Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings • Hacker News Board

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#101

Post by majormajor » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:31 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #71

branchless wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I don't think anyone would be using one of these pre-fab buildings for gentrifying existing urban centers. Those development projects usually aim to create aspirational purchases, or investment properties—neither of which wants the taint of "put together from parts, like a trailer-home or something." No, I imagine these would mostly be used to construct "condo-cities": exurbs/farmland "reformatted" all at once into n…

> Those development projects usually aim to create aspirational purchases, or investment properties—neither of which wants the taint of "put together from parts, like a trailer-home or something."

Live in a few of them and you'll see that the level of build quality can be wildly divorced from appearance and sales messaging. :)

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#102

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

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…

A huge amount of American suburbia is soulless copy/pasted McMansions and copy/pasted townhouses. Lucky for us, my father was a building contractor so he designed and custom built the home I grew up in, but AFAIK that is super rare nowadays, and is limited to rich people who can afford something custom. Everyone else in suburbia gets cut/pasted houses with the same faux brick facades, tacky arches, and cheap plastic siding on the walls that don’t face front.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#103

Post by branchless » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

ohazi wrote: post #92

branchless wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#104

Post by derefr » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:43 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #93

derefr wrote: post #73

Earlier 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…

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, and then condo #26 the next), etc. Maybe some more are added a few years later, and maybe those are across town—but this is still the same ongoing "project", by the same architect, the same construction firm, under the umbrella of the same sign-off from the same urban planners and engineers.

Whereas, what doesn't seem to exist, is a sort of approach to architecture that resembles software engineering. One where "a building blueprint" is like "a software library": a reusable thing, sold or shared between different companies, or maybe even open-sourced. A world where your first condo project, as a developer, might involve constructing a building to a blueprint that existed long before your company did, even a blueprint your rival firms are also using.

In such a world, you'd expect the components that go into such "common blueprints" to become standardized. You'd see a separation-of-concerns where these components get prefabricated not by the development company's contractors (as part of a "house in a box" or "condo in a box", the way you see today) but as part of an ecosystem of parts that enable these separate development-companies working off the same plans to work more quickly/efficiently. You'd have the Apples of the construction world buying full kitchen-assemblies or pre-plumbed-and-electrified-and-insulated-walls or whatever from the Samsungs of the construction world.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#105

Post by yrb » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:43 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #41

jpao79 wrote: post #22

It's also gaining popularity in the hotel industry. Inspiring video: http://www.guerdonmodularbuildings.com/modular-now-marriotts... It has many benefits for the construction teams. They can work in a controlled environment, and focus on technical skills versus getting through urban commutes, live in lower cost of living areas (in this case Idaho), all the tools/materials are there, have quality assurance processes,…

Thanks for the Video Link. It answer a lot of the question I had previously. One problem I thought that was not solved were finishing. It turns out they actually do all the finishing before it is shipped. And because the finishing, construction, are all done indoor and in house, my guess is that with Air Condition they will / could work much faster, higher efficiency, and more importantly, there should be less sloppi…

Depending on how you measure a lot of prefab construction you don't save time overall (design to finished) or end up with better quality. You also tend to up with buildings that will fail earlier due to having a lot more of the most risky components of any built form, joints.

I have hope that as designers and tools get better at dealing with the connection detailing and with material/assembly tolerances it will lead to better outcomes in the future.

I would really recommend watching "The Building Science of Prefabricated Construction". It does a good job of going over the realities of this form of construction.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIeZlCfweMo

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#106

Post by ghostly_s » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:46 PM UTC

megaman22 wrote: post #11

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…

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...

> It's not super expensive or time-consuming to throw together a standard software project. Once you have your dev environment set up, you can get your wireframe demo compiling in a week with a handful of people. Then you just need to do all the fiddly stuff inside...

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#107

Post by yrb » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #83

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is the foundation. You either need to pour a large foundation ahead of time (that you won't use for a while) or pour it as you go. It's not an insurmountable problem, but it does make it more difficult. Although if you decided to build up instead, by just adding more floors you could avoid that problem.

Is pouring more foundation next to existing foundation problematic and difficult, or is it just more expense to get the concrete guys back out to do more work?

It can actually be very problematic and difficult, depending how how easy the new slab location is to access now that you have a building in the way and presumably landscaping you want to preserve. This can end up adding a considerable amount of expense to a job compared to a bare site.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#108

Post by bobthepanda » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

tomjakubowski wrote: post #43

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.

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 most of them, act this way, the end result is a housing shortage even when the economy is barely chugging along.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#109

Post by Dowwie » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:11 PM UTC

There already are prefab towers in Brooklyn, some prefabbed in warehouse(s) somewhere in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Here's one of the older stories: https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20131211/navy-yard/worlds-t...

I haven't been closely following the Atlantic Yards project, but to my knowledge it's had quite a few setbacks.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#110

Post by digikata » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

maire wrote: post #74

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.

We just built a "hybrid" house in Santa Cruz county. We picked the default design and stuck to it. We had to make a few changes to get through the planning department. The biggest issue was not at the building level - but rather everything they made us do to prepare the site for building. Yikes - that was expensive. It also took a long time to get through the planning department.

Was more required of the site prep for the hybrid house than one using more typical construction processes?