What follows from b) is that it would be less difficult/expensive to customize a house to match the constrains of its site, which is currently hard when dealing with non-flat, non-rectangular lots. One could even generate building designs algorithmically according to some heuristics.
My prediction is that if house-building robots take off, we'll see a lot of co-evolution between the machines and architectural design software.
- dig a hole
- pour a foundation
- truck in the house in two halves
- bolt the house together
- do final wiring, plumbing
move the family in
I have no idea how much these kinds of homes are today, but their latest zillow zesitmate puts it at around $300k (on an acre of property)...so YMMV.
3d printing, in general, is expensive and better for one-off, or low-volume things. Mass manufacture techniques are hyper-optimized and beat 3d printing most of the time when you need to make >10 of the thing almost every time...this includes houses.
The house is still there, still looks fine. A little cramped for adult me, but a perfectly fine place to live and grow up. The house I live in now could fit that house inside of it and have plenty of room to spare. My parents still live there, have all the amenities of a modern home. They turned half the basement into their master bedroom suite and the other half into a nice extended home office.
Housing crises are not going to be solved by tiny houses on half-acre properties. The houses are a tiny fraction of the overall property values -- and are made in a factory, on the cheap, in mass quantities. Making structures has been solved for hundreds if not thousands of years, making land is the problem.
> Making structures has been solved for hundreds if
> not thousands of years, making land is the problem.
Especially for "consumer" facing government services like libraries and postal centers.
I think getting local governments to mix in more "official" functions might be harder since some of the legitimacy of those functions sometimes stems from the power signalling they use to distinguish the building from the rest of society -- e.g. courthouses tend to be big official looking buildings with lots of wood paneling in the courtrooms.
In Korea, where land is at a premium, you find tiny police stations all over Seoul, but even the very small ones tend to be stand-alone affairs. IIR courthouses tend to be either standalone or as part of larger local government centers.
http://img11.deviantart.net/5c0d/i/2013/337/5/1/police_stati...
https://s3.amazonaws.com/gs-waymarking-images/fb6d6675-11fb-...
In the backwaters of upstate New York, half the post offices are in leased buildings, including parts of private houses in otherwise residential neighborhoods.
So, you don't really need anything special to provision for local government, just a local government with tax dollars to spend.
Lethal Weapon 4?
You're not going to find any huge suburban type houses, but there are a lot of small to medium options, all with their own strengths and tradeoffs.
There's panelized construction, which is like IKEA for houses. This works reasonably well for rectangular houses. The joints can be a weak point, both structurally and as leak points.[1] Plumbing, wiring, and interior walls are best done at the factory, but that makes the connections complicated.
If you're willing to have exposed bolts and joints, it's easier. Butler Buildings makes industrial buildings and barns from prefab panels of corrugated steel. Those buildings are everywhere in rural America. They're strong, they go up fast, they can be purchased with insulated panels, and they last a long time. You can even get a fake brick exterior and a nice interior. But the result will look industrial.
[1] http://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/PDF/path_panel_co...
It limits the size of the individual module, but I've seen an entire multistory, city-block-size apartment complex built up from trucked in modules; limiting the size of the prefabricated modules doesn't meaningfully limit the size of the final building.
Pretty incredible watching the entire storey of a block worth of townhouses being assembled in an afternoon.
[1] Article on the "overly" ambitious Sky City -- http://fortune.com/2015/07/09/china-skyscraper/
[2] The video of them building 57 stories in 19 days -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyxwgLYbAk0
Unfortunately they weren't very well insulated and suffer from catastrophic rusting of the rebar ("concrete cancer"). This may make them unsaleable: https://harveybowes.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/are-concrete-ho...
(They look nothing like the US "doublewide", but more like similar panelised concrete construction in Eastern Europe)
Here's a firm in Austin that specializes in making them in the Modern style: http://www.mamodular.com/
Why half a million when you could have 600 square feet for 1.3 million in Silicon Valley?
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Sunnyvale-CA-94085/195...
So your choices are rent or live in a hotel if you don't want to buy a home this expensive?
I would be making some tough choices if I had to move out there.
Actually, the ease of getting to Central, Arques, Fair Oaks, and Wolfe makes that location extremely compelling for a lot of people, me included. From Central eastbound you would take the Fair Oaks exit, keep left onto America, and boop, you're home. That's actually pretty good, unless you're expecting Sunnyvale to behave like San Francisco and be anti-car.
This isn't theoretical, either. I know someone who specifically looked in those dozen or so blocks between Maude and Arques once his employer dug in about a mile away, and he ended up buying on Morse. He walks now. It's a cute little neighborhood, and I'd consider it if I were in the market.
They are developing a core competency of creating the fixturing to mass produce homes. The cost per house should drop well below that of a traditional house with equal square footage when they go for volume. They do that by removing construction labor, site/weather variability (so site delays), economize material transport cost, and reducing time to construct (labor hours). Things that don't change, the cost of basic materials, the cost of land, the cost to prepare the site (foundation/leveling etc), and permitting/access.
For the absolute lowest cost with on site materials the 'sand' homes [1], that provides the framing (much like the 3D printed house in the article).