121–130 of 426 posts
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But people still want and yell for “affordable housing”. Can’t have your cake and eat it too
Affordable housing has little to do with the cost of building the house.
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Affordable housing is just a zoning issue. The cost of construction is a tiny fraction of the cost of a new house in major metros. The cake you can't have and eat at the same time is: "I want affordable housing" and "I want my house to be a good investment."
That's not even remotely true. Cost of construction is typically 60 to 80% of the cost. In high cost of living areas land is more expensive but so are construction costs.
Note that this is using a counterintuitive definition for "productivity". Most comments here are taking it to mean that construction projects get less stuff done (foundations dug, concrete poured, etc...), but it's actually measuring it as an economic value in units of "value added per full time worker". That seems to be rather more related to the distribution of capital than work output. If the construction industry…
The "mistake" in the linked article is assuming all construction work is equal and unchanging over those decades where CLEARLY there have been infinite real estate fads over the decades. There's just no way replacing countertops with granite can generate as much financial productivity as sewer work, and the fraction of the market spend on low-profit countertops is vastly higher now.
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Pretty sure this is the right answer and calling this "worker productivity" seems a bit harsh. A "Pretty Good House" (book that was on the front page last week) includes insulation above and below the foundation slab, vapour barriers, double studs to break thermal bridges, complex window installation (again thermal bridges), air exchangers and heat pumps with ducts (or mini-splits). New constructions (for cold zone),…
Book may have been on the front page last week but I assure you very very few people in the US have insulation above and below their foundations or incredibly air tight houses.
I'd be surprised if Maine, Vermont, New York and the other North-Eastern states don't have something similar.
In this time-period there has been a large-scale introduction of undocumented workers into the construction labor force. They are a quarter of some construction labor categories. Perhaps using undocumented subcontractors may play a role in lower productivity growth (cheap, unstable, and relatively unskilled labor) or maybe just distorting the statistics. https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/...
Easy. Have them to daily standups, sprint planning every two weeks and a day of retrospective and soon their producticity will be rockin'.
*George, instead of just putting up this wall, can you have a ticket and close it for every board you put up?*
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That's not even remotely true. Cost of construction is typically 60 to 80% of the cost. In high cost of living areas land is more expensive but so are construction costs.
There's no way. Most of the value of housing in expensive areas is the land itself, not the cost of the building.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not even remotely true. Cost of construction is typically 60 to 80% of the cost. In high cost of living areas land is more expensive but so are construction costs.
There's no way. Most of the value of housing in expensive areas is the land itself, not the cost of the building.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Affordable housing is just a zoning issue. The cost of construction is a tiny fraction of the cost of a new house in major metros. The cake you can't have and eat at the same time is: "I want affordable housing" and "I want my house to be a good investment."
> Affordable housing is just a zoning issue. The cost of construction is a tiny fraction of the cost of a new house in major metros. No it is not. Construction costs (material, labor) are sky high even if property costs are as well. Building high-end housing has always been more profitable than otherwise, low-end housing is simply high-end housing 20 or 30 years in the future.
That was maybe true in the past, but todays exurban sheetrock palaces are impossible to be turned into low-income/entry-level housing. It starts with the zoning requirements - are you really going to divide a 2500 sqft McMansion into a duplex without an epic zoning fight? And then there's the transportation/parking issue.
The real problem is that 1200 sqft entry level housing like it was built in the decade after WW2 isn't made any longer but is urgently needed.
In this time-period there has been a large-scale introduction of undocumented workers into the construction labor force. They are a quarter of some construction labor categories. Perhaps using undocumented subcontractors may play a role in lower productivity growth (cheap, unstable, and relatively unskilled labor) or maybe just distorting the statistics. https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/...
Are undocumented workers factored into the number of employees? I would assume the are excluded from the # of workers in the calculation.