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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Prefab houses have been around forever. I grew up in one. I think my parents paid about $100k in 1989. The construction was:

- 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.

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After a quick search on prefabricated homes and reading the Wikipedia article, I'm really not clear on what their limitations are. Most of them seem optimized for warmer weather? I would really appreciate some links describing the current state of prefab housing and it's practicality.

You've got to look around. There are a lot of options today. You have everything from Tinyhomes (for which you'll finds tons of manufactures in each country .. easy startup idea really with a lot of shared eco-friendly components out there), to Yurts, to fully finished multi-piece homes that don't look pre-fab at all/you wouldn't know unless the owner told you.

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.

Look up Finnish modular homes. They work in climates where temperature goes below -30C.

In Sweden, where I live, there are lots of prefabricated houses. An example of what it can look like: https://www.myresjohus.se/vara-hus/annedal/ So it's clearly suitable even for colder climate zones.

The basic limitation is how wide a load you can move by road and rail. That usually limits you to a double-wide house.

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...

> The basic limitation is how wide a load you can move by road and rail. That usually limits you to a double-wide house

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.

It's amazing to watch! There was a row of townhouses like that put up near my old house. They had a crane and a steady stream of trucks bringing in the modules. Truck shows up, two guys put straps around the module and hook it to the crane. When I was watching, they were on the second storey, so there were two guys on the roof that helped the crane operator drop them in place. Take the straps off, throw them down to the ground, and repeat.

Pretty incredible watching the entire storey of a block worth of townhouses being assembled in an afternoon.

Depends on what you consider a limitation. There is the Broad Group in China which had proposed to build the worlds tallest structure in 90 days. [1] They have pre-fabricated buildings and put up a 57 story one [2] in 19 days. To be fair there is still a lot of prep for the foundation.

[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

https://www.huf-haus.com/en.html

I love huf hauses. It's on my list of life-goals

Some are clearly designed for warmer climates, but some are suitable for colder ones as well. I'm here in Norway and my spouse and I have been looking at alternative house building. Prefab has come into our radar more than once.

The UK built a lot of prefabs to solve the postwar housing shortage: http://www.neverpaintagain.co.uk/blog/damp-in-concrete-house...

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)

Exactly right. And as the manufacturing techniques expand you get more choices than just single wide or double wide.

Yeah, it was basically a fixed double-wide mobile home with better materials. I can't remember the movie offhand, but there's a fight scene that takes place in half of a prefab house on the highway.

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.

Well stated. I think land allocation also contributes to the issue. I was pleased that 'mixed commercial/residential' zoning got to be a thing as it makes for a much nicer living experience if you have your basic needs met by walking. I'm still waiting for a mixed commercial/residential/governmental tract where you can have a police station, library, courthouse, and office space mixed in with houses and shops. I remember touring York in the UK and thinking about how medieval villages were set up, they have the taint of 'old times' but they optimized a space for useful living and commerce. I think there are things to be learned there.

> I'm still waiting for a mixed commercial/residential/governmental tract where you can have a police station, library, courthouse, and office space mixed in with houses and shops.

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-...

Government can lease commercial property, the same as anyone else.

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.

> I can't remember the movie offhand, but there's a fight scene that takes place in half of a prefab house on the highway.

Lethal Weapon 4?

I think that's the one!

And we have tons of land as well. We just don't have tons of land in a handful of places where a lot of people have convinced themselves they just have to live or their life isn't worth living.

The better quality pre-fabs are modular homes. They're not strictly limited to "double-wide" dimensions, but being that they're still being trucked to the building site, it's an important consideration (to clear telephone poles and street lamps)

Here's a firm in Austin that specializes in making them in the Modern style: http://www.mamodular.com/

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