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Including plumbing, flooring, electricity, hooking up utilities etc. ? Please cite your sources because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=china+skyscraper+15+days It's been discussed on HN half a dozen times. "Extraordinary claims" is a context-dependent idea.
I love things like this, but also saddened that in the UK the land to put it on would cost at least ten times that amount. The planning system here is a disgrace.
UK housebuilding companies are sitting on (by various estimates) 400,000-600,000 plots of land which have planning permission, but they haven't built on. That's about 3 years' worth of new houses. The reason is to hold up prices, and because (with "ever-rising" prices) if they build in the future they will make more profit. There are problems in the planning system, certainly, but at the moment we need an undeveloped…
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> How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford, but that anyone would want—while also providing a living wage for the local construction team that builds it? Material is $14k.
6k = 12 working days for a builder skilled enough to do everything from working an excavator to hooking up hvac. So they're claiming a house that can be build in 12 day, by a single person, ready to move in? Clickbait.
But given the cladding and roofing in the photo's, I'd imagine a 2 man crew could build a house in roughly that many working days. Probably less.
When I was working as a builders labourer, we'd show up on-site with the concrete pad already set. Take ~ 1 day to stand-up the frames. ~ another day to stand up the roof trusses, ~1-2 days to put the roof purlins and any internal gutters in (the buildings shown won't have those). And another day or two for putting tar-paper on the roof, tyvek around the frames, and general tidy up
A contractor would take ~2 days to put the roof on.
~1/2 day for the electrical pre-wire. ~1 day for the plumbers and drainlayers to pre-place everything
1-2 days to fit the windows and doors.
The style of exterior cladding shown is comparable to the roof, so another 2 days. (Most of the houses I worked on had brick cladding over a timber frame, which took ~4 days for a single story house)
Plastering, (2 days) Painting (1 day), electrical post (~1/2 day) plumbing post (~1/2 day). Cabinet work (1 day) carpet (2 days)
So ~19.5 days to build a conventional house.
We can eliminate the carpet straight off.
If we use structural insulated panels we can eliminate the cladding, roofing, papering, and time to install the purlins. That's ~7 days saved right off the bat.
The depicted houses are on concrete block stilts, which will need a day or 2 to build, and there needs to be some extra time allocated to building and insulating the elevated floor, but I don't really see why that has to be hugely expensive.
The depicted structure is small, and doesn't appear to have AC. the foundation, plumbing and drainage don't look like they require extensive use of excavators (although you will need some for the drainlayers at least).
So with 2 people, plus the drainlayer contractor and his baby excavator, I don't think they're all that far off a reasonable construction cost.
It's kind of hard for me to tell whether the house is nicer than mine when there's so little detail in the article on the actual house. Look, i'm more than supportive of innovative design and doing things cheaply, but for an article that was heavy on "the house is so cheap", and "its built kinda more like a airplane", and "it uses all this innovative stuff", there's a startling dearth of information. Sqm, plans, insu…
I want to know too; having somewhat recently bought a house, and I've started to upgrade it. I can see $20,000 going really fast for simple things.
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They left out current building codes. I have a general contractor's licence. To build anything involves so many rules/codes it's rediculious. Every year the building department in your town/city usually includes the latest codes, and prohibits so many things. It all sounds great until you are paying someone to build something. The various building code manuals take up at least two feet of space on my shelf. Where I l…
You really have to wonder how necessary some of these codes are. Houses already last 60 or 70 years, which is plenty, by the time they're at a point where they need rebuilding they're hopelessly outdated. I was helping my father with building a house over Christmas, some of the regulations are ridiculous, we had to build a massive retaining wall with 200 mm posts going 1.5 m down, just because the earth it was retain…
It's mostly driven by the insurance industry. They don't want to pay out claims, so they write the codes to make the buildings as robust as possible.
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One facet of it is cultural: For a lot of people, someone isn't seen as a "real adult" until he or she owns a residence. (Obligatory "if you have a mortgage you're just renting from the bank and have to fix the water heater yourself" line here.) Another is financial: There are heavy tax incentives towards ownership, though this is lessened in the era of cheap money. (On the other hand, if a mortgage can be had for ch…
I think this is also why home ownership is prized so highly in Britain - at least since the rental market was deregulated.
I realise I'm very fortunate to have been in the position to buy a place five years ago, and I'm grateful for the combination of fortuitous timing and hard-work paying off. That said, if I could have continued to rent affordably, I would probably still be renting today.
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One facet of it is cultural: For a lot of people, someone isn't seen as a "real adult" until he or she owns a residence. (Obligatory "if you have a mortgage you're just renting from the bank and have to fix the water heater yourself" line here.) Another is financial: There are heavy tax incentives towards ownership, though this is lessened in the era of cheap money. (On the other hand, if a mortgage can be had for ch…
I think this is also why home ownership is prized so highly in Britain - at least since the rental market was deregulated.
> How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford Why not rent a flat instead? Wouldn't that be much more economical (no property prices, lower heating costs, less maintenance work, less risk, not built on the cheap)? I don't understand the fixation on owning a house / living in a single-family house many americans seem to have.
Rent does not build wealth. Rent is the act of transferring wealth from the poor to the rich. Rent is, essentially, theft from society itself, it leaves everyone poorer when most people rent. Rent in America today is identical to the serfs of old. The post-WW2 thing the Government did with getting everyone mortgages so they would be home owners that caused the eventual economic collapse 10 years ago? They had the rig…
So, you think that paying massive amounts of interest to financial institutions, over decades, all while being tied to a specific physical location and having a disproportionate amount of your wealth tied up in a single asset class is "fiscally responsible"?
>We need less stupid people, to put it frankly.
The word you're looking for is "fewer".
>he actually has spoken in depth about how to fix the underlying bullshit that keeps so many Americans renters
I appreciate many of his views, but if his platform has anything to do with "turn renters into owners" then it demonstrates his lack of economic wisdom, and will be part of the reason he won't get elected.
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>Rent does not build wealth. Rent is the act of transferring wealth from the poor to the rich. That's not a general rule. It really depends on rents, interest rates, and the cost to purchase housing. In a functioning market rents bring in just a tiny bit more than the monthly mortgage payment, including taxes and fees. There have been times in my area where you came out ahead renting, and times when you came out ahea…
> In a functioning market rents bring in just a tiny bit more than the monthly mortgage payment, including taxes and fees. Which means rent is still transferring money from the poor to the rich. If you have a mortgage, you're hopefully building up equity that can be released when you retire to somewhere smaller or in a cheaper location (which you can do, since you don't need to live near jobs and any kids will have m…
In other words, you're relying on the "Greater Fool Theory" of perpetually increasing house prices.
There is nothing special about real estate as an asset class.
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As noted in the article, the current mortgage situation isn't good at all. I wanted to buy land a couple of years ago, to build a tiny house on. I went in willing/able to put a 30-40% down payment on the property, with plans to build my own tiny house completely self-funded over the next year or so. The banks were simply not at all equipped to address that. Despite my excellent credit (high 700s) and low debt, and th…
That loan situation sounds incredibly frustrating. The banks are like, "come on man, it's cool, borrow more money from us," because that's in their interest ... but if you don't wanna play by their rules, then you get shot down. Sorry to hear it -- both "sorry" in the sense that I wish it hadn't happened to you, and sorry because I myself have had pipe dreams of buying my own land and building on it, so here is some…
It's certainly possible and people do it all the time. But it's more complicated and will usually require more cash in hand than a standard home mortgage will.