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Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

nytimes.com

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Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#71

Post by derefr »

branchless wrote: post #69
ohazi wrote: post #8

I find it hilarious that a CA company is leading the charge in new, efficient, high-quality pre-fab design and construction. These units are going to improve construction quality and lower costs in every state except CA, thanks to our asinine zoning laws.

Nope. In urban areas land is undersupplied therefore you will be paying the "monopoly price" where you bid what you can afford. So if a building used to cost 400k, broken into 200k land cost and 200k building cost, it will still cost 400k, 300k land cost and 100k building cost. That's how prices are set. It's not "how much this costs to build plus a fair profit".

I don't think anyone would be using one of these pre-fab buildings for gentrifying existing urban centers. Those development projects usually aim to create aspirational purchases, or investment properties—neither of which wants the taint of "put together from parts, like a trailer-home or something."

No, I imagine these would mostly be used to construct "condo-cities": exurbs/farmland "reformatted" all at once into new urban branch-nodes by plopping five hundred mixed-use condo buildings onto it, and then connecting it to the nearest urban center using high-speed rail or other public transit.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#72

Post by adrianmonk »

Joeri wrote: post #6

I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. All that pouring and sawing and drilling and slathering of raw materials to do one-off designs for houses that are then filled with standardized ikea furniture which fits the custom room shape poorly. Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach. Either we make carpenter and bricklayer robots to do the bespoke work cheaply, or we build homes fr…

With some exceptions, every site is different. The lot may be shaped one way or another. Maybe it's long and thin or maybe it's roughly square. There might be a tree that you want to save.

Maybe the area is hilly and the lot slopes downward from back to front, so you want to build on the flatter front portion because it's easier, and there's adequate drainage so that's OK. Or maybe there isn't adequate drainage so you'd be better off putting the house on the higher part of the lot.

Maybe there's a two-story house next door and if you put windows in the wrong places, they can look right down into your bedroom. Or maybe there isn't and you need all the windows you can get on that side of the house because that's south-facing so it's the best place to have them from an energy efficiency point of view.

If there's an alley behind the house, you probably want the garage to back up to that. If there isn't, you'll have to put the driveway on the front. Unless it's a corner lot, in which case you might want it on the side if the street on the front has heavier traffic or bad visibility.

Maybe there's a view so you want the living room on the back of the house so everyone can enjoy that view. Or maybe the view is to the side so you want the living room there.

You get the idea. The best house you can build on a piece of land depends on a lot of factors specific to that piece of land. So customized designs help you achieve that.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#73

Post by derefr »

megaman22 wrote: post #11
Joeri wrote: post #6

I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. All that pouring and sawing and drilling and slathering of raw materials to do one-off designs for houses that are then filled with standardized ikea furniture which fits the custom room shape poorly. Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach. Either we make carpenter and bricklayer robots to do the bespoke work cheaply, or we build homes fr…

It's not super expensive or time-consuming to throw up a standard, American stick-built house. Once you have a foundation poured, you can do all the framing, sheathe it, roof it, and have it ready for finish work in a week with a handful of people. What takes forever and a day is the signoffs, and waiting for all the deliveries and third-parties to show up and do their piece. And then all the fiddly stuff inside...

Sure, that's sensible; a house is at this point almost an artisanal good, like a wicker chair. Something people buy to go against the grain of standardization and conformity.

But isn't it weird that there aren't more copy-and-paste condo buildings? Maybe not even in the same city—you don't want a Brasilia[1]. But, once you've gotten an architect to design a large building, why not get N times the materials, and then build the same building in as many cities as are compatible with the building codes it was designed under?

[1] http://thomaslockehobbs.com/brasilia/index.html

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#74

Post by maire »

ohazi wrote: post #8

I find it hilarious that a CA company is leading the charge in new, efficient, high-quality pre-fab design and construction. These units are going to improve construction quality and lower costs in every state except CA, thanks to our asinine zoning laws.

We just built a "hybrid" house in Santa Cruz county. We picked the default design and stuck to it. We had to make a few changes to get through the planning department. The biggest issue was not at the building level - but rather everything they made us do to prepare the site for building. Yikes - that was expensive. It also took a long time to get through the planning department.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#75

Post by adventured »

Jarb wrote: post #53
kazen44 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not so sure. Whats the average lifespan of a house? 50-80 years? make that a 100 years easily. (atleast in my country). Heck, some houses don't even have architectural drawings because of their age.

My architecture wife said houses today are designed (in the US) to last at least 50 years. However I seriously have my doubts that a house could make it that long without some major renovations/overhauls along the way, given that they're essentially built as plywood sheets, stapled to wood planks, protected by plastic siding, and covered with a tar sheet roof down here where I live. I wish the developers invested mor…

US houses can easily last 100+ years. Once they're enclosed, basic maintenance and rare exterior repair/replace gets you a century, unless a natural disaster hits or a freak accident (major fire). With metal roofing becoming common, that removes having to replace the roof except every ~40 years.

You can find plenty of poorly constructed 100+ year old homes in the US, with original innards put together every which way in a shoddy fashion before there were building codes and standardization of construction. And yet there they are, still going with basic maintenance.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#76

Post by pilingual »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #65
danschumann wrote: post #27

What I want is an MVP house (room + bathroom + kitchen), which I can expand ( extra rooms, extra bathrooms, etc ). Normally with construction, when you add stuff, you need to break stuff, but if there could be a modular housing system that would let you expand without destruction, while being competitively priced, I'd do that. In Elon Musk fashion, it would have to be better than a normal house, right? A modular hous…

Part of the problem is the foundation. You either need to pour a large foundation ahead of time (that you won't use for a while) or pour it as you go. It's not an insurmountable problem, but it does make it more difficult. Although if you decided to build up instead, by just adding more floors you could avoid that problem.

It’s certainly worth considering. A 20x20 concrete slab can be poured for a few thousand US dollars by a professional concrete contractor, and you could include radiant heating in the slab. Seems to be at least an straight forward option.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#77

Post by zip1234 »

edmundhuber wrote: post #5

The problem is the price of buildable land, not the buildings on it.

The problems are the amount of buildable land in desirable areas and zoning rules preventing maximizing use of said land. In general, there is plenty of buildable land--just not necessarily where people want to live.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#78

Post by joe_the_user »

megaman22 wrote: post #11
Joeri wrote: post #6

I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. All that pouring and sawing and drilling and slathering of raw materials to do one-off designs for houses that are then filled with standardized ikea furniture which fits the custom room shape poorly. Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach. Either we make carpenter and bricklayer robots to do the bespoke work cheaply, or we build homes fr…

It's not super expensive or time-consuming to throw up a standard, American stick-built house. Once you have a foundation poured, you can do all the framing, sheathe it, roof it, and have it ready for finish work in a week with a handful of people. What takes forever and a day is the signoffs, and waiting for all the deliveries and third-parties to show up and do their piece. And then all the fiddly stuff inside...

Sure but if you have a prefabricated wall, floor and ceiling solution, that solution could contain all "fiddly bits" pre-installed in an arrangement that was pre-approved and so should theoretically be much faster. Especially, you need wires and pipes and these require significant time and labor even with no zoning requirements.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#79

Post by osdiab »

derefr wrote: post #73
megaman22 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not super expensive or time-consuming to throw up a standard, American stick-built house. Once you have a foundation poured, you can do all the framing, sheathe it, roof it, and have it ready for finish work in a week with a handful of people. What takes forever and a day is the signoffs, and waiting for all the deliveries and third-parties to show up and do their piece. And then all the fiddly stuff inside...

Sure, that's sensible; a house is at this point almost an artisanal good, like a wicker chair. Something people buy to go against the grain of standardization and conformity. But isn't it weird that there aren't more copy-and-paste condo buildings? Maybe not even in the same city—you don't want a Brasilia[1]. But, once you've gotten an architect to design a large building, why not get N times the materials, and then…

China, HK, Singapore have a lot of copy paste buildings lined up next to each other, which I find pretty odd to look at and dehumanizing/alienating to be surrounded by (though probably very efficient to build, and it seems like Chinese people don't mind too much). You'd see them as soon as you left the airport if you visit there sometime.

I found many cities in China in particular look very similar to one another in a not great way because of similar architectural choices including copy paste buildings, which apparently the government has noticed—I can't find the article about it but the central government is making moves to get Chinese cities to stop being built in exactly the same way/destroy and replace too much of their historic buildings with culturally diverse architecture.

Not to say we shouldn't do what you're saying, but if we do it we should probably do it in a way that doesn't make all our cities too generic.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#80

Post by Jarb »

adventured wrote: post #75
Jarb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My architecture wife said houses today are designed (in the US) to last at least 50 years. However I seriously have my doubts that a house could make it that long without some major renovations/overhauls along the way, given that they're essentially built as plywood sheets, stapled to wood planks, protected by plastic siding, and covered with a tar sheet roof down here where I live. I wish the developers invested mor…

US houses can easily last 100+ years. Once they're enclosed, basic maintenance and rare exterior repair/replace gets you a century, unless a natural disaster hits or a freak accident (major fire). With metal roofing becoming common, that removes having to replace the roof except every ~40 years. You can find plenty of poorly constructed 100+ year old homes in the US, with original innards put together every which way…

Nice, did not know all that. TIL ^^
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