Solving the housing crisis requires fighting monopolies in construction (2020)

In defence of brutalist architecture, at least its functional, spacious, and sensibly planned enough to build communities around those blocks. The concrete monstrosities of the 1960 and 70s built in London are still standing and are worth just as much as the newer builds which typically sport newer materials but come with higher rents and smaller spaces.

Though the parent is being slightly obtuse in his language, I do agree with him to a point.

Here in the UK, if you are willing to accept a commute and downgrade your expectations slightly, you can buy an affordable house or apartment relatively easily. Even commutable to London you could buy say a 1-2 bedroom apartment for £200k, which is achievable for 1 good earner or 2 average earners.

The problem is that people want nice big houses in the best areas of global cities. I understand the aspiration, but that is not a housing crisis. It's just a market.

I acknowledge problems for low earners in low wage areas etc, but maybe I am referring to a different type of person, say young professionals wanting to get on the housing ladder or needing somewhere to live that is commutable to work. I think that too often they just have expectations out of line with their budgets.

I talked to a real estate friend today. He said the high prices are cracking and falling away as:

1. interest rates rise

2. peoples' stock porfolios have tanked

To my knowledge (sorry not citing sources, too much, but could be individually looked up and validated/refuted) it is rather the opposite, the construction industry is hopelessly fragmanted. A tree of contractors and subcontractors participate in any sizeable projects (and several even in the smallest one), also the composition change during the project many times. There are research efforts for long time into this topic, how to handle the fragmented and volatile situations as part of construction supply chain management research. Also touches the risk management area.

The industrialized construction (or offsite construction) improvements more like hindered than helped by this fragmantation. Inventing and introducing new techniques (including workforce training, software and hardware) is infinitely harder with fragmanted organization involvement. Having few dominant organizations that could dictate work methods actually helps.

Furthermore the finances of the construction organizations are of project focused. Need to find money and time in long running single construction projects for research and development and somehow connect those accross production projects, in parallel, while trying to keep up prompt and cheap delivery as clients (paying a lot for each one off product, each product different unlike in manufacturing industry using mass production or at least mass customization) demand quick and cheap delivery. They may go to one does not spend on R&D and can work cheaper (eve 1% difference can mean millions on this scale). Need to change the engine while flying kind of thing, cannot stop alone, or even together for a while (clients demands delivery) to reform the practices.

Even with industrialized construction the housing crisis remains. Look at very advanced countries like Sweden where factory based construction is norm but (despite municipality and government backed effort) getting a home is still hard. Not enough supply of the very expensive stock and even the councious and heavy regulations just shift the problem elsewhere (life long waiting lines for affordable rentals).

I believe the housing crisis is almost pure financial problem. Housing is used for investments too. And having affordable (reliably cheap) and high profit yielding (rapid cost increasing) housing at the same time is impossible. Seems like the ball is more like at the economists and regulatory side than construction technology.

Not to mention places where the cost of land and associated taxes are further worsening the situation (e.g. UK), where construction cost is actually lower portion in the overall price.

The construction industry can do quite a bit in improving mass production, but not that much that would solve housing crisis in high value locations where the space is limited, costly, and prices fuelled by investment efforts as well (where else would you invest than in places with high demand?). State bodies could help more.

You can avoid this with condominiums.