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Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

nytimes.com

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Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#121

Post by vkou »

bobthepanda wrote: post #108
tomjakubowski wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the state zoning laws? As far as I know, the state constitution leaves zoning as an issue for the cities/counties to handle. Is that your beef or are there laws on the books I'm ignorant of?

The issue is that regional concerns (there is not enough housing in the region) do not mesh well with local control. Every locality thinks that everyone else should relieve the burden of housing because they are already "crowded" and new residents mean more money needed for services, which is a hard ask in a place like CA where raising local taxes is fiendishly difficult. If all the localities in a region, or even mo…

> Every locality thinks that everyone else should relieve the burden of housing because they are already "crowded" and new residents mean more money needed for services, which is a hard ask in a place like CA where raising local taxes is fiendishly difficult.

The localities have a point. Why should existing residents pay for new infrastructure, to accommodate housing for 10,000 new residents (All because large tech firms keep building offices in the valley?)

In a proper world, either the tech giant, or those new employees should pay for those infrastructure improvements.

Traditionally, this has been done through high re-zoning and subdivision fees.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#122

Post by seanmcdirmid »

njoro wrote: post #119
bobthepanda wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that regional concerns (there is not enough housing in the region) do not mesh well with local control. Every locality thinks that everyone else should relieve the burden of housing because they are already "crowded" and new residents mean more money needed for services, which is a hard ask in a place like CA where raising local taxes is fiendishly difficult. If all the localities in a region, or even mo…

Personally I wouldn't mind the Bay Area looking like Shenzhen, but I don't understand why people think that anything is going to change. Housing and education are prime assets in the new information based society and economy. People aren't going to share that anymore than natural resources, stocks, bitcoins or domains. Regardless of the larger consequences.

Also, Shenzhen isn’t much cheaper either (at least to buy, rents are much more reasonable of course).

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#123

Post by andrewksu »

mikestew wrote: post #12
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…

I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. Anything else falls into the dreaded "modular home" category. You know, just one step above a single-wide trailer, at least in the minds of some. Never mind the fact that the only thing separating my ungodly expensive house in Redmond, which sits on a slab, from a modular home is that it was built onsite. "Bespoke"? phhhffft , I can find you a dozen hous…

Most modular just does it wrong. Doing fixed design is a great opportunity for better, deeper design. Think Apple or Tesla type design and engineering. Not many complaints around cookie cutter Audi RS7's or even Hyundais

The status quo is a home depot and it all gets figured out on the fly. We would be in a much better place with engineered kit as you describe Ford doing.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#124

Post by andrewksu »

njoro wrote: post #94
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…

> 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.…

Recent CA costs for a framer range $65-125/hr. That adds up fast.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#125

Post by andrewksu »

astura wrote: post #113
planteen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What city do you live in? I live in Denver. Houses last way longer than 50 years here. Old houses here are quite desirable due to many of these neighborhoods proximity to downtown. The last two houses I rented were from the 1929 and 1943. They were in great shape. They were not the "old house" on the block either, both neighborhoods dated to that era. Of course they have had several roofs in that time, but roofs don'…

Even the highest quality roof only lasts ~30 years at the most. I have asphalt roll roofing which is cheap but needs to be replaced every 5-8 years.

Metal goes 100+ yrs. Doing the same thing (asphalt) and expecting different results = insanity.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#126

Post by rictic »

branchless wrote: post #103
ohazi wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 project…

Zoning isn't going to fix all of this for you. It's highly unlikely supply will ramp up to avoid bidding at the monopoly price.

> to avoid bidding at the monopoly price.

Can you expand on this? What's the monopoly of?

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#128

Post by yrb »

derefr wrote: post #104
beat wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

Sure, but that's not quite what I was getting at. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. The sort of copy-paste condos you see all in one place are still a single development project by a single property developer . They're all signed off on as one job-lot, and then the materials are allocated to build all of them, a pool of workers are hired and reused between all the projects (where they might be working on condo #14 one day…

What do you think bathtubs, showers, sinks, taps, doors and most fittings are?

There is a ton of prefabrication in construction already. There are also large libraries of shared details.

Most of the bits that are not already prefabricated are the bits that don't have simple interfaces. Either to each other or to their surrounding environment.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#129

Post by yrb »

bradknowles wrote: post #116
joe_the_user wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try doing that with Legos. Build all the plumbing into those walls. Build all the wiring into those walls. Build all the windows and doors and other openings into those walls. Then try to put those walls together in a way that connects all the plumbing and all the wiring. Now, let's look at the real world, at least here in the US. Yes, there is a national electrical code that covers many parts that aspect, but lots o…

Even without the code differences just the connecting those services between panels is hard.

Your service life is also going to take a hit due to having a lot more of the most unreliable aspects in construction - a joint.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#130

Post by oftenwrong »

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.

The same problems are pretty much everywhere in the US. This brings to mind a proposed project in Boston that faced a lot of friction, in part because prefab construction was proposed:

https://www.universalhub.com/2016/lagrange-street-residents-...

>The Zoning Board of Appeals this week rejected a proposed condo building on the site of a former asthma-inhaler factory in West Roxbury, citing neighborhood concerns about density, parking and the developer's proposal to assemble prefab modular units on the site, rather than hiring local workers for more traditional construction.

>...

>But board member Mark Erlich, who is also executive secretary and treasurer of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters, used the proposed modular construction to open an attack on the project. City officials have frequently expressed skepticism of such prefab units being bolted together, he said. But he added:

>It also removes a lot of [work] hours that could be done by people who live and work in the city vs. people in Maine, who wear sneakers.

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