Sears Kit Homes Changed Housing
curbed.com
curbed.com
http://mcmansionhell.com/post/155602312686/the-mail-order-am...
Part two: http://mcmansionhell.com/post/155922980391/the-mail-order-am...
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-i...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puch_250_SGS
[1] A build log of one restoration that needs updating https://zachwick.com/sears-allstate-project-1-n/
People used to be handier than they are today. I don't know anyone who would dare take on this project.
Doing things correctly according to modern wiring safety code is something that requires a lot of knowledge, and a person could curse regulation and so on while learning all of that, but using all the modern tools would require a lot of knowledge regardless. There are dozens of parts in a standard electrical installation that simply didn't exist when it was just knobs and tubes.
By being industrious and efficient and building outside the box you violated the norms of the community and they take issue with that.
(It's funny now how some of those very neighborhoods have grown increasingly conservative in their old age by nature of gentrification and often being closer to urban centers than the exurbs that replaced them in people's minds as "suburbs".)
Yeah, no. It's not that simple.
In the US the liberals tend to generally be more in favor of government management of what you do on your own property because of how the existing battle lines are drawn with regard to big government/regulation vs small government/deregulation.
The situation is flipped in SV where the slightly older and slightly less left leaning/liberal existing property owners want slightly more regulation (specifically zoning) than the slightly more liberal and slightly younger renters.
Rights of property owners isn't really a specific part of either party's platform. Desire for government micromanagement of what you do on your own property follows wealth much more closely than any ideology. A bunch of rich conservative jerks in a suburb of NYC will agree with bunch of rich liberal jerks in a suburb of SF when it comes to using regulation to prevent people from building things they don't want to look at.
It is an experiment in rolling back the administrative state, if done properly.
The reason for that is that in ten years' time, you may have moved on and sold your house, and the next tenants will probably own two cars (this being the US), and so will end up parking on the street. If everyone does this, it's a nightmare
Enforcing a number of parking spaces per dwelling is very common even here in France
The government isn't telling anyone anything - it's a purely municipal decision
The problem is that charging for street parking is trickier politically than setting rules for construction. Builders will build apartment blocks with not enough parking spaces, people will buy the apartments because they're cheaper, and then complain that the municipality is extorting them by making them pay to park in the street... It's a lot easier to just fix the problem at the source, even if it's not as fair
Suffice it to say adding free parking introduce horrendous incentives, destroys streetscapes (your shopfronts are now parking), is expensive for everyone even if they don't drive, and makes walking, cycling, and taking public transport less viable and less pleasant.
https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/books-buildi...
Bare land in cities doesn't exist anymore and isn't cheap. Labor is expensive due to high living standards. And politics can lower the supply of potential developable land even further, raise the cost of labor, as well as drive other differentiating concerns. Your neighbors can sue you (or compel the government or an HOA to step in) if they don't want you to build. And it's probably next to impossible to design a kit home that could meet the developmental codes of all fifty states, let alone all the municipalities.
It's why comparisons between say, Hyperloop and CAHSR are so infuriating. The technology is not the reason why traditional high speed rail construction in California is so expensive and slow.
The lawyer knows the prosecutor and the judge. The contractor knows all the inspectors and bureaucrats. They get favorable treatment compared to some nobody off the street. A huge chunk of what you pay them is compensation for all the time they spend building that professional relationship with the people who you need to appease. The fact that services are rendered is what blurs the line between business and corruption.
Seriously, good luck getting the subcontractor back to finish quickly when somebody who has been providing him with work consistently calls and needs a hand. As a homeowner you are back burner.
At least on the inspector side, I wonder if governments started privatizing home inspection if this would help establish a more "market-based" treatment of builders. The city could honor certain third-party inspections as being "reasonable" for permitting.
I could see this working even better if the inspection service bills the building owner rather than the builder. Then the incentivizes are aligned for a fair inspection and fair treatment of builders that is in the owner's interest.
You can buy 20 acres in Okanogan county, WA, in a very rural ranch area about 40 minutes drive from Omak for about $23,000.
By the way, if these prices surprise you, then you should have a look at the housing market in the vast majority of the U.S. that isn't near an ocean. The country is full of perfectly-fine housing in working-class neighborhoods for $150k or less.
The houses you can buy today also have more going on behind the walls. Nobody had an R-60 attic in 1918.
"Reinventing construction: A route to higher productivity", McKinsey Global Institute (2017) (pdf, see page 23): https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Capital...
https://images.slideplayer.com/27/8913519/slides/slide_9.jpg
- I imagine the modern kits come with a lot more detail work already done. - Raw lumber was very cheap back in the day while they were still cutting down virgin forests. - The market of self-made homes was much bigger and allowed for larger economies of scale and competition.
So popular that close to eighty years after they were last available it is very common to mention a property is a Sears home in real estate ads.
Amazon may have sped up their demise but Sears lost track of offering their customers value decades ago.
The rise of Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, Best Buy, etc. serving the Sears customers better - as you mentioned - is entirely what killed Sears. They ultimately lost in every category to those guys, from clothes, to electronics, to home & garden. They kept doing a lot of things, and did nothing well. Any article that claims Amazon played a role in the demise of Sears, is selling click-bait.
http://www.searshomes.org/index.php/2012/04/10/the-kit-homes...
With standard lumber sizes kit homes don't gain much though. Home Depot sells precut studs (92 5/8) that allow the standard size drywall/plywood to fit.
I don't know about the other steps you name.
I recall reading about a spec house builder who would design the houses so that the dimensions of the rooms would fit an even multiple of the widths of carpet rolls. This nearly eliminated carpet waste, and made installation cheaper, too, as there were no seams.
The popular narrative of an out-of-touch company unable to compete with the likes of Amazon is false. The CEO is a hedge fund manager who pillaged the company, sold off it's best assets (sometimes to himself), loaded up the company with debt, and used it to pay himself millions.
http://prospect.org/article/it-was-vulture-capitalism-killed...
There is no good reason we are losing this company which has been the backbone of American commerce for over a century.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-10-18/uber-driv...
> Over the years of propping Sears up, Lampert threw his own money into the effort, and his friends and supporters said this wasn’t only in self interest: He wanted to keep the lights on and people employed. He and ESL were willing to lend at much lower rates than others were demanding. He had Sears pay almost $2 billion into the unfunded pension plan in the past five years.
> The traditional story of financial engineering is that smart hedge-fund guys structure complicated transactions that enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary workers. But it’s at least possible that Sears is the opposite story, the story of a smart hedge-fund guy structuring complicated transactions that blew through his fortune to keep ordinary workers employed through a financial crisis. Of course that’s not mainly a matter of disinterested kindness: If he just wanted to give his money away to workers, he wouldn’t have needed the complicated transactions. It’s mostly just a gamble that didn’t pay off: He expected that the complicated transactions would help Sears to recover and make him even richer, but they didn’t.
> I genuinely don’t know what to make of Lampert and Sears. There is a version of the story in which he rapaciously extracted assets from Sears, enriching himself while starving the business, and another version in which he selflessly pumped money into the company to keep it afloat at his own expense. (“Although he has been criticized for selling Sears assets, spending on stock buybacks and collecting interest on loans to Sears, he said it is unlikely he will come out ahead financially on his long-running Sears bet,” notes the Journal.)
Or, and this is their worst offense, maybe direct one that allows me to connect over SSL and doesn't 302 redirect HTTPS to HTTP. It's 2018.
Sears' financial troubles began long before he ever got involved and he presided over the company's decline. He did things to protect his investment but didn't pillage the company in the way that you originally stated.
My wife and I are thinking about building a new house. I'm surprised how many new houses are still built from bespoke plans, and how much the plans cost. You'd think house plan 'Open Sourcing' would soon give us better houses at better prices. (I hope so, anyway.)
Very interested in knowing what the user experience is on this sort of product, so to speak
Prototyping was engineering heavy and costly and ended up back in India due to Visa issues :-( . Used the money to validate another startup. Turns out it is easier to sell ads than build houses.
The most common I've seen are wall sections which are studded and sheathed in a warehouse, sometimes with exterior covering as well (Hardie board most commonly), then delivered via crane truck. Trusses are also common.
Depends on the builder, really. Also the lumber supplier. There are many around me, they seem to offer this service as an advantage.
Builders who do this pre-assembly have a significantly quicker completion time, especially considering the weather, and their ability to get the roof and windows/doors in before the rains come.
Then again, I don't consider myself handy enough to take on such a project anyway :)