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Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

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Re: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

#221

Post by shpeedy »

solarmist wrote: post #200
phobosanomaly wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your ideas for how to shift things in a more positive direction? If I were to write my congressman tomorrow, what do you think I should say? What are the top-5 key actionable bullet points? Genuinely curious. I like to hear all sorts of ideas for how we can steer the country (hell, the planet) in a more positive direction.

I wish I had actionable ideas. For a top 5 (or 7) wish list it would be along the line of: - Outlaw billionaires the same way we’ve outlawed (at least on paper) monopolies. At that scale individuals have the power to sway governments. (A billion is likely not the right number, but it’s a good starting point.) - Kill the money in politics. Make lobbying illegal. - Kill the filibuster - Kill the electoral college - Dec…

For billionaire, wish list will have this top item:

1. Kill solarmist (it's good starting point).

Re: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

#222

Post by jaclaz »

briancp wrote: post #180

Background: structural engineer, have worked with prefab construction in various capacities 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 building…

Only to somehow confirm anecdotally what you said but in another area of constructions.

I have been working in and around the construction industry for the last 35+ years in Italy and in the '90's the firm I was working for had a department for pre-fabricated (concrete) buildings (more like condos or office buildings than "single" homes), which was led by an engineer that was - really - a technical genius and - besides him - we did have exceptionally good staff, both the technicians and the workers.

In the arc of more than ten years we tried everything and the contrary of it and after several , generally successful or mostly successful, built projects (with only a few minor issues in a few of them) we came to these conclusions:

1)you can make cheaper pre-fabricated buildings only if the level of finiture and overall result is cheaper or feels cheaper or looks cheaper

2) you can make pre-fabricated buildings that are as beautiful, functional and what not as "built-on-site" but that will cost the same (or more) as the corresponding built-on-site ones

3) the one and only difference was time, with pre-fab buildings we could build in 6-8 months time buildings that would have otherwise taken 18 months or more (this worked very well for rebuilding after an earthquake)

In the years since I was involved in several more similar to the US timber based projects for single homes or anyway one/two storeys structures, and "components" (like pre-fabricated bathrooms "cells" for industrial buildings and hotels) and my experience did not change the overall opinion much.

For anything that is "modular" or very, very "standard" (i.e. homes from catalog) there may be some space for fair competition (slightly lower cost for same or similar "quality" of end results), but when you start to include in it:

1) the local building codes (and possible needed deviations from the "standard")

2) the customers' changes/preferences

3) the architects/designers (with all due respect for the category) "whims"

It invariably ends up costing the same or more (money) and almost the same (time).

Re: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

#223

Post by bluGill »

jessaustin wrote: post #92
bluGill wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs more than it is worth to have them do better. As a framer is takes me a couple minutes more to compensate. To have the do it would take hours of labor.

I presume you're talking about scribing the bottom plate, or perhaps another board placed between the foundation and the bottom plate? Why couldn't a layer of that same sort of scribed board be placed on the foundation before placing the prefab modules?

Depends on where it was. The worst case I saw was a half wall, so we cut each stud a different length.

There are options for prefab as you saw - but when building on site we have the saws and other tools needed anyway, so it isn't a big deal to use them. With prefab they don't normally use those tools so you have to account for the cost of getting them out putting them away.

Re: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

#224

Post by bluGill »

jdhn wrote: post #143
aidenn0 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any skilled job that can be done poorly with little training becomes a bit of a lemon market. I hate painting. I'm also a terrible painter. However, I've given up on ever hiring painters. Every professional painter I've used has either prepped the surface improperly, or put the coats on too thick, to the point where I rub paint off if I brush up against the wall. I'm willing to pay more for better work, but I can't e…

> or put the coats on too thick, to the point where I rub paint off if I brush up against the wall How many coats are they putting on the wall, 5? I've never heard of paint rubbing off because there's too much of it.

It is not number of coats it is thickness of coats. If you put on a thin coat of good paint it sticks well. Thick coats of even good paint won't stick.

Re: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

#225

Post by tw04 »

seibelj wrote: post #151
tw04 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’m not downvoting you - on HN you can’t downvote someone you are replying to. It’s the rest of HN that is downvoting your arguments. Tons of jobs we have now didn’t exist 5, 10, 25 years ago. Every time a mass amount of jobs are lost when an industry collapses, they always say “this time is different!” I just fundamentally disagree with that premise. There will always be work to do and someone willing to pay for it.…

So what replaced the jobs in Detroit? You keep saying this but the numbers don't reflect what you're claiming. The middle class in the US is SHRINKING, their wealth is decreasing, and it has been since the 70s. All those jobs are going to other countries or disappearing entirely. You and everyone else on HN can keep parroting the same "it's different jobs" until you're blue in the face, but until you can show me some actual DATA to backup the claim, you're literally just making up a reality that doesn't exist. You're 4 responses in yet without a single citation to back up your claim that there are new jobs to replace the old, and I'm willing to bet if you replied 20 more times you STILL wouldn't have any facts to back anything up you've said. Going from a manufacturing job making $60-80k+/year to driving Uber making minimum wage isn't a "replacement".

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-state-of-amer...

https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/what-is-middle-cl...

Re: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

#226

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

phobosanomaly wrote: post #190
CamperBob2 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also: countries that maintain a military big enough to fight off an attack from two hostile star systems at once, never mind two hostile countries. It's the ultimate jobs program.

The defense industrial complex is the go-to, but I got a kind of novel jobs program that doesn't get thrown around a lot: Private Health Insurance. There's a straightforward transaction that occurs between healthcare provider and patient. But every...single...dollar that flows through the healthcare system is diverted through the massive private health insurance industry, which is essentially an artificial middleman…

In places with, relatively speaking, rich social services programs are essentially jobs programs. The budgets are caseloads are never reflective of need, and most families would be better served with getting a check than meeting with a burnt/checked out social worker. Often times programs run by the state are so taxed that they are entirely incapable of meeting the metrics required by law.

Those trillions would have been better spent expanding government programs in: land preservation, social services, healthcare, stem, and infrastructure maintenance and expansion. Instead it's just sloshing around the accounts of people who neither understand nor care about the plights of the average American.

Re: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

#227

Post by tw04 »

phobosanomaly wrote: post #165
tw04 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The concept assumes there are replacement jobs being created. That was true for a hundred years, it hasn't been for the last 20+.

At some point automation eliminates jobs wholesale, and there aren't replacements waiting. People always refer to cars replacing horses and point out that all those jobs surrounding horses were replaced with something else - manufacturing plant jobs, car salesman, etc. What they fail to mention is that HORSES were replaced with CARS - and we've got far, far, far fewer horses on the planet today because they're just not needed.

We're the horses...

Re: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

#228

Post by jeffbee »

danans wrote: post #166
jeffbee wrote: post #4

Prefab is the wrong optimization. It targets a minor improvement in a small part of the overall budget. Most of the time and money of construction in America is tied up in land prices, permitting, and regulation. Prefab solves zero of these issues. There is a building going up in Oakland right now where Factory_OS put out a press release that they had built it in ten days. But they spent 7 years getting approvals, 18…

> There is a building going up in Oakland right now where Factory_OS put out a press release that they had built it in ten days. But they spent 7 years getting approvals, 18 months in site prep, I'm currently gut remodeling a small house in Oakland. Permitting and regulations are a whopping 3% of the cost. The land (the existing property) is 50%, and 40% is building costs. Land costs (addressed via incremental upzoni…

Remodeling an existing structure won't really expose you to the regulatory burden, which is good for you but isn't the full picture. If you wanted to buy a SFH and build a duplex or, God forbid, a triplex, then you'd be paying serious money, mostly in the carrying costs of your debts while the government dithers over your application. This is why in California one of the most important recent state law changes was 2017's SB35, which mandates that local authorities must approve certain types of projects in 90 days or less. But the types of projects which benefit from this are fairly few.

On top of the carrying costs there are impact fees. These vary by city but you can see how crazy they are. In Fremont you will pay $160k per dwelling, that's just cash out of your pocket. Totally crazy.

https://www.spur.org/news/2018-05-09/it-all-adds-growing-cos...

Re: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

#229

Post by vannevar »

robocat wrote: post #138
vannevar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does prefab go much beyond framing? The NAHB estimates that framing is only 17% of the cost of a house(1), so even cutting that cost in half doesn't save much on the whole project. (1) https://www.nahbclassic.org/generic.aspx?sectionID=734&gener... .

> so even cutting that cost in half doesn't save much on the whole project. Houses are usually a leveraged investment. If you put down 5%, and prefab saves you 5%, you have massively reduced your risk of default during a downturn. And if you expect it to take 20 years to pay off your mortgage, and framing saves 5%, that’s one year saved, which is massive IMHO. Obviously a lot of assumptions to the above e.g. everyone…

These are fair points, and if a buyer had 100% confidence in prefab, your argument certainly makes financial sense. But for most consumers prefab is a novel approach, and therefore likely to be perceived as risky. So that savings might need to be greater to get them to try something new. Given the failure of prefab to make a big dent in the market, that seems to be exactly what's happening.

Re: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

#230

Post by phobosanomaly »

solarmist wrote: post #200
phobosanomaly wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your ideas for how to shift things in a more positive direction? If I were to write my congressman tomorrow, what do you think I should say? What are the top-5 key actionable bullet points? Genuinely curious. I like to hear all sorts of ideas for how we can steer the country (hell, the planet) in a more positive direction.

I wish I had actionable ideas. For a top 5 (or 7) wish list it would be along the line of: - Outlaw billionaires the same way we’ve outlawed (at least on paper) monopolies. At that scale individuals have the power to sway governments. (A billion is likely not the right number, but it’s a good starting point.) - Kill the money in politics. Make lobbying illegal. - Kill the filibuster - Kill the electoral college - Dec…

Based on my understanding of their platforms, that seems consistent with a Warren/Sanders ticket?
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