I wonder how Chinese compare, I bet they doubled.
And I bet most of them are empty. And will be forever.
See also "Chinese ghost towns": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...
The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
261–270 of 426 posts
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#262Earlier 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.
I did say "in major metros" - new construction in SF is about $440/sqft average vs a median listing price of almost $1000/sqft (average $964).
This is the highest in the world. [1, 2]
That's got nothing on San Mateo's $1264 average sale price and $160-350 per square foot in construction costs. [2]
Outside of major metros zoning rules make houses massive, twice as big as in the 70s. While the inflation-adjusted per square foot cost has remained roughly constant since the 70s, the much bigger size makes each house far less affordable.
It really is zoning.
[1] https://cbreemail.com/rv/ff019c9050e5e959ddee96391147a04f828...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234783/average-sales-pr...
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#263CRE guy here. A lot of this "productivity loss" is also due to government related staffing issues and bureaucracy. Most people are describing more complex building codes, so I'll add something new. I had a project that was delayed by over a year during Covid because the city approved incorrect plans, came back and requested revisions, and then lost the physical plans (without us knowing until we checked in asking wha…
State and local governments are, as far as I can tell, simultaneously spending way too much money and are badly understaffed in certain areas. Sometimes even while appearing well-staffed, because there's some bottleneck elsewhere in the system (due to insufficient staffing there) preventing the efforts of an army of other frontline workers from being effective. Like the elevator inspector thing—you may have more than…
> State and local governments are, as far as I can tell, simultaneously spending way too much money and are badly understaffed in certain areas.
Shouldn't be a mystery.
In many states and localities a massive portion of spending goes to pensions.
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#264> 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.
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…
The great thing about PEX is that they made an expensive* tool that makes joining pipes like 90% less skill-intensive.
I'd love to see something similar done for electric wiring. I'm picturing something like an electrical box that you can directly connect Romex that's been stripped with a special tool, and then a circuit-breaker-style snap-in for the actual receptacle. The parts/tools would cost more but might dramatically speed up the installation.
*relatively expensive, especially in the early days.
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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),…
Don't forget all the roofline complexity for "aesthetics". Or higher pitches because they look nice too. It'd be interesting to see these stats broken out by trade, with an appropriate unit (/sqft might make sense for roofing, but it doesn't for wall sheathing). I'd think a good chunk of this is due to safety expectations as well. It's a lot easier to walk around a roof if you aren't concerned with fall protection.
Yeah, all these fugly pop-outs that are typical in the "McMansion" style have to take a lot more time than just making a normal, more-or-less rectangular-footprint house. More measuring, more cutting, more separate pieces to apply, for every layer that goes on. More ridges and valleys to deal with when roofing.
They do make the house look bigger (on the outside) than a same-square-footage house with a more traditional floor plan, though, so... I guess that makes it worth it, to someone?
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Upping the codes to require new construction to have those things, while not razing your parents' house, shows it's all about the pyramid scheme and not about actual safety. If it were about actual safety and such things are considered unsafe then unsafe houses like your parents home should be bulldozed for the good of the people.
By your logic every single house in Florida (and those along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts that are in the path of possible hurricanes) that was built prior to 2002 (the year the building codes were changed in direct response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992) needs to be razed. I'm not sure that's really politically feasible...
My logic is the entitled fucks that vote for this policy should be made to eat their own medicine. Either it's OK to have a house without the safety criteria in the code, or it isn't.
Forcing them to eat their own medicine would allow the youth to also have the chance to build a house, even if it's not perfectly safe, closer to the cost their parents had to spend. Rather than changing the game and screwing over new entrants while old entrants enjoy immunity to the same rules.
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#267> 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.
There's the theory that building codes are used similarly (and complimentarily) to zoning laws to limit the supply of new housing (and therefore raise property values).
A great example being fire walls and mandatory self-latching doors between garages and living spaces - definitely a logical thing (cars and their gas are flammable, so let's isolate them from the house).
When you look at the data [0], garage fires are 2% of residential fires because cars don't really catch on fire in garages (fires happen in garages, but usually because of intentionally set fires getting out of control)
So now, in the midst of a housing affordability crisis (or a the end of a great run for real estate, depending on your outlook), we have construction workers using special fire-resistant drywall (that must be cut specially and cannot have holes in it), placing solid steel doors, and generally spending a lot of hours and materials building spaces that people don't even live in, when really, adding smoke detectors in garages solves the problem.
[0] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v14i12.pd...
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does that happen? For 700k I could hire 2 skilled persons and 5 undocumented immigrants to work an entire year. How long does it take to raise a house?
It's not just manual labor. You need an architect, structural engineer. Getting all permits, environmental analysis. A lot of expensive "knowledge workers" involved. Then there are materials, rental of construction equipment, insurance. Developers who build large number of row houses at the same time can get costs down through economies of scale.
In the county next to me you can self certify and pretty promise you did all that "knowledge worker" shit. No one will ever check, the self certification just promises you did the stuff and the government promises they won't investigate. Somehow not everyone is dying in city-wide house fires.
Sounds like southern california done fucked themselves with over-regulating that stuff.
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#269CRE guy here. A lot of this "productivity loss" is also due to government related staffing issues and bureaucracy. Most people are describing more complex building codes, so I'll add something new. I had a project that was delayed by over a year during Covid because the city approved incorrect plans, came back and requested revisions, and then lost the physical plans (without us knowing until we checked in asking wha…
State and local governments are, as far as I can tell, simultaneously spending way too much money and are badly understaffed in certain areas. Sometimes even while appearing well-staffed, because there's some bottleneck elsewhere in the system (due to insufficient staffing there) preventing the efforts of an army of other frontline workers from being effective. Like the elevator inspector thing—you may have more than…
They might also simply be exerting too much oversight. The other way to reduce these pressures is to reduce workloads by simply caring less. I'm doing a remodel and I got three pages of comments that were 90% about minor annotation issues that won't make any difference to anything on the ground ever. But it burned tens of hours of plan checker time.
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
From what I understand, while it is up to code, pro's don't put sharkbites in walls. I've gone with ss crimps instead of copper rings too. Mostly cause I live near the ocean and the ss crimps just seem easier to use. 200' of blue/red sharkbite brand pex b tubing is only about $70 on amazon right now, amazing.
Shark bite is awesome for capping a broken pipe until you can get around to a proper fix. Love those shark-bite caps. IMO every home owner should have pipe cutters for the pipes in their house (whatever materials those may be), and a set of those caps ready to apply for every size of pipe they've got. Ought to be as common as having a screwdriver and hammer. They're absolute life-savers when a leak or pipe burst happens at odd hours and you just want to get the leak stopped and the water back on and go back to bed or get back to work or whatever. Cut the pipe, steel wool the end clean, slap the shark bite cap on, get on with life until you have the time to properly fix it. Turns something very inconvenient into something merely a little inconvenient. Beats the hell out of having to break out the solder or pipe glue at 2AM.