171–180 of 426 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no reason they would be excluded. They are getting paid so they'd show up on the books.
I mean, if you're illegally hiring someone, you're not gonna pay them on the book.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe this is why we're seeing some of the industry starting to experiment with pre-fabbed homes that are modular but can be constructed using the automation we see in car manufacturing. The weak link in creating ever more complex homes, with ever more stringent building codes, at faster rates, is to remove the "humans with nail guns and drills" from the construction process. At some point, us meat sacks are the…
Back in 2003-2007, I worked for a home builder who vertically integrated and went for maximized modularity. In '05 we expanded our truss yard to 2 large presses and 4 automated saws, and added a wall-framing yard what worked the same way as the truss yard. Add in that they bought a concrete company to do the slabs, and a 2-story house could go from pour to sheeting in 35 days. Plumbing, electrical, and finishing jobs…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Affordable housing has little to do with the cost of building the house.
I am pretty sure it does. Lets assume an income of 32,000$ (~median US income) and 30% to pay for housing. That gives them 9,300$/year for a mortgage or 775$. with a 7% interest rate, that means the person would not be able to easily afford to buy a new home > 175,000$. There are lots of levers that determine if a person can afford a home. income, interest rates, % income that goes towards housing, etc. But its obvio…
Go compare the costs of identical pieces of plywood from the Home Depot on West 23rd Street in Manhattan and the Home Depot in Jersey City, directly across the river.
Manhattan: $76; Jersey City: $37
Is that the cost of shipping a piece of plywood an additional 3-10 miles? Is it taxes?
It's the rent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm remodeling my place right now. You're totally right, the building codes are a lot more complex and there is more 'work' to do as a result. No more just hiding electrical boxes in the walls. Heh. That said, the products being used have improved a lot. Things like PEX tubing for plumbing (instead of copper) and glue on walls for showers (over doing tile work), make some aspects go a lot faster. Edit: Oh, I forgot t…
PEX is great. I highly recommend keeping some shark bites and spare pieces of PEX around, as it's easy to do repairs on your own if you have an issue.
> number of houses or total square footage built per employee Average house size has probably doubled in the last 50 years. Nail guns can't make up for building code and higher finish work demands. It's not uncommon to see 6 or 7 layers in sheathing today.
> Nail guns can't make up for building code and higher finish work demands. It's not uncommon to see 6 or 7 layers in sheathing today. Yeah pretty much this I suspect. The paper doesn't propose that more regulations and complex code is why it's harder to build things today. And that's not a bad thing - code is a great thing since it sets a standard. Houses from 100 years ago, a carpenter could just make game time dec…
When the frame is put up it is typically inspected to ensure it meets code and that correct fasteners and brackets are used. Until the inspection is done you don't see roofing and electrical finished up. Then you have the electrical and plumbing on top the foundation. And when that is in its inspected again. Also heating cooling piping. Then fiber insulation is put in walls, then you have your drywall installed. Then you have the different finish teams come in. Finish plumbing, cabinetry, tiling, floors. And then another round of builder inspection. Then you get to the city and bank inspections.
Any one of the inspections or the specilaty teams running slow can push the whole project back. If your AC ducts aren't in you can't drywall for example.
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/...
>undocumented workers [are responsible for the productivity drop] I am confused by this assertion. If they are undocumented, wouldn't they be excluded in the stats? And if they aren't included in the stats, shouldn't we expect an artificial increase in worker productivity? If there is a 4:1 undocumented to documented ratio, then that 1 documented person will get "credit" for the work of 5 people! Even if 4 of those p…
I’m not sure if something similar happens in construction, but I’ve heard that in the landscaping business a supervisor will just pull up to a Home Depot with a pickup truck, and there’ll be a bunch of people waiting around, and they’ll go “Who wants $X for Y hours?” And then 4 or 5 guys get in the back of the truck and they head to the work site.
In a situation like that, you’re probably keeping track of how many people you employ each day so you can figure out how many you need for future projects, but you’re not gonna be able to produce a list of social security numbers if someone asked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copper is superior. I specifically went out of my way to find a house with large swaths of the plumbing done with copper. Pretty neat to have anti-microbial properties built in.
Better keep that copper out of exterior walls. It doesn't stretch and rebound like PEX when the water freezes. Those who care about homeopathy can run their drinking water through a loop of copper.
Construction is a job that you go into if you've been to prison, haven't gone to college, or are an undocumented laborer. It attracts those people who are the least skilled in the country because it's a hard job that's hard on your body, pays little, and is intellectually uninteresting (compared to most college educated middle class jobs). The people who make money in the industry have to go through onerous licensing requirements and have the skills necessary to run their own business and take on the risks of having that business fail, which most people (myself included) don't have. That's managing payroll, licensing, taxation (and avoiding taxation), sales, marketing, and all the rest of it while still being able to be a master plumber or what have you which can take 10 years or more. And even then you can be making 70+ hours a week or have to be on-call for emergencies (as a plumber), only be able to get work during certain times of the year (summer for a large amount of construction), or be away from home for long periods of time (if you have a specialized skill such as oil drilling or specialized skills in setting concrete and so forth and have to travel across the country to where the work is).
I've worked day labor in construction. After only a few months my hands are messed up to the point where some days it hurts to type after longer periods of time. Have you ever had to carry dry wall, lumber or sheet rock for 8 hours a day for minimum wage? It's boring and it hurts.
I'm currently unemployed and homeless. I'd rather be unemployed and homeless than do construction again. A year of that and my body would fall apart.
As a society we've made the industry as unattractive as possible so what do you expect?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Immigrant labor does not carry their own housing on their backs. It competes in the housing market for homes built by past generations of the native born.
Very true. That said, to be fair, the average poor undocumented immigrant demands far less space (simply because that's what they can get under the circumstances). Living multiple unrelated people to a room is not unusual, ie, even more cramped than college students, NYC 20 something year olds, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Manhattan or San Francisco? Probably not. But in most of the gigantic, sprawling USA, I suspect affordable housing absolutely has everything to do with cost of building a house.
If I had to guess it's not so much the actual cost of building the house as it is the profit margin of those who are building homes. Why build a $200,000 "starter home" when you can build a $478,000 home with gigantic margin on "luxury" trim like cheap granite countertops and "hardwood" floors for roughly the same cost? And then once you get the ugly design down you can just copy and paste it with few adjustments and…