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Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

nytimes.com

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Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#181

Post by anoncoward111 »

maire wrote: post #180
anoncoward111 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the counties in the Northeast have taken a strong stance against composting toilets. It's because the local construction companies control the local governments here. They literally don't let you buy or move onto specific properties without submitting plans from "an approved septic installation company." You can imagine who is on the approval board, and which companies are "approved providers."

California has water issues - that is why they were seriously considering composting toilets.

Sounds like I should move there :) The Northeast's justification is that they don't want human feces in the water table.

But their policies don't reflect this noble goal.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#182

Post by baybal2 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #152
jimrandomh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the problematic zoning laws exist mainly at the city level. The problem is that the decisions about key areas are being made by people who are incentivized to make housing prices go up (because they own property), which they do by severely restricting construction of dense housing.

Even that seems super short sighed though isn't it? If an area turns into the next Manhattan all land owners win big time. I'd love it if it became economically desirable to build a 100 story skyscraper next to my house and someone went ahead and did it!

This idea is entirely alien to majority of American high class suburbians.

My sorries to people insulted by this statement.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#183

Post by baybal2 »

derefr wrote: post #104
beat wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have just found out what Soviet 112th series apartments were.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#184

Post by baybal2 »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #65
danschumann wrote: post #27

What I want is an MVP house (room + bathroom + kitchen), which I can expand ( extra rooms, extra bathrooms, etc ). Normally with construction, when you add stuff, you need to break stuff, but if there could be a modular housing system that would let you expand without destruction, while being competitively priced, I'd do that. In Elon Musk fashion, it would have to be better than a normal house, right? A modular hous…

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.

Protip: use piles

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#185

Post by Eridrus »

reeddavid wrote: post #138

Quality prefabricated homes and apartments are a great idea. There's a negative association with prefabricated homes, but I've seen a lot of newer companies that seem to be focusing on quality and efficiency, often targeting the higher end of the market. And lots of new homes built on-site are of very poor quality these days: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/where-we-live/wp/2017/05... This approach doesn't seem l…

> This approach doesn't seem like a solution to affordable housing, even though many of these companies use that concept in their marketing.

It's not a complete solution, but construction costs provide a floor on the price of new housing.

Even if we solve all the other issues around zoning, impact fees (https://letsgola.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/impact-fees-are-ba...), approval times, NIMBYs, etc, the price of dense, new housing is going to provide a floor on how much it costs to house people.

It's also super important for construction to be cheap for it to make sense to build denser housing where moderately dense housing exists, because in those cases the value of the building over the cost of land is significant, e.g. I live in a 4 story building, but I live right on top of a subway station where we should probably have far more density, but my landlord is deriving value from all the occupants, but not the land.

So, it's not going to solve the housing issue by itself, but like the Ben Horowitz saying, there are no silver bullets, only lead bullets. And making construction costs cheaper is one of them.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#186

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

DrScump wrote: post #166
swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not just a logistics thing. Prefab components are mostly used for faster RoI by building quicker. A good example of a real estate holdings company using prefab construction is mcdonalds, wawa, etc. These establishments have the same churn and burn formula. From start to finish, some of these stores can be completed in a little under a month from start of construction to open time. It makes sense for them to spend…

Prefab components are mostly used for faster RoI by building quicker ... or by displacing work to places where labor and materials are cheaper (even if mainly due to poor QC and/or compromised worker safety). A classic example of this was the imported prefab segments of the New Bay Bridge, which costs tens (hundreds?) of millions in rework costs and who-knows-how-many remaining unfixed defects.

I overstated myself here. What I meant is that for residential / small - midsized commercial buildings only, QC/defects are not as large as a concern.

Prefab components I was thinking about was prefab wall / roof / floor trusses like these http://www.buildwithbmc.com/bmc/Products/Trusses%2C-I-Joists...

Bridges are a different story all together.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#188

Post by DrScump »

jdavis703 wrote: post #158
vkou wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because tax rates are the same for old, and new residents/employers, they aren't paying enough to offset the costs they are adding to the system. If you and your 4 roommates rent a 5-bedroom house... And then a sixth person moves in, and demands that everyone spends $20,000 each, to construct a sixth bedroom... The old residents are getting a pretty bad deal. The new resident paid $20,000 to get a room... But the res…

The reason you're getting downvoted is because your facts are wrong, property tax is lower for older residents because Prop 13 limits increases in assessed value. Further new projects are saddled with a wide variety of impact fees. Overall new residents wind up subsdising old residents.

  property tax is lower for older residents
That's incorrect as written. Perhaps you meant to say that "for otherwise equal properties, tax is lower for owners with longer tenure in that property." It has nothing to do with owner age.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#189

Post by DrScump »

bradknowles wrote: post #116
joe_the_user wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but if you have a prefabricated wall, floor and ceiling solution, that solution could contain all "fiddly bits" pre-installed in an arrangement that was pre-approved and so should theoretically be much faster. Especially, you need wires and pipes and these require significant time and labor even with no zoning requirements.

Try doing that with Legos. Build all the plumbing into those walls. Build all the wiring into those walls. Build all the windows and doors and other openings into those walls. Then try to put those walls together in a way that connects all the plumbing and all the wiring. Now, let's look at the real world, at least here in the US. Yes, there is a national electrical code that covers many parts that aspect, but lots o…

Are there conflicting codes, though (rather than some just being more strict than another)?

Is there no "one best way" that is compatible with all local codes?

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