171–180 of 244 posts
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No one is writing articles asking why mobile homes haven't taken over. In many communities, they have.
Locally? Because nationally manufactured home deliveries are a small fraction of what they once were in the 1970s. Adjusted for population they are down to 10% of their peak. https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/mhs/tables/time-ser...
I built my current house recently, and our builder used a prefab factory in the region for some of the construction. I would _never_ do it again. The process has all the pitfalls of the waterfall software development model, but at the end you have to live in the failed project! It took months for the factory to do their pre-build engineering, and that's after they started the process using plans from my architect. Th…
I think these problems are unique to your type of home maybe. I have been to a Bone Structure presentation. They fabricate all parts and interfaces using computer operated cutters with extreme precision from CAD plans. Note that parts are made of metal, not wood. The structure is then aligns perfectly and all connection holes align perfectly as well. The building is then assembled using just an electric screw driver,…
I've worked in traditional construction and the plans are never accurate with hundreds of omissions/errors/interferences. Those can be corrected in real time when something is field built, but are nearly impossible when the house ships wrong but nearly finished.
I can see it working with cookie cutter housing - first ~5 will be garbage as they find bugs then slap a thousand identical copies up cheaply. For custom it's a mess.
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One big area where modular prefab can potentially make a difference is by reducing the need for skilled tradesmen, particularly electricians, plumbers and HVAC techs. In most growing American metros, a major constraining factor on housing supply is the lack of these skilled tradesmen. In contrast, drywall, painting, and landscaping tend to be lower-skilled and easier to draw from the general labor pool. You can have…
> One big area where modular prefab can potentially make a difference is by reducing the need for skilled tradesmen, particularly electricians, plumbers and HVAC techs. To what end? As a country we're already struggling to create enough middle-class jobs and you're suggesting we try to gut another whole sector. So that owners/executives of prefab factories can pocket the money? If you think it's going to reduce cost…
That said you’re not totally off the mark, but comments like “It astounds me that people on HN think that eliminating jobs without any thought to the social impact” is why you’re getting down voted.
How do you know now I or anyone else hasn’t given this thought? If you browse though old stories you’ll see tons of discussion on this topic.
My point of view on this is “It’s too late. The genie is out of the bottle and no amount of trying to avoid job losses is going to be productive.” Instead we need to work towards making our gross economic output support everyone. If basic necessities are all provided for (such as though UBI or some other idea) then no one will care if jobs are lost because then people can focus on figuring out how to productively use their time rather than worrying about finding a shitty, or even non-shitty, job so their family can eat and stay out of the weather. And without that we’ll continue hemorrhaging jobs until we reach a critical point where there will be an honest to god revolution in the USA and things will be violently reset (not corrected).
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There isn't a shortage of carpenters. There is a shortage willing to work for the wages offered. I've done carpentry work in the past, offer enough money and I'll leave my tech job. I'm not the only one who could do carpentry for the right price.
Around here, the carpenters I know all drive very nice trucks and are booked solid making $$$$. These guys are running their own 2-4 person shops though.
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You keep downvoting me, but you’ve yet to explain where these jobs are coming from. The jobs Detroit lost didn’t shift, they were just lost forever. The people who held them now work minimum wage jobs or live off welfare. What are the electricians and plumbers doing instead? You can keep saying people will just retrain and do something else but that’s about as useful as Trump saying he’ll bring manufacturing jobs bac…
I have friends who are economists, and I get in this argument with them all the time over beers. There's economic optimization, and social optimization, and those are two different things that are often totally orthagonal. Economic progress is often horrendously negative for people's lives and livelihoods. People don't just pick-up and move, or re-train in a completely different field with the fluidity that is often…
Economic freedom leads to personal freedom and increased happiness. The never ending desire to have the government solve all our problems is what got us into this huge mess in the first place. I know that people are hurting, but the solution will emerge.
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This is the fallacy - The Fallacy - that is always made by those who don’t understand economics. Why did we build the car when it put all of the horse tradesmen out of business? Why do we use elevator buttons and put the doormen out of a job? Why did we create the Internet when perfectly good newspaper printers could pass information to us? You are making an age-old argument that we need to reduce productivity in ord…
I see you ALSO failed to explain what the replacement jobs for these highly skilled, well-paid employees will be. Horse tradesman became car dealerships. Elevator operator was never a skilled position in the first place. The internet has actually created a massive crisis in the western world that we're just now starting to realize - local newspapers going out of business is HORRIBLE for a functioning democracy, and n…
Job losses are only going to accelerate for the foreseeable future across most industries and they won’t be replaced by anything or at most a small fraction of what was lost.
Instead of the Jetsons (everyone’s jobs get simpler and simpler until they’re trivial, which seems to be what you’re leaning towards) we’ll have huge swaths of people that have so much time on their hands the time value of labor will drop to almost $0.
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I have friends who are economists, and I get in this argument with them all the time over beers. There's economic optimization, and social optimization, and those are two different things that are often totally orthagonal. Economic progress is often horrendously negative for people's lives and livelihoods. People don't just pick-up and move, or re-train in a completely different field with the fluidity that is often…
Very well put! And I agree that our retraining systems are horrendous. I’m probably not anywhere near as reasonable as you, as I can point to the government for every problem - why is college so expensive? Federally backed loans you can’t discharge in bankruptcy. Why do so many jobs need licenses that take years and tens of thousands of dollars to get when, for example, cutting hair is something you can learn on Yout…
I am curious what the mechanism is from the free-market side to prevent increasing income inequality, and regulatory capture by corporations and the wealthy? If we de-regulate, what stops Bezos and Exxon, EvilCorp, and whoever from doing whatever they want (assume for a second that's not already happening to some extent under the current setup)? I guess that there's a market-based mechanism that is supposed to prevent that, but I don't know enough libertarians to have heard the argument.
I'm not convinced we should legislate our way out of anything either, but I can't get over the idea that deregulation = noone looking over the shoulders of those with absurd amounts of money and the wolf eats the whole damn henhouse.
The short answer to this question is "because we haven't figured out how to make it less expensive than regular site built construction".
The longer answer: prefab, or modular, construction has made inroads in various construction niches. Parking garages are nearly all prefabricated concrete for instance. Light framed buildings (either wood or cold formed steel) frequently have their structure panelized off site. Hotels (especially in places where the cold weather means a short construction season) are sometimes built using prefab modules.
It's also super common to have prefabricated lower-level components - wood trusses, bar joists, hollowcore panels, etc.
But any higher degree of prefabrication tends to be more expensive than conventional, not less. They mostly get used when their perceived benefits outweigh their costs. (If you look at a panelizer like Entekra's benefits page, they don't list "cheaper" anywhere). Two major exceptions to this are parking garages and HUD homes, which (among other reasons) are heavily optimized for a particular form factor.
Regarding Bone Structure, it's an interesting system, and I love seeing people tackle this problem space. But I rate the chances of a custom fabricated steel structure ever being less expensive than conventional wood framing as "very near zero". This seems limited to the high end custom home market, and their marketing material seems to indicate that as well.