4 ms·

To me, it has always seemed completely bonkers that for most people, the roof over their head should be their #1 expense throughout their adult lives. It boggl

by leobg 3y ago

To me, it has always seemed completely bonkers that for most people, the roof over their head should be their #1 expense throughout their adult lives. It boggles my mind that walls made of bricks that someone laid some 50 years back along with a bunch of pipes are more expensive today than my Tesla Model X… and by a factor of 5 to 10. Of course, a house is more in terms of pure weight of material. But the again, that material is only dirt. It’s unreasonable that this should be something you’d be paying offf month after month, over decades. I understand that for people in urban areas, thei main part of their housing cost is actually competing with other people who’d like to live in the same place. I’m talking about construction cost only.

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
There are plenty of things that have departed from cost-based pricing into supply and demand territory. That’s how things very often tend to go. Housing is just…special.
oconnor663 3y ago
To be fair, it's not really the bricks that are so expensive. It's the dirt :)
- bombcar 3y ago
  Not around here, I can get the dirt for $15k, $50k if all services are ready for hookup. The bricks add another $250k, which is why the used houses go for somewhat less.
  - leobg 3y ago
    I want to buy a hydraulic press, and then fabricate the walls for my house right from the dirt at the building site. Like when they built The Dakota.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Adobe is still used in the southwest sometimes, and works fine. Saves somewhat on the materials, but a lot of the cost is labor and things like plumbing, electrical, etc.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    > The bricks add another $250k Are these gold plated? That seems absurdly high.
    - HWR_14 3y ago
      I assume that's adding the labor and other construction materials. "Bricks" just means the cost of building a house on a vacant lot.
    - IshKebab 3y ago
      He doesn't literally mean only the bricks. He means the construction of the house. That's very cheap depending on the house. Also you maybe be underestimating how expensive bricks are! A brick house might have 10k bricks and fancy ones can cost like £2 each, so that's £20k literally just on the materials for the outer skin. House construction is expensive because it uses a ton of materials (even if per kg the material is cheap) and a ton of labour.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Exactly. In the US even things that look like brick houses aren't actually brick but the outer veneer. But whatever the materials, you're looking at a minimum of $100k for materials, and then the rest is labor and other expenses (like delivery, excavation, etc). Even a "manufactured home" (think: doublewide) costs something like $80-$100k before delivery these days.
        fragmede 3y ago
        but are they charging that much based on it costs to make a double wide, or is it based on what the market will bear. If a custom home costs X, you'd charge X-a little bit to be competitive, not cost of materials * a reasonable markup.
jajko 3y ago
Well you pay mostly for land in any good location, even with apartments. Then check how long it takes to build some apartment building, team of say 10 people working with some expensive machinery for a year. Plus all the materials of which there are literal truckloads. Back home people do these mostly by themselves and friends/family, and the price aint that much lower. Plus for certain things you really need a professional company, even construction workers building their own homes hire companies for some parts of it.
- bombcar 3y ago
  You can play around here for fun: https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/the-project-store/home-projects/c-1474668109497.htm https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/the-project-... A Midwest hardware store that will show the price of a “house kit” basically. All the materials, none of the labor. Put in 55440 as a Zip if outside the area.
- leobg 3y ago
  My wife and I were on the Seychelles some time back. Our neighbor there was some 60 year old British guy. He was building a house on his land by himself, to rent out as a vacation home. He’d be working during the day and take out his kayak at sunset. He let me look over his shoulders for a bit. Said he had even done the plans for the permit himself. He said anyone can do it. And this house is on the Seychelles - high humidity, heavy thunderstorms. I’m not saying building a house is trivial technology. People can die if you do it wrong. But most of us are working with stuff that is way more complicated than that every single day. If a 60 year old dude on the Seychelles can do it by himself, a proper building company with access to machinery and materials should be able to do it for a price of months of income - not years.
  - jajko 3y ago
    Sure, but I suspect some guy building some home for himself in some tropical paradise has different construction needs than most of the folks here, including me. We have snow in the winter for example, which changes literally everything. And then there is whole world of regulations for given country, Seychelles probably have 10% of the complexity and requirements of typical G7 country. Also, if that guy is doing electricity by himself he is a (dangerous) fool. As I said - it takes 10 professionals easily a year to build something. It simply does. Just check how their daily work looks like - its messy just like other types of projects, you have unforeseen problems, people drop sick or injured, suppliers can fail to deliver things on time etc. From IT world - the stuff I hack together in a week takes altogether to bring live 6 months easily, since initial dev is rather small part of it. So maybe adjust your expectations to reality, its not gonna adjust to you.
Negitivefrags 3y ago
Consider how many man years it takes to build a house. It might take 20 people a full time year to build your house (including all the time spent creating the materials). If we lived in a truely equal society where everyone was paid the same amount, you should therefore expect it to take 20 full time years of your life to pay for it.
- leobg 3y ago
  That’s what I was thinking, too: How long would it take a layman to build his own house, say from bricks. 1 year full time? Probably more. 10? Probably less. So now, if it’s done not buy a layperson but by someone specialized with big machinery and procurement channels set up, it should be much faster. Say, half a year. So why should I pay more than 2x that? (It’s a bit like with bread these days. If I can make a Tartine league bread for $5 in my goddamn home oven, including electricity, then why should I pay $8 for a bread that is much worse at a bakery outlet that sells stuff made at economies of scale? That’s not capitalism. It’s banking on people not being able anymore to value. It’s treating buyers not as competent individuals, but as dumb herd driven consumers. That approach is clearly working. But I’m attracted to those pockets and niches where it’s not true. Like HN.)
  - concordDance 3y ago
    Just brick laying wouldn't take even close to a year. The 10,000 bricks to lay would take around 200 hours at a minute per brick (which seems a lot slower than I remember being in my youth[1]). Most of the man hours are not in the crude house frame, but in everything else, particularly finishings. Also, the transactions costs for a large number of specialists are considerable. [1] and indeed, looks like a careful bricklayer will be doing 4 a minute or so: https://youtu.be/jDgEqhz94-Y?si=oKxmQ-QAXEDC13h4 https://youtu.be/jDgEqhz94-Y?si=oKxmQ-QAXEDC13h4
  - emporas 3y ago
    Speaking of personal experience: 3 people working most of the time part-time (half the day), it took almost 7 years to build a 3 floor building. It was me: 8 to 15 years old, my brother 5 to 13 years old, and my father. It includes almost all of the hard costs the article mentions except the foundation, brick laying, electrical, plumbing, windows, more concrete around the house, garage, and a myriad other things. Sometimes we hired 1 or 2 people, once a month or something. If all people were like my father, mathematician, polymath, expert in everything electrical, wood and metal constructions, with connections to many other engineers who regularly ask for advice, then the estimated total cost of building a 3 floor house is around 100.000 euros. That's the cost of materials, but probably less than that, 80.000 or something. The estimated time for 3 adults (not children - teenagers), to build a 120 m^2 per floor building, all 3 floors, is 3-4 years. Anyway, i think housing-transportation and many other things, will become free, once we move to carbon based buildings, vehicles and so on (see graphene). It is only carbon that offers us, strength of materials, flexibility, lightweight-ness, variety of materials so as to have everything in abundance. Abundance, like, personal skyscrapers, that kind of abundance.
class3shock 3y ago
Tesla has roughly 140K employees and made 930K cars in 2023. That's roughly 320 hours of their total employee time per car or one person working 40 hours a week for 8 weeks / 2 months. Building a house involves multiple people over many months. Yes those people may be getting paid less but you are easily talking about an order of magnitude more effort. On top of that, the raw materials are expensive. If you just priced out the cost for concrete and steel for the foundation, wood (studs / plywood) and drywall for the walls, windows, siding, roofing, you are talking tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. You said construction cost only but on top of that there is also the cost for the land. That alone can be a huge chunk of any home price (just look up what an empty lot costs). Looking in an area I'm interested a lot looks like it could be 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of the home (if I built).

by leobg 3y ago

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago

There are plenty of things that have departed from cost-based pricing into supply and demand territory. That’s how things very often tend to go. Housing is just…special.

oconnor663 3y ago

To be fair, it's not really the bricks that are so expensive. It's the dirt :)

bombcar 3y ago
Not around here, I can get the dirt for $15k, $50k if all services are ready for hookup. The bricks add another $250k, which is why the used houses go for somewhat less.
- leobg 3y ago
  I want to buy a hydraulic press, and then fabricate the walls for my house right from the dirt at the building site. Like when they built The Dakota.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Adobe is still used in the southwest sometimes, and works fine. Saves somewhat on the materials, but a lot of the cost is labor and things like plumbing, electrical, etc.
- concordDance 3y ago
  > The bricks add another $250k Are these gold plated? That seems absurdly high.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    I assume that's adding the labor and other construction materials. "Bricks" just means the cost of building a house on a vacant lot.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    He doesn't literally mean only the bricks. He means the construction of the house. That's very cheap depending on the house. Also you maybe be underestimating how expensive bricks are! A brick house might have 10k bricks and fancy ones can cost like £2 each, so that's £20k literally just on the materials for the outer skin. House construction is expensive because it uses a ton of materials (even if per kg the material is cheap) and a ton of labour.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Exactly. In the US even things that look like brick houses aren't actually brick but the outer veneer. But whatever the materials, you're looking at a minimum of $100k for materials, and then the rest is labor and other expenses (like delivery, excavation, etc). Even a "manufactured home" (think: doublewide) costs something like $80-$100k before delivery these days.
      - fragmede 3y ago
        but are they charging that much based on it costs to make a double wide, or is it based on what the market will bear. If a custom home costs X, you'd charge X-a little bit to be competitive, not cost of materials * a reasonable markup.

jajko 3y ago

Well you pay mostly for land in any good location, even with apartments. Then check how long it takes to build some apartment building, team of say 10 people working with some expensive machinery for a year. Plus all the materials of which there are literal truckloads. Back home people do these mostly by themselves and friends/family, and the price aint that much lower. Plus for certain things you really need a professional company, even construction workers building their own homes hire companies for some parts of it.

bombcar 3y ago
You can play around here for fun: https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/the-project-store/home-projects/c-1474668109497.htm https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/the-project-... A Midwest hardware store that will show the price of a “house kit” basically. All the materials, none of the labor. Put in 55440 as a Zip if outside the area.
leobg 3y ago
My wife and I were on the Seychelles some time back. Our neighbor there was some 60 year old British guy. He was building a house on his land by himself, to rent out as a vacation home. He’d be working during the day and take out his kayak at sunset. He let me look over his shoulders for a bit. Said he had even done the plans for the permit himself. He said anyone can do it. And this house is on the Seychelles - high humidity, heavy thunderstorms. I’m not saying building a house is trivial technology. People can die if you do it wrong. But most of us are working with stuff that is way more complicated than that every single day. If a 60 year old dude on the Seychelles can do it by himself, a proper building company with access to machinery and materials should be able to do it for a price of months of income - not years.
- jajko 3y ago
  Sure, but I suspect some guy building some home for himself in some tropical paradise has different construction needs than most of the folks here, including me. We have snow in the winter for example, which changes literally everything. And then there is whole world of regulations for given country, Seychelles probably have 10% of the complexity and requirements of typical G7 country. Also, if that guy is doing electricity by himself he is a (dangerous) fool. As I said - it takes 10 professionals easily a year to build something. It simply does. Just check how their daily work looks like - its messy just like other types of projects, you have unforeseen problems, people drop sick or injured, suppliers can fail to deliver things on time etc. From IT world - the stuff I hack together in a week takes altogether to bring live 6 months easily, since initial dev is rather small part of it. So maybe adjust your expectations to reality, its not gonna adjust to you.

Negitivefrags 3y ago

Consider how many man years it takes to build a house. It might take 20 people a full time year to build your house (including all the time spent creating the materials). If we lived in a truely equal society where everyone was paid the same amount, you should therefore expect it to take 20 full time years of your life to pay for it.

leobg 3y ago
That’s what I was thinking, too: How long would it take a layman to build his own house, say from bricks. 1 year full time? Probably more. 10? Probably less. So now, if it’s done not buy a layperson but by someone specialized with big machinery and procurement channels set up, it should be much faster. Say, half a year. So why should I pay more than 2x that? (It’s a bit like with bread these days. If I can make a Tartine league bread for $5 in my goddamn home oven, including electricity, then why should I pay $8 for a bread that is much worse at a bakery outlet that sells stuff made at economies of scale? That’s not capitalism. It’s banking on people not being able anymore to value. It’s treating buyers not as competent individuals, but as dumb herd driven consumers. That approach is clearly working. But I’m attracted to those pockets and niches where it’s not true. Like HN.)
- concordDance 3y ago
  Just brick laying wouldn't take even close to a year. The 10,000 bricks to lay would take around 200 hours at a minute per brick (which seems a lot slower than I remember being in my youth[1]). Most of the man hours are not in the crude house frame, but in everything else, particularly finishings. Also, the transactions costs for a large number of specialists are considerable. [1] and indeed, looks like a careful bricklayer will be doing 4 a minute or so: https://youtu.be/jDgEqhz94-Y?si=oKxmQ-QAXEDC13h4 https://youtu.be/jDgEqhz94-Y?si=oKxmQ-QAXEDC13h4
- emporas 3y ago
  Speaking of personal experience: 3 people working most of the time part-time (half the day), it took almost 7 years to build a 3 floor building. It was me: 8 to 15 years old, my brother 5 to 13 years old, and my father. It includes almost all of the hard costs the article mentions except the foundation, brick laying, electrical, plumbing, windows, more concrete around the house, garage, and a myriad other things. Sometimes we hired 1 or 2 people, once a month or something. If all people were like my father, mathematician, polymath, expert in everything electrical, wood and metal constructions, with connections to many other engineers who regularly ask for advice, then the estimated total cost of building a 3 floor house is around 100.000 euros. That's the cost of materials, but probably less than that, 80.000 or something. The estimated time for 3 adults (not children - teenagers), to build a 120 m^2 per floor building, all 3 floors, is 3-4 years. Anyway, i think housing-transportation and many other things, will become free, once we move to carbon based buildings, vehicles and so on (see graphene). It is only carbon that offers us, strength of materials, flexibility, lightweight-ness, variety of materials so as to have everything in abundance. Abundance, like, personal skyscrapers, that kind of abundance.

class3shock 3y ago

Tesla has roughly 140K employees and made 930K cars in 2023. That's roughly 320 hours of their total employee time per car or one person working 40 hours a week for 8 weeks / 2 months. Building a house involves multiple people over many months. Yes those people may be getting paid less but you are easily talking about an order of magnitude more effort. On top of that, the raw materials are expensive. If you just priced out the cost for concrete and steel for the foundation, wood (studs / plywood) and drywall for the walls, windows, siding, roofing, you are talking tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. You said construction cost only but on top of that there is also the cost for the land. That alone can be a huge chunk of any home price (just look up what an empty lot costs). Looking in an area I'm interested a lot looks like it could be 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of the home (if I built).