quit and change careers to be one of those professional types. Add to that the regulatory and compliance requirements that raises the floor of acceptable quality (building MUST be energy efficient, accessible, fire-safe, earthquake-safe, minimally ecologically impactful, etc etc etc) and your wiggle room for where to focus your "quality" budget is pretty tiny and exterior aesthetics rapidly sinks to the bottom of that list. [disclaimer: I actually disagree with the people who say that new buildings are ugly. I actually like the modernist and international style aesthetics that are artistic declarations of raw functionality. My town has a brutalist city hall where the council chamber juts out in an overhang, so when you walk by you can look at it and say "that funky structural appendix is the exact room where people are making important decisions at this very moment" which I think is cool. This post-modern concert hall just opened a few blocks from me and I think it's pretty sexy: https://wysomusic.org/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2021-11-16-at-11.46.55-AM-1024x514.png https://wysomusic.org/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2021-11... ]
- balfirevic 3y ago
  > We can do that. Can we? Construction is heavily impacted by cost disease. My friend recently had a house built and the plot of land was around 15% of the cost of the entire project. The land in more premium location would still end up under 30% of total cost.
pas 3y ago
Short answer to the riddle is: not enough demand to warrant investment (because you would need a long string of a few magnitudes bigger projects). Basically, the same structural problem that plagues nuclear power plant construction. All those fancy technological advancements did almost nothing to the typical housing construction, it's still a lot of manual work, a lot of specialized tasks (site prep, foundation, frame/structural stuff, roof, insulation, plumbing, sewage, wiring, HVAC, connecting utilities), a ton of waiting, lots of logistics. An enormous amount of babysitting (project management) of the builders, because everything is basically custom/one-off. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-tasks-have-gotten https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-ta... cheaper https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-economies-of https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-... scale https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-its-hard-to-innovate-in-construction https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-its-hard-to-innov...
hannasanarion 3y ago
There's a lot of costs that go into construction, the actual expense of putting together the parts to make the thing was at one time the biggest one, but not any more. With all those new technologies that increase the efficiency of buildings and construction come technicians who expect to be paid well for their expertise, so for every manual job removed there's an expert who needs to be paid about as much or more to operate or plan the labor-saving technology so implementing the technology may not actually reduce the cost to the builder at all. For the parts that do still require manual labor, that's been getting a lot more expensive and hard to find, because hand-in-hand with people specializing in all these fancy new technologies, the appetite for manual labor employment in developed economies has fallen, which pushes up the cost of the parts of construction that technologies hasn't changed. Regulations and requirements have also massively proliferated in the last century. The number of inspections and approvals that any piece of construction needs is pretty crazy compared to the prewar era, plus new requirements and design limitations set by law that, while good for society (anti-fire, disability access), can sometimes drive up costs or limit design choices because ramps take more space than stairs and fire sprinklers represent a doubling of the amount of plumbing work you need to do. Land has gotten progressively more expensive as it has become more scarce. Sprawl kinda reached the limit of what commuters are willing to tolerate in the 90s, so nobody can do cheap greenfill development anymore (anecdote, my parents had a new house built on the outskirts of Phoenix in 2006, with a 70 minute minimum driving commute, which I would absofuckinglutely never tolerate for myself): you need to buy more expensive interior land to redevelop. God help you if your local land use regulations require you to provide free parking, in which case you may be forbidden from building on as much as 2/3 of that very expensive land you just bought.

bigbillheck 3y ago

"Won't", not "can't".

gravescale 3y ago
You're right, but there's a lot of people here making excuses predicated on treating entirely socially-voluntary problems (like providing no public transport, or allowing regulatory capture to inflate costs) as laws of nature.

spaniard89277 3y ago

We can do that. But we can't make new space.

pegasus 3y ago
If the footprint is so expensive, you'd expect more investment in building quality, not less.
- azulster 3y ago
  bricks and wood are unable to maximize the quality of a limited footprint. an expensive plot of land in a city needs to be built to certain quality standards to make sure it is affordable and safe. this is only possible with steel and concrete. brick and wood alone can't build safely and cheaply over 3 stories
  - pas 3y ago
    Of course depending on the definition, but light-framed wood is good for around 5 stories. And mass timber (eg. CLT - cross-laminated timber) is good up to ~20. And for the foundation concrete is still needed. But a lighter one. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/mass-timber-is-great-but-it-will https://www.construction-physics.com/p/mass-timber-is-great-...
  - pchristensen 3y ago
    Much of American cities and outer areas of are 0 stories (big lots, wide roads, etc), or maybe 1-2. Building technology is not the limiting factor.
  - nick__m 3y ago
    brick and wood alone can't build safely and cheaply over 3 stories Tell that to those architects: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/worlds-tallest-wooden-skyscraper-greenlit https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/worlds-tallest-woo...
    - astrange 3y ago
      That's not plain wood like American houses are made of, it's a new kind of engineered material that's made out of wood called CLT.
- hannasanarion 3y ago
  Because the footprint is so expensive, you don't have the cash to invest in quality without making the building too expensive for the people who are going to be using it. And the footprint isn't the only thing that's more expensive, all the cool new technologies that your grandparent comment brought up are all more expensive to implement than structures without them. The existence of those technologies implies the existence of skilled professionals to plan and install them. It used to be that you just needed to pay your architect and engineer and builders, now you gotta also pay your crane operators and electricians and plumbers and acoustic consultants, and fire protection experts, and geologists, and network engineers, and energy consultants, and accessibility consultants too and they all want to be paid well for their expertise. The proliferation of skilled professionals reduces the appetite in the population in general for unskilled manual labor, so that gets more scarce and expensive too. Gotta pay the builders well or else they'll quit and change careers to be one of those professional types. Add to that the regulatory and compliance requirements that raises the floor of acceptable quality (building MUST be energy efficient, accessible, fire-safe, earthquake-safe, minimally ecologically impactful, etc etc etc) and your wiggle room for where to focus your "quality" budget is pretty tiny and exterior aesthetics rapidly sinks to the bottom of that list. [disclaimer: I actually disagree with the people who say that new buildings are ugly. I actually like the modernist and international style aesthetics that are artistic declarations of raw functionality. My town has a brutalist city hall where the council chamber juts out in an overhang, so when you walk by you can look at it and say "that funky structural appendix is the exact room where people are making important decisions at this very moment" which I think is cool. This post-modern concert hall just opened a few blocks from me and I think it's pretty sexy: https://wysomusic.org/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2021-11-16-at-11.46.55-AM-1024x514.png https://wysomusic.org/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2021-11... ]
balfirevic 3y ago
> We can do that. Can we? Construction is heavily impacted by cost disease. My friend recently had a house built and the plot of land was around 15% of the cost of the entire project. The land in more premium location would still end up under 30% of total cost.

pas 3y ago

Short answer to the riddle is: not enough demand to warrant investment (because you would need a long string of a few magnitudes bigger projects). Basically, the same structural problem that plagues nuclear power plant construction. All those fancy technological advancements did almost nothing to the typical housing construction, it's still a lot of manual work, a lot of specialized tasks (site prep, foundation, frame/structural stuff, roof, insulation, plumbing, sewage, wiring, HVAC, connecting utilities), a ton of waiting, lots of logistics. An enormous amount of babysitting (project management) of the builders, because everything is basically custom/one-off. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-tasks-have-gotten https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-ta... cheaper https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-economies-of https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-... scale https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-its-hard-to-innovate-in-construction https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-its-hard-to-innov...

hannasanarion 3y ago

There's a lot of costs that go into construction, the actual expense of putting together the parts to make the thing was at one time the biggest one, but not any more. With all those new technologies that increase the efficiency of buildings and construction come technicians who expect to be paid well for their expertise, so for every manual job removed there's an expert who needs to be paid about as much or more to operate or plan the labor-saving technology so implementing the technology may not actually reduce the cost to the builder at all. For the parts that do still require manual labor, that's been getting a lot more expensive and hard to find, because hand-in-hand with people specializing in all these fancy new technologies, the appetite for manual labor employment in developed economies has fallen, which pushes up the cost of the parts of construction that technologies hasn't changed. Regulations and requirements have also massively proliferated in the last century. The number of inspections and approvals that any piece of construction needs is pretty crazy compared to the prewar era, plus new requirements and design limitations set by law that, while good for society (anti-fire, disability access), can sometimes drive up costs or limit design choices because ramps take more space than stairs and fire sprinklers represent a doubling of the amount of plumbing work you need to do. Land has gotten progressively more expensive as it has become more scarce. Sprawl kinda reached the limit of what commuters are willing to tolerate in the 90s, so nobody can do cheap greenfill development anymore (anecdote, my parents had a new house built on the outskirts of Phoenix in 2006, with a 70 minute minimum driving commute, which I would absofuckinglutely never tolerate for myself): you need to buy more expensive interior land to redevelop. God help you if your local land use regulations require you to provide free parking, in which case you may be forbidden from building on as much as 2/3 of that very expensive land you just bought.