Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.universalhub.com/2016/lagrange-street-residents-...
>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.
It seems so orthogonal that I think it must be some kind of local joke?
I wanted to buy a $60,000 foreclosure in my town-- they told me I'm not allowed to even step foot on the property until I install a septic system.
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."
But their policies don't reflect this noble goal.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/apr/30/china-bu...
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.
It's more complicated than just sharing.
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?
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.
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.
property tax is lower for older residents
My sorries to people insulted by this statement.
And housing costs are high because of asinine zoning laws, as OP mentioned.
So if a building used to cost 400k, broken into 200k land cost and 200k building cost, it will still cost 400k, 300k land cost and 100k building cost.
That's how prices are set. It's not "how much this costs to build plus a fair profit".
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.
[1]: https://sf.curbed.com/2013/4/17/10252934/what-the-heck-is-di...
[2]: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Discretionary-...
Can you expand on this? What's the monopoly of?
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
Complete bespoke design can be wonderful, but comes with high cost and time.
Fixed designs can also be wonderful, and much more accessible.
Check out https://www.acre.co as an example.
Disclaimer - I'm a founder.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is a stigma to owning them in lots of places though.
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.
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 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?
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.
Your service life is also going to take a hit due to having a lot more of the most unreliable aspects in construction - a joint.
Is there no "one best way" that is compatible with all local codes?
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?
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.
Houses, or even rooms, don't.
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.
make that a 100 years easily. (atleast in my country).
Heck, some houses don't even have architectural drawings because of their age.
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.
I have asphalt roll roofing which is cheap but needs to be replaced every 5-8 years.
As long as the roof and exterior walls hold up, there's not much to it. And the roof you change every dozen years or so.
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 house should last 150 years at least, provided it's maintained.
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.
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.
Well, IKEA does have a joint venture with a construction company to make prefab apartments.
https://www.boklok.com/about-the-BoKlok-concept/ https://medium.com/@bartholomewhearn/the-flat-pack-taken-to-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwvvcgoHC9w
> Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach.
Not in the US were there are always people willing to swing a nail gun to feed thier family.
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.
So there's still a lot of pre-built components that are used when building multiple houses.
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).
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-t...
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.
Expensive though.
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
It seems that when populations have to have lots of housing, now and fast, they go more with some kind of semi-prefabbed mobile factory approaches and stamp the buildings out on site. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/wn20...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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.
http://vancouver.ca/people-programs/temporary-modular-housin...
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.
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.
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?
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.
These are popular in Tahoe and Napa.
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...
AAA estimates the TCO of a car to be $8,500/yr: https://newsroom.aaa.com/auto/your-driving-costs.
Even if you're only "a short drive away," you then have to pay for parking on or near campus, which is likely dear: https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/7/19/15993936/high-cost-of-f....
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.
Like, prefab highrise has existed for more then 60 years, it is not a new thing?
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.
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).
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.
https://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/close-look-bro...
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6996729,-73.9898138,3a,65.6y...
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.
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?
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.
It can handle the earthquake zone as one developer describes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC0fyFtbaQk
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
And here's an example in Sunnyvale: http://www.palisadebuilders.com/projects/domain/
And here's an example in Sunnyvale:
And it's true for pre-fab, which replaced unionized trades with automation and non-union factory workers, cutting wages drastically.
One can imagine the salary difference.
Especially when sold at a high margin, because land value is high.
there is a company in UAE doing this for quite some time from concrete: http://www.gulfprecast.ae/
I haven't been closely following the Atlantic Yards project, but to my knowledge it's had quite a few setbacks.
Their website: http://www.toyotahome-aichi.co.jp/ (JP only, no English)
http://s2.ziareromania.ro/?mmid=5d9526e31d488caac
It's about the worst kind of home you could live in. No one wants it if they can afford better.
I absolutely love pre-fab everything-- long live pre-fab that is customized afterwards.
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.
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).