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.
The same problems are pretty much everywhere in the US. This brings to mind a proposed project in Boston that faced a lot of friction, in part because prefab construction was proposed:
>The Zoning Board of Appeals this week rejected a proposed condo building on the site of a former asthma-inhaler factory in West Roxbury, citing neighborhood concerns about density, parking and the developer's proposal to assemble prefab modular units on the site, rather than hiring local workers for more traditional construction.
>...
>But board member Mark Erlich, who is also executive secretary and treasurer of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters, used the proposed modular construction to open an attack on the project. City officials have frequently expressed skepticism of such prefab units being bolted together, he said. But he added:
>It also removes a lot of [work] hours that could be done by people who live and work in the city vs. people in Maine, who wear sneakers.
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.
The site prep was normal for any house. The biggest change was in septic system requirements. Septic systems cost three times as much as they did a few years ago because we have to have an active system with a fan and they have to have lifetime inspections. The contractor said this is normal now for the state of California. There are also relatively new rules to manage water runoff.
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."
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.
Personally I wouldn't mind the Bay Area looking like Shenzhen, but I don't understand why people think that anything is going to change. Housing and education are prime assets in the new information based society and economy. People aren't going to share that anymore than natural resources, stocks, bitcoins or domains. Regardless of the larger consequences.
It's not about whether you have to let people come and live on your own property. It's about whether your neighbour may subdivide her own property for a profit. Collectively, owners have an incentive to stop her; but individual incentives are mixed.
We can see how the politics of that tension is working out right now. But how can anyone tell how it will play out in the future?
> 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.
The localities have a point. Why should existing residents pay for new infrastructure, to accommodate housing for 10,000 new residents (All because large tech firms keep building offices in the valley?)
In a proper world, either the tech giant, or those new employees should pay for those infrastructure improvements.
Traditionally, this has been done through high re-zoning and subdivision fees.
Aren't local tech companies offices paying taxes that should take care of that? Unless you mean that tech companies should build private roads and infrastructure which sounds very bad... The way you get money from private parties and use it to build public infrastructure is through taxes :)
Tech company office taxes incentivize local municipalities to open offices, not to build houses. And in fact that's exactly what happens - offices go up, but the people to work there have to commute in from outside the municipality.
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 rest of the house paid $100,000, for no benefit to themselves.
Cities have zoning/subdivision fees to deal with this exact problem. If you're adding X new units to the city, you have to pay for the infrastructure to support these X units.
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.
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.
Are you serious?! If your area gets more desirable and built up your property value will more than make up for any perceived tax unfairness. If you end up blocking a lot in Manhattan with your single family home you are a made man!
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!
Actually its driven by the need for localized labor and unfortunately due to high housing costs, labor can't afford to live in downtown SF/LA and so a lot of time is wasted getting to the job site from the outer suburbs.
Ok true. Just would add that high housing costs are actually the sum of asinine zoning laws + high labor costs and that high labor costs are due to high housing costs. :)
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 projects that would be automatically approved in any other city [1, 2]. This is why nothing gets built here, it has nothing to do with the cost of land.
No developer can afford to put up with a five-year battle with neighbors who complain about the shadow that the new building will cast onto their back yard, or to pay for fifteen $X0,000 bullshit environmental studies that the city will make the developer conduct as a "compromise." And remember, these are for designs that are completely up to code and that are zoned legally.
No more land can be manufactured, supply is inelastic. In urban areas you are going to have to bid against everyone else and the highest bidder, who agrees to work for the most years for the land, wins.
Rezoning isn't going to fix this IMHO. It might help, but you will reach a limit and then have the same root cause to deal with: rentiers.
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 new urban branch-nodes by plopping five hundred mixed-use condo buildings onto it, and then connecting it to the nearest urban center using high-speed rail or other public transit.
> 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. :)
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 from standardized parts.
With some exceptions, every site is different. The lot may be shaped one way or another. Maybe it's long and thin or maybe it's roughly square. There might be a tree that you want to save.
Maybe the area is hilly and the lot slopes downward from back to front, so you want to build on the flatter front portion because it's easier, and there's adequate drainage so that's OK. Or maybe there isn't adequate drainage so you'd be better off putting the house on the higher part of the lot.
Maybe there's a two-story house next door and if you put windows in the wrong places, they can look right down into your bedroom. Or maybe there isn't and you need all the windows you can get on that side of the house because that's south-facing so it's the best place to have them from an energy efficiency point of view.
If there's an alley behind the house, you probably want the garage to back up to that. If there isn't, you'll have to put the driveway on the front. Unless it's a corner lot, in which case you might want it on the side if the street on the front has heavier traffic or bad visibility.
Maybe there's a view so you want the living room on the back of the house so everyone can enjoy that view. Or maybe the view is to the side so you want the living room there.
You get the idea. The best house you can build on a piece of land depends on a lot of factors specific to that piece of land. So customized designs help you achieve that.
Yup, to expand on that you don't even need to make it bespoke. Just having the option to mirror a floor plan makes a huge difference in how well you can use a plan.
We did that with our new house, flipped where the kitchen/livingroom would be so the good view out of the back of the house is much more usable. Super easy to do with a stick-built house, probably a fair bit harder with modular.
Houses aren't even that "bespoke" - most homes come from a stock set of designs that builders bought 20-30 years ago and have simply been churning out the same house... There are so many places in America that claim to have different house designs and yet they're identical or mirror images of one another. Maybe one's got a different trim package or a different set of cabinets or countertops... but otherwise indistinguishable from one another.
Stick-and-frame is still the most prevalent way to build homes for numerous other reasons though, like ease of available materials, roads being non-ideal for transporting large, heavy edifices, and the general perception of prefabricated homes being... not so great... due to seeing prefabbed mobile homes and the lack of quality that's incredibly common in that industry, amongst numerous other reasons.
What has seemed to really change things recently are "SIPs" - Structural Insulated Panels - essentially prefabbed wall segments that you can then jinga together to make a home. They've become wildly popular in some parts of the country as they are easy to transport on the back of an 18-wheeler, easy to install with or without a construction crane, and take care of multiple construction steps at once, greatly reducing build times. They can often be more energy efficient too, as they have fewer seams and the insulation is applied more evenly (often an expanding foam is used instead of fiberglass, which also boosts the R value by quite a bit).
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...
Having just gone through this process can confirm. You also have different states/counties having different zoning requirements for stuff like wind/snow load, etc. If you're building from materials it's much easier to go from 2x4 -> 2x6 and stronger trusses/foundation than re-engineer a whole modular structure.
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 build the same building in as many cities as are compatible with the building codes it was designed under?
China, HK, Singapore have a lot of copy paste buildings lined up next to each other, which I find pretty odd to look at and dehumanizing/alienating to be surrounded by (though probably very efficient to build, and it seems like Chinese people don't mind too much). You'd see them as soon as you left the airport if you visit there sometime.
I found many cities in China in particular look very similar to one another in a not great way because of similar architectural choices including copy paste buildings, which apparently the government has noticed—I can't find the article about it but the central government is making moves to get Chinese cities to stop being built in exactly the same way/destroy and replace too much of their historic buildings with culturally diverse architecture.
Not to say we shouldn't do what you're saying, but if we do it we should probably do it in a way that doesn't make all our cities too generic.
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. There's a T structure, leading to three sections on the first floor. The entrance is a living/dining area separated by an arch, on the other side of the back wall is the kitchen, and on the other side of the interior side wall is a hallway leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom. They're all like this. And these were built by hand, with the most sophisticated factory parts being two-by-fours and hinges. They might have a porch, or an extension (my house has a back extension built in the 1950s), and the attic might be finished into a single room, or even expanded into multiple rooms with a large dormer. Many/most have been modified over the years. But the basic form? Consistent as a pup tent.
These things are the result of available technology. The bungalows are a product of factory-made nails, which made balloon frame construction viable. In the South, you'll find shotgun shacks, which are what happens when you build a bungalow but don't need or want a basement.
This is nothing new. My neighborhood might look varigaeted, but it's not.
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.
What do you think bathtubs, showers, sinks, taps, doors and most fittings are?
There is a ton of prefabrication in construction already. There are also large libraries of shared details.
Most of the bits that are not already prefabricated are the bits that don't have simple interfaces. Either to each other or to their surrounding environment.
This is exactly how apartment buildings are built. There are tons of examples of copy-paste development, even miles apart, in my area.
Regarding the article, pre-fabricated buildings have been a thing for decades. For example in my area Quadrant Homes contracts out framing to a local builder that assembles interior and exterior walls in a factory on a gantry and then ships the entire wall package out to the house to be assembled.
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.
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 of other codes vary on a city by city or even neighborhood by neighborhood basis. And your HOA can have some of their own codes that you're also required to honor.
How can you have a single central location that can build all those prefab walls according to all those different codes, and have them all pre-approved?
Sure, in the US now codes make this and so many other things impossible.
But if it's just the problem of connecting various kinds of pre-built conduit in lego-like walls, yes it would be a hard problem but it seems solvable in itself. Especially, you don't to have just fixed pieces. rather you can have pieces whose routining "logic" is adjustable after that fact (switch the flow of pipes from an internal panel of the wall). And you could have an app for verifying a given arrangement could work, before you ordered your "lego" set.
> 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...
I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke.
Anything else falls into the dreaded "modular home" category. You know, just one step above a single-wide trailer, at least in the minds of some. Never mind the fact that the only thing separating my ungodly expensive house in Redmond, which sits on a slab, from a modular home is that it was built onsite. "Bespoke"? phhhffft, I can find you a dozen houses within the radius of our daily dog walk that are exactly the same.
Personally, I think the status quo is equivalent to Ford dropping a box of parts at your local dealership, and you have to wait for the mechanic to assemble it. Why aren't robots framing my house in a factory somewhere?
FWIW that's how all the trusses on your house were probably done.
I think it's mostly a cost/benefit tradeoff. My hunch is that the overhead of building on-site isn't that great when you have to figure in the overhead of shipping/designing something in a modular way. Pretty much everything is 8ft long in terms of building materials which makes it much easier to transport.
Most modular just does it wrong. Doing fixed design is a great opportunity for better, deeper design. Think Apple or Tesla type design and engineering. Not many complaints around cookie cutter Audi RS7's or even Hyundais
The status quo is a home depot and it all gets figured out on the fly. We would be in a much better place with engineered kit as you describe Ford doing.
There are places that do factory assembly of things like framing then ship it out to the job site, google or search youtube for preframed wall factory. It's becoming more popular precisely because labor and time are in short supply.
Modular construction is pretty big here in upstate NY. I've never seen a stigma against it vs stick built, and it does not appear to be a differentiator in home pricing here.
I'm not so sure. Whats the average lifespan of a house? 50-80 years? To me it makes sense to invest the time to optimize design to make best use of the land area. I guess you could still use somewhat standarized parts though, spend more effort in the design phase.
My architecture wife said houses today are designed (in the US) to last at least 50 years. However I seriously have my doubts that a house could make it that long without some major renovations/overhauls along the way, given that they're essentially built as plywood sheets, stapled to wood planks, protected by plastic siding, and covered with a tar sheet roof down here where I live. I wish the developers invested more into the longevity of a house instead of pinching every penny they can.
US houses can easily last 100+ years. Once they're enclosed, basic maintenance and rare exterior repair/replace gets you a century, unless a natural disaster hits or a freak accident (major fire). With metal roofing becoming common, that removes having to replace the roof except every ~40 years.
You can find plenty of poorly constructed 100+ year old homes in the US, with original innards put together every which way in a shoddy fashion before there were building codes and standardization of construction. And yet there they are, still going with basic maintenance.
I live in Denver. Houses last way longer than 50 years here. Old houses here are quite desirable due to many of these neighborhoods proximity to downtown. The last two houses I rented were from the 1929 and 1943. They were in great shape. They were not the "old house" on the block either, both neighborhoods dated to that era.
Of course they have had several roofs in that time, but roofs don't last much longer than 15-20 years here due to hail. Siding has a limited life, but Hardie Plank which most new builds I see around here has a very long life. Brick will last basically forever along with plaster walls and hard wood floors. The foundation, framing, and plywood basically last forever if you keep it dry.
Here in Ithaca, NY, many of the houses standing today were built before Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn. Ironically, they’re among the best housing stock, because unlike many mid-20th century constructions, the older houses are free of asbestos and lead paint.
More likely the quality of wood and carpentry is higher. You can't buy wood these days, certainly not economically, that compares with what was standard 100+ years ago.
Yup. Most studs and beams were made of far better would than the short growth wood we have now. Heck, there are firms that specialize in recovering old wood from barns and factories since the wood is so much denser, and the size is simply unavailable elsewhere.
The lifespan of a house is a ship of theseus type question. The wiring in the walls, plumbing, foundation and frame could last 50+ years if everything else was done right, and there is no water going where it is not supposed to. Modern roofs, windows, air conditioner and heater last 25-30 years. A water heater is going to last about 15 years. Exterior paint, interior paint, carpet, all last about 10 years. After 50 years you will have replaced a substantial portion of the value of a house even if it looks more or less the same.
Even if the home is habitable there are other reasons they are removed. After a certain point it makes more sense financially to tear a home down and rebuild than to continue to renovate it. Also markets change over time, and homes are not always built in a way that maximizes the use of the land. An area that was mostly bungalows and ranches can have homes replaced with larger homes or multifamily buildings.
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.
Factory-made homes do exist, but they acquired a bad reputation somewhere along the line, and tend to get used only in limited applications, such as summer cottages.
What is gaining ground, apparently, is prefabricating components of houses, which are then assembled on site rather than doing everything on site from plain lumber. Stairs, for example, are often made from kits.
A house I owned was built in two halves, transported, and joined together down the middle (a “marriage wall” results). The primary issues I hit weren’t the house - it was insuring the thing and properly classifying it. Some insurance companies called it manufactured and raised the rates significantly outright refused to insure, others call it stick built because of the set of standards were sufficient to note that this is not a mobile home. The other issues were around the fireplace being classified as an insert (non-masonry) which evidently also makes the house uninsurable to some companies in North Carolina.
Basically on paper, a lot of these off-site manufactured and local assembled homes sound like double wides and lower income housing options and the gains get erased in insurance premiums because you get lumped in with high risk owners despite buying a $500k+ custom home basically.
> 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.
Well, IKEA does have a joint venture with a construction company to make prefab apartments.
There are some places doing things similar to the Factory OS but for home. 100% prefab homes have a certain stigma in the US due to quality issues. Also many people want an at least somewhat customized home so there's limits to what can be pre-assembled. There are some parts that are being pre-assembled offsite and trucked to the home like the Factory OS in the article. It's just mainly the framing etc that is predone then the customized elements like flooring and fixtures are added on site.
One big factor preventing us from doing the same thing as the article for homes is the need to support customization. With a large apartment complex there's enough of the exact same sets of rooms being created that building them all out then shipping out makes sense, trying the same thing for homes (without a change to people accepting much more identical housing) would require stocking and setting up a lot of different tile and hardwood and loosing scale efficiencies.
In developments where they build many identical houses, there is some re-use - the concrete forms used to build one slab are hauled down the block for the next one. Also, preformed wall framing is sometimes trucked in, as are roof trusses and other pieces.
So there's still a lot of pre-built components that are used when building multiple houses.
> I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke.
I know very little about building construction but we just bought a new-built in Vienna and very little of that seems bespoke. The entire construction is largely made from standardized prefab elements (I think there are around 130 units in here).
If there is one thing technology has been doing, it has been taking things that were once only possible with a large organization, once only possible with lots of knowledge, once only possible with lots of money; and making those things do-able by one person.
Building houses fits a few of those. So it's foreseeable that eventually someone will be able to build a house with an app, for fairly low money, fairly quickly, fairly automated, but it might be many years until it's really that cheap/easy.
A potential stop gap would be like an app that told you every single step how-to build your house: buying, delivering, cutting, etc etc etc, for the millions of edge cases of construction.
I first saw them on Grand Designs where they put up a beautiful house in 7 days. (only thing that had to be done on site was groundworks, the house turned up on a couple of lorries and efficient germans (tautology possibly) put it together, cleaned up and left.
I think it's very interesting how prefab construction seems to pop up from time to time in the media. I grew up in a prefab house, trucked to the property in two halves and bolted together on a poured concrete foundation -- it's incredibly common.
Apartment blocks however, they seem to be locked in a perpetual demonstrator state. One, maybe two prefab buildings will go up, and then no more, eliminating the point of the effort. All kinds of stats will be provided, "built in 30 days", "providing housing for 100 families" and so on. Decades later they'll lay forgotten, or in disrepair, or make for interesting background scenery in dystopian cinema. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower
My guess is that it's a logistics thing. You can more efficiently move 10,000 tons of concrete and rebar to a site packed in sacks and bound in sets, on fewer trucks and in less space, than you can move the same in prefabbed boxes full of mostly empty air. Converting that raw material into the same boxes of air isn't particularly complicated or difficult and can be done at high quality on site anyways, and now you also don't have to pay to have a factory and factory workers.
I was thinking the same thing: logsitics-wise, it seems more efficient to stack all the material flat in the trailers rather than have a premade box with a lot of unused space (the room's interior).
On the other hand, having the ability to construct everything at the factory helps overcoming issues such as waste of material and lost time due to conatruction error, not to mention the health of construction workers not depending on weather conditions as much.
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 more money on prefab components. Opening sooner means faster revenue streams. Not only that, if you open in a popular area, rent/land is very high. Where I live the average rent for a store is maybe $3000 a month for a 1500 square foot area but a new chipotle in my town opened up an area with a rent of about $8000.
Your traditional real estate development takes much longer than this though. They pay for cheaper raw materials instead, as its easier to work with for each houses need. They dont have a streamlined sysyem setup for needing prefab components.
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 doubt the logistics would make the task of prefabrication not worth doing, though.
The analogy in software that first came to mind was server vs. client-side rendering of websites.
(I think much of it holds true for physical construction, too.) This topic seem to reappear every few years (2010 -> everything on the server; 2014 -> everything on the client; 2018 -> everything BACK on the server.) It will likely cycle for at least an iteration more (especially if someone finds a way to advance CPU's vertically, once again), but I believe in future, the consensus will settle to: if you can afford it -> do it on the server. (maybe it already has?)
In the web world, the "builder" would be paying a larger bill, if they would "prefabricate" what they serve to the world, but customers will be happier to get their product/service faster. On the other side - the builder will be able to get to a larger audience with smaller investment into infrastructure, if much of that computation is off-loaded to the clients.
But if we look at the overall cost of those computations - the servers should execute the same amount of computation cheaper (being a dedicated infrastructure for this specific purpose), (generally) it should be in everyone's best interest that computation happens on the server, because overall it costs less for everybody.
Which means that all that it comes down to, would be the question - how critical is this decision, in growing the service/product's customer/user-base and does the RoI make sense (i.e. would that company make more profit getting larger portion of the computation along with a larger userbase, or does it only make sense with lesser server bill)?
So while it would be cheaper, logistically, for facebook to serve their content in a completely raw format (to be fully rendered on the client), would they've still been able to grow their product to what it is right now, if they never made the switch. (I'm speculating about facebook, but I thought it was a safe bet that they do much of the rendering on the server, without confirming that first elsewhere)
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:
This approach doesn't seem like a solution to affordable housing, even though many of these companies use that concept in their marketing.
In the least affordable housing markets with worsening trends, including Seattle and San Francisco, construction cost is a tiny fraction of the problem.
Efficient, prefabricated housing isn't going to make housing meaningfully more affordable in places where the majority of the cost of a dwelling is its land.
> 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.
Start-to-finish I believe the timeframe is about six months and one of the benefits of modular is that they can reconfigure or move these buildings in several years as needs and neighbourhoods change.
Absolutely, land estate prices are totally insane in the more gentrified areas. The building itself is nearly irrelevant, see Vancouver rare land plots for measure... or most of the UK. What is in dire need is a fundamental legislation change, where the entirety of the real estate is no longer a market open to speculation, but a fundamental right of the individual and is well proportioned to any income range within a very reasonable 2:1 ratio and this even if it means depricing the already bought properties and cutting corporations out of the building business and of course limiting the amount of houses in possession to a single individual to maybe 2 and eliminate speculators/investors completely.
Hong Kong has been breaking records after records in the most unaffordable places on earth to live, ranked by Median Income and Median Price of Housing.
Agreed. I think the solution is, Property should not be an investment vehicle. At least it should be taxed and regulated. Although another / the major reason to what we have now is QE, pushing asset prices up.
Exactly... when an uncovered parking space rents for $400-1k/mo it's hard to see how building practices are going to help. Outside of towncenter land costs are lower, but transportation is lacking. Really, it's driven by a combination of growth in high paying tech jobs, restricted geography, and tax/financing structures, as much as, zoning laws or building costs.
Parking is often one of the most expensive things to build in land constrained areas due to the dead load of cars that parking structures must support, with a standard spot requiring 200sqft itself, add to that 50% for ingress/egress space. Generally parking spots cost a fraction of what that space would go for if it were allowed to be lived in.
The problems are the amount of buildable land in desirable areas and zoning rules preventing maximizing use of said land. In general, there is plenty of buildable land--just not necessarily where people want to live.
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 house ( like a mobile home ), which is expandable, which is simultaneously better than a normal house. Maybe for my next startup idea ( since this is a problem I have and I would use ). The end goal would be a transition from a tiny house to a mansion, with each state being as good as a comparable house, and about as cheap. Maybe some panels they could sell back?
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.
It’s certainly worth considering. A 20x20 concrete slab can be poured for a few thousand US dollars by a professional concrete contractor, and you could include radiant heating in the slab. Seems to be at least an straight forward option.
I grew up playing The Sims so my ideal housing situation is essentially the same as your comment.
There are companies that build custom manufactured houses, like Carina Construction[1] in Ithaca, NY. I haven’t looked into how modifications like those you mention might work, but the prices are competitive and the modular customization is pretty extensive. All-in-all a good deal, if you don’t mind a house that looks slightly plastic.
2 Bed, 2 Bath with a combined kitchen and living room, all for the low, low price of $330k? For what is essentially a double-wide with fancy siding and big windows? Haha, nope. If I had land, I could easily build something twice the size or plop down a mobile home for 1/10 of the cost. But that is the true issue with housing these days: finding affordable, available land in a desirable area.
I’ve thought about this type of thing a lot and it is something I’d like to build eventually. There’s an existing market and room for improving manufacturing processes.
This is the real factor at play: Bodies are moving to the area faster than new units are being constructed because of zoning laws an other regulations which limit the speed at which new developments can be made. In Los Angeles it takes 2 - 3 years to break ground on a new apartment complex because of all the regulations mandating permits, surveys and reports that must be complied with prior to construction. This ensures only very large players can enter the market and raises the costs to develop new units, keeping prices high.
In some cases, your conclusion is correct while the problem is completely different. I live in a college town, where rent and housing prices obey different laws of economics.
Unlike the Bay Area, a brisk 15 minutes drive in any direction will bring you to dirt cheap rural property, but because a huuuuuuge proportion of renters are college students, they tend to live in the city and put the rent on their student loans instead of moving further out and spending time (and money, on a car) commuting. It’s not as if a college student is going to throw in their hands and say “well, I could get an Ivy League degree at the school I was accepted to, or I could get a second-Tier degree somewhere else and pay half the rent.”
Case in point, Ithaca’s Collegetown neighborhood used to be a sleepy community of large rental houses, but over the last 20 years it’s been heavily developed into very large, tall apartment blocks, all while Cornell built massive developments of dorms and grad student housing complexes. And rents just keep climbing higher and higher...
I've always been surprised by how expensive Princeton is even though short drives in any direction can be much cheaper. Students seem to be mostly in student housing anyway, and anybody who lives there in any other capacity probably has a car, is it just prestige of being there that pumps up the rent?
Finally, commuting sucks: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/there-and-back... from a social and psychological perspective. People love living around other people who can they chat with and befriend; that's why current zoning laws prohibiting such developments are so pernicious.
And a fascinating documentary https://youtu.be/D7shgCkCfhU?t=573. I've skipped to the fun part with people riding their hotel rooms up to the building on a crane... but the whole thing is worth a watch if you've got the time.
The Plattenbau were mostly composed of system built concrete panels and frames assembled into rooms onsite, with only the small bathrooms being delivered to site as complete units.
These appear to be structures composed entirely of stacked full-size room unit completed before site delivery and winched into place; but that technique's been around (especially in the hotel industry) for a good while too, although it's only in the last 20 years people have started to build structures of over 10 storeys that way
Nothing's ever truly new. The Romans used prefabricated elements to speed up fort construction in the first century AD.
Yep, I lived in one in Poland for most of my life, they were absolutely fine. Most of them erected in the 60-70s too. All made in factory and assembled on-site:
My suspicion is that its under the following constraints:
1) Site is cleared, maybe foundation complete (which means excavation done etc)
2) All prefab pieces are done
3) No restrictions of number of people on site (besides physical realities)
#3 is no small case. I've often noticed that construction companies in the west have very few people on site. Certainly not 50 people per floor, for example. IMO this is due to wages and contracts. a) wages are too high to risk idle people and b) contracts are insufficiently written to incentivize speed of delivery (probably in favor of cost).
I would say the biggest factor is that it is a very repetitive rectangular box.
Overall design and how it is detailed is the dominant factor in time it takes to build things.
Do I have lots of joints that have to be perfect or can they be rough cut and covered with trim?
Do things assembly easily without having to fiddle due to having the correct tolerances?
Cuts and joins are what take the most time. The less cuts and joins you have the cheaper and faster things will be. Also cuts and joins that have to be done to high tolerances take a lot longer.
The New York City Office of Emergency Management has a "pre-fab brownstone" demo assembled in downtown Brooklyn. They're hoping to be able to relocate entire neighborhoods when another event like Sandy hits.
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, etc.
I think the key is its for condos/apartments which will look virtually indistinguishable from a conventional apartment building, then you escape the stigma of mobile trailer home.
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 sloppiness.
But then Another question I had as shown in the video, wouldn't all the room be limited by the 40Ft Container Size that fits in the truck?
How much of those labour, once moved indoor, could be full automated?
Can you built a 50 floor + building / Hotel with these modular tech? How does it work in area where you have special construction requirement like earth quake zone.
Are the factory mobilise? i.e, Assuming this take mainstream, would a manufacture of those unit have to ship 100s of containers across the country to have these fitted? Because all the time saved are now bottlenecked by transportation of these blocks. Are we going to ship them overseas?
Making the hotel from 2 years to 9 months sounds like a big Win. But in places like China or Japan. No one has 9 month to wait for a construction. China has a 30 floor hotel built from Zero to fully working hotel in less then 3 months.
Other then time and quality, are there any actual cost savings?
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.
I think the strategy is to make the apartment/condo floorpans in units of container shipping dimensions and connect them onsite. The key application appears to be the micro-unit.
It would likely be automated as much as a Tesla car could.
You could probably ship from overseas as I suspect the micro units have similar dimensions as a shipping container. I'd imagine building in the midwest (i.e. Idaho/Nevada factory to support West Coast) would probably be more optimal.
Solving the housing part of homelessness through the construction of modular, micro-housing is described in the above video by Patrick Kennedy, founder of Panoramic Interests
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC0fyFtbaQk
I think that maybe the last thing humanity needs is high density- low quality- apartment blocks, built in ill-planned areas that promotes anonymity and does not promote socially sound communities.
Especially when sold at a high margin, because land value is high.
I lived directly across from the Berkeley one shown in the article while they were building it. I wonder how significant the cost benefits were - the time to build didn't seem substantively different (another apartment complex a couple blocks away went up in fairly comparable time it felt like), but I could definitely imagine it being faster
Pre-fab is a thing in the USA because our building codes and permitting process are ridiculously complex, and also actually building a building is also complex with lots of labor and risk and so on.
I absolutely love pre-fab everything-- long live pre-fab that is customized afterwards.
Partially but not for any physical reasons, just "social status" reasons.
Like, the quality of the construction is really good and these days is very modern and stylish. Maybe in 1985, pre-fab houses were crappy mobile homes that fell apart easily. But these days, no, pre-fab is much nicer than a normal home constructed in the 1960s (most homes in NYC metro are very old).
However, if you are at the country club, and you mention that your house is a pre-fab... well... the vieux-riche people will have a very negative opinion of you.
Too much particleboard, chipboard, oriented strand board, MDF board and cheap shit that is used as an alternative to real plywood. I've seen what happens to those particleboard nightmares when construction is temporarily paused in a wet climate, for unforeseen reasons, and it gets rained on before the roof and cladding are on.
I wonder how hard it would be for mobile home manufactors to support the modular stacking of units. It would look redneck as hell, but could probably go up even faster then wooden prefabs that still needs a building finished around it
You could build the external structure and a "floor" (steel plate) for each level, then you could swap out trailers if needed, a vertical trailer park.
Would need some way to get up and down and toilet/water.
Tbh by the time you've done all that you might as well just build a normal modular high rise (that's how the local budget hotel did it, nearly whole thing turned up as a series of containers each prefitted with plumbing and power, then stacked together, hooked up and done, it went up insanely fast).
Isn't that how modular homes already work? My house is a modular. The two floors are pretty much identical under the drywall and flooring; it comes as a one or two floor option and from what I've been told they just slap the same floor on top of the first in the latter case.
There are some gorgeous homes made out of shipping containers, the best ones I've seen probably were not cheap but the design is modular and relatively simple.
Did this article just presented prefabricated housing as an innovative and novel way of building, and a solution to the housing crisis? Am I really reading NYtimes?
