Did this article just presented prefabricated housing as an innovative and novel way of building, and a solution to the housing crisis? Am I really reading NYtimes?
Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings
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Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings
#92I 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".
The zoning and permitting regulations prevent you from building reasonably on land that you already own. There are plenty of wealthy individuals and developers in San Francisco who would love to tear down two or three shabby Victorian houses to put up a five-story 20-unit condo if they could only get the project approved.
San Francisco in particular makes it extremely easy for neighborhood residents to impede projects that would be automatically approved in any other city [1, 2]. This is why nothing gets built here, it has nothing to do with the cost of land.
No developer can afford to put up with a five-year battle with neighbors who complain about the shadow that the new building will cast onto their back yard, or to pay for fifteen $X0,000 bullshit environmental studies that the city will make the developer conduct as a "compromise." And remember, these are for designs that are completely up to code and that are zoned legally.
[1]: https://sf.curbed.com/2013/4/17/10252934/what-the-heck-is-di...
[2]: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Discretionary-...
Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings
#93Earlier 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…
There are lots of copy-paste condo farms here in the Minnesota suburbs. You can easily wander into a neighborhood full of a few hundred physically identical duplexes.
Ugly as sin, but they're cheap housing.
edit: I'll go farther than this. My own house is over 100 years old, in a "bungalow neighborhood" of Minneapolis. Most of the houses were built over a period of a few decades, with more or less the same design. There's a T structure, leading to three sections on the first floor. The entrance is a living/dining area separated by an arch, on the other side of the back wall is the kitchen, and on the other side of the interior side wall is a hallway leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom. They're all like this. And these were built by hand, with the most sophisticated factory parts being two-by-fours and hinges. They might have a porch, or an extension (my house has a back extension built in the 1950s), and the attic might be finished into a single room, or even expanded into multiple rooms with a large dormer. Many/most have been modified over the years. But the basic form? Consistent as a pup tent.
These things are the result of available technology. The bungalows are a product of factory-made nails, which made balloon frame construction viable. In the South, you'll find shotgun shacks, which are what happens when you build a bungalow but don't need or want a basement.
This is nothing new. My neighborhood might look varigaeted, but it's not.
Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings
#94I’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…
> 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.
Well, IKEA does have a joint venture with a construction company to make prefab apartments.
https://www.boklok.com/about-the-BoKlok-concept/ https://medium.com/@bartholomewhearn/the-flat-pack-taken-to-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwvvcgoHC9w
> Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach.
Not in the US were there are always people willing to swing a nail gun to feed thier family.
Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings
#95I’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…
I'm not so sure. Whats the average lifespan of a house? 50-80 years? To me it makes sense to invest the time to optimize design to make best use of the land area. I guess you could still use somewhat standarized parts though, spend more effort in the design phase.
The majority of the houses in my neighborhood are older than 50-80 years. Mine is close to 80 and doing just fine.
A house should last 150 years at least, provided it's maintained.
Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings
#96I’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…
In developments where they build many identical houses, there is some re-use - the concrete forms used to build one slab are hauled down the block for the next one. Also, preformed wall framing is sometimes trucked in, as are roof trusses and other pieces.
So there's still a lot of pre-built components that are used when building multiple houses.
Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in Ithaca, NY, many of the houses standing today were built before Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn. Ironically, they’re among the best housing stock, because unlike many mid-20th century constructions, the older houses are free of asbestos and lead paint.
More likely the quality of wood and carpentry is higher. You can't buy wood these days, certainly not economically, that compares with what was standard 100+ years ago.
Yup. Most studs and beams were made of far better would than the short growth wood we have now. Heck, there are firms that specialize in recovering old wood from barns and factories since the wood is so much denser, and the size is simply unavailable elsewhere.
Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
In some cases, your conclusion is correct while the problem is completely different. I live in a college town, where rent and housing prices obey different laws of economics. Unlike the Bay Area, a brisk 15 minutes drive in any direction will bring you to dirt cheap rural property, but because a huuuuuuge proportion of renters are college students, they tend to live in the city and put the rent on their student loans…
I've always been surprised by how expensive Princeton is even though short drives in any direction can be much cheaper. Students seem to be mostly in student housing anyway, and anybody who lives there in any other capacity probably has a car, is it just prestige of being there that pumps up the rent?
I've always been surprised by how expensive Princeton is even though short drives in any direction can be much cheaper
AAA estimates the TCO of a car to be $8,500/yr: https://newsroom.aaa.com/auto/your-driving-costs.
Even if you're only "a short drive away," you then have to pay for parking on or near campus, which is likely dear: https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/7/19/15993936/high-cost-of-f....
Finally, commuting sucks: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/there-and-back... from a social and psychological perspective. People love living around other people who can they chat with and befriend; that's why current zoning laws prohibiting such developments are so pernicious.
Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings
#99I’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…
Factory-made homes do exist, but they acquired a bad reputation somewhere along the line, and tend to get used only in limited applications, such as summer cottages.
What is gaining ground, apparently, is prefabricating components of houses, which are then assembled on site rather than doing everything on site from plain lumber. Stairs, for example, are often made from kits.
Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Make they come to the west and think all our housing looks the same.