Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
It took months for the factory to do their pre-build engineering, and that's after they started the process using plans from my architect. The companies building these modules tend to sell mostly from their own catalog of floorplans and modules, so they don't have a strong incentive to hire skilled architects for the relatively small amount of custom work that comes in (I fell into this category). I'm led to believe that they hire draftsmen instead of architects.
They built one of the modules a foot too long, so it hangs over the edge of the foundation. They also messed up the roof line, so some guttering and geometry had to be changed for the garage that was stick-built onsite. They did all of the drywall wraps around the windows incorrectly. Every single door was hung incorrectly, some with chunks taken out from bad routing. The vinyl plank flooring has bubbles because they didn't float it correctly. They omitted electrical features that were on their own drawings. They ordered a few wrong windows, so they charged me anyway and just laid them on the floor when they shipped the module.
It'll all be fine at the end of the day, but the parts that were built onsite are all so much better. No cheaper, mind you, but faster and with much less drama. Maybe there are some parts of the industry that do a lot better, but I kind of wish I'd listened to my dad when he said "the pioneers take the arrows".
Doubly so if it came after all the stress of custom-building a home. My blood pressure is worth more than that.
Oh and the 15k are only for legal costs. Don't forget rent for 3 years on top of that. And all the money that you'll still have to pay for the construction. And stress (medical bills are not cheap).
The one I remember had to do w/ $1900 worth of lost wedding photos cuz a server died or got deleted. Cost more to twist the knife in court than to just settle.
We were very aware that big projects, be they software or home construction, don't ever go perfectly, so we made a conscious effort to stay calm and solution-oriented through the entire multi-year process. We came in very slightly under budget, and things that need to get addressed are getting addressed, whereas a lawsuit would have turned things adversarial very quickly.
Most large projects have some central features/processes that are by their very nature both very expensive and very complicated.
The entire prefab industry is built around minimising those things - but then something ELSE becomes the most expensive/complicated thing. You then have a situation where if you're seen as a bottleneck, holding up the expensive/complicated thing, then the total cost of the project will balloon.
Many prefab companies know this and are happy to sell modules with little QA work done, because it's unlikely that there will be serious repercussions. Once you accept the work then it'll be too hard for your legal team to fight for (or at least, not financially worth it).
I'm not saying that prefab companies are ethically bankrupt, but it IS an environment that promotes this method of doing business. I've been in construction for mining/oil&gas companies, on both sides of this situation, quite a few times. The amount of shoddy work you're willing to accept is quite terrifying once the cost for re-work gets into nine and ten digits.
If you're going to go with a vendor with a 'catalogue' of prefab plans, then I would think you'd want to choose from their pre-designed plans.
There's a middle-ground between completely prefab catalogue plans, and stuff that's built by on-site carpenters (which aren't a bad option if you're doing custom) doing 'stick built': and that's to hire a company that specifically does custom prefab frame walls:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnnwJi40Wzo
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl3_bo-XWGQ
Also using floor trusses to have no internal load-bearing walls and easier running of utilities:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysT3zXkFGB8
'Completing' the build, prefab foundation walls:
While architects can be talented and make a great design on so many levels, can they really fully optimize space for usability and features to a deep level? I just think of RV interior design, which amazes me sometimes with the ingenious use of space that is clearly the result of dozens of rounds of iterative design over the year.
Not that a house should be that crazy (aside from the tiny house movement) with maximizing space, but if there were industrial production, then you could get to deep optimization of the floor design.
What always strikes me with (american suburban) houses, is that they are very inefficient at vertical storage of things like clothes, dishes, and a ton of other housewares that you need on a daily basis (so you don't dump them in the basement). I walk through 3000 and 4000 sqft houses and they are only marginally better than a well designed 2000 sqft house in usability.
After it was delivered (and it comes delivered with sheetrock walls, electrical, and subfloor), my coworker noticed that the the factory forgot a step: the plumbing. The builder had to rip out lots of the sheetrock and install plumbing.
Lots of mistakes occur while building a house. The difference is that when the workers are already in the field, it is generally quite inexpensive to identify and fix any problems. Not so for the prefab stuff.
I have been to a Bone Structure presentation. They fabricate all parts and interfaces using computer operated cutters with extreme precision from CAD plans. Note that parts are made of metal, not wood.
The structure is then aligns perfectly and all connection holes align perfectly as well.
The building is then assembled using just an electric screw driver, on sight. They claimed that almost anyone could do it, like IKEA. But they still require skilled technicians. But the point was that it isn’t a rocket science and plans are designed in such a way that you can’t really mess it up too much.
I've worked in traditional construction and the plans are never accurate with hundreds of omissions/errors/interferences. Those can be corrected in real time when something is field built, but are nearly impossible when the house ships wrong but nearly finished.
I can see it working with cookie cutter housing - first ~5 will be garbage as they find bugs then slap a thousand identical copies up cheaply. For custom it's a mess.
The buildings also look horrendous by default, artificial and cheap looking with a complete lack of character. I’m all for prefab in theory but it’s like building a whole piece of software without testing any of the interfaces fit together or that say logging and error handling are plumbed in without testing them. It’s clearly a recipe for disaster even with the best organised prefabricator.
1. Be stupidly rich and don't give a crap about how much you spend
2. Do damn near all of it yourself.
And actually you bring up another wrinkle, which is if you don't own the land underneath, there are plenty of lenders who also won't lend to you to buy a manufactured home, because they consider it to be personal property rather than a permanent dwelling (which they could more easily foreclose and sell)
There are examples of "leases of years" like Canberra/ACT in Australia, where all titles are for 99 year leaseholds.
They've started renewing them since the first leases were granted in the 1920s.
the 99/100 year lease is quite common in many Europan countries. It's not "exceptional" here
I have to admit that having a prefab building that has one side a foot longer than the other side not sound like a condemnation of the concept but the factory that built it. I presume one would have recourse under contract for such a foul up?
Possibly, but delays in construction are what kill you. You can't really FedEx overnight new structural steel framing components, so now you're blocked until they can get
a. rebuilt, and
b. freighted out to you
The overwhelming downside of not needing professional builders to build a house is not having professional builders build a house. Half-assed amateurs aren't going to give you the quality you expect for your home.
Because framing a house, even a two story house, only takes an experienced crew a couple of days. And in the neighborhoods springing up around here, they are using pre-fab framed walls (still using wooden studs (which are cheap and plentiful), but they arrive on site as whole walls).
Before framing, there's site prep, foundation pours (probably some early HVAC and plumbing as well), floor joists, and floor sheeting. After framing, there's sheeting (the outside), roofing, putting in windows/doors, waterproofing (can be avoided with some more expensive sheeting options), and siding (which includes caulking the edges of the siding, and around any wall penetration).
Then there's insulating the outer walls, framing the interior walls, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, electrical, carpeting/flooring, drywall, trim, paint, landscaping... and probably a dozen other things I don't know about.
Optimizing only the framing - something that's already been pretty well optimized - isn't going to change prices much. What's really needed is a way to be ship entire finished walls.
(Seriously, look up some videos about "Larry Haun" and watch him and his brother frame an entire floor in under a day, using mostly hand tools).
At least in the US, banks are reluctant to back a mortgage to a home like this. Many of these modular homes are on leased land. Once the lease was up the house became worthless and had to be destroyed.
In most growing American metros, a major constraining factor on housing supply is the lack of these skilled tradesmen. In contrast, drywall, painting, and landscaping tend to be lower-skilled and easier to draw from the general labor pool.
You can have a high-productivity manufacturing center start with a pre-fab "core" built out of a modular shipping container, and pre-fab roof trusses. In parallel, you prep the site including any lot development and laying the concrete foundation. You then install the core and trusses on site, and can finish up the drywall and paining very quickly.
The core contains all the complex plumbing, electrical work, HVAC and kitchen work. The finished house looks indistinguishable from regular construction, and you can stand up single family homes or duplexes in under two months.
To what end? As a country we're already struggling to create enough middle-class jobs and you're suggesting we try to gut another whole sector. So that owners/executives of prefab factories can pocket the money?
If you think it's going to reduce cost or benefit the consumer, you're crazy.
I notice you downvoted without responding. I presume you've got a plan to recreate those jobs vs. just transferring wealth upwards and are keeping it a secret.
It astounds me people on HN think that eliminating jobs without any thought to the social impact is somehow a righteous goal to strive for. Yet you can't even answer what the benefit is to society other than making some really rich dude a little bit richer at the expensive of hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs. And most likely an end product for consumers that's LOWER quality.
Why did we build the car when it put all of the horse tradesmen out of business? Why do we use elevator buttons and put the doormen out of a job? Why did we create the Internet when perfectly good newspaper printers could pass information to us?
You are making an age-old argument that we need to reduce productivity in order to save jobs. If you spent your whole life scrubbing a floor with a tooth brush when right next to you is a mop, just so you can ensure more of your time was spent washing, wouldn’t you feel like your life was wasted?
There's no reason to expect the job-generation cycle to last forever. In fact there's every reason to believe it can't. The question is whether it ends on a scale more like decades or centuries. To blindly assume that things will continue as they have is foolish. (To be clear, I think the solution looks more like UBI than Luddism.)
Arguing against new tech now because of some inevitable eventual breakdown of the job-generation cycle is just luddism with extra steps.
We are also at a cross-roads with regards to having a housing crisis. There are many places now (Bay Area, Boulder) where housing is skyrocketing not because the value is naturally increasing, but is instead being artificially inflated due to a shortage in homes. One "radical" solution to this: build more homes.
However, given the amount of labour and time needed to do so, we may not be able to avoid the housing crisis. One way the market is responding is moving to pre-fab construction, and trying to reduce time / costs that way. The article does seem to claim that the projects cost about the same, even if pre-fab is faster in terms of time. This _does_ identify a problem with pre-fab, namely, how come they can't fulfill this promise of being cheaper & faster. Seems strange that you save time but still cost the same when what you're proposing is taking away a significant chunk of higher-skilled labour from the equation.
Some of this is regulatory capture (wasted time / money trying to convince cities of the process), some of this is nascent technology sucking (see top parent comment, sometimes pre-fab doesn't get it right), and some of this seems to just be a lack of experience on behalf of the companies trying to "disrupt" construction.
The US used to have prefab apartment block construction, as did most Western public housing programs, but generally speaking they have not held up over time.
Further affordability pressure is also caused by the proceeds of corruption and organized crime being used to buy/hold housing as part of money laundering schemes. The sums of criminal money involved in the housing market are non-trivial and have been estimated to account for upwards of 5% of housing valuation in some cities.
Construction costs do not enter into this at all.
If you want to address housing affordability, only three things will make a difference: get rid of NIMBY vetoes on new construction, require all properties that are not owner-occupied to be tenanted, and severely crack down on money laundering through the real estate market.
Horse tradesman became car dealerships. Elevator operator was never a skilled position in the first place. The internet has actually created a massive crisis in the western world that we're just now starting to realize - local newspapers going out of business is HORRIBLE for a functioning democracy, and nations across the globe are suing companies like google because of it.
You're insinuating that there will somehow be a new job for the folks put out of work, but fail to explain what that is. Look no further than Detroit, hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs that are simply gone. More weight on the economy, fewer middle class citizens, but a handful of shareholders and executives that are significantly more wealthy.
While I appreciate the condescending tone, I don't think you've even begun to put critical thinking skills to the problem. You're just parroting the same old tired story that justified "trick down economics" which is also based on a reality that doesn't exist.
I’m sympathetic that government can help those who lose jobs. My preference is straight-up cash transfers so they can pick their own schools and move to where jobs are, rather than a government-run school loaded with bureaucracy. But artificially preserving shrinking industries just so we can all act like we still need them around is a waste of tax dollars and is logically inconsistent.
You might want to provide a source for that one, there is still a huge amount of car industry expertise there including robotics, electric car engineering and thousands of support companies that feed the main companies.
Tons of jobs we have now didn’t exist 5, 10, 25 years ago. Every time a mass amount of jobs are lost when an industry collapses, they always say “this time is different!” I just fundamentally disagree with that premise. There will always be work to do and someone willing to pay for it. If that ceases to be the case it would be the first time in human history, which seems way less likely than society continuing on like it has for millennia.
You also seem to think individuals are too stupid to look at the job market, see what skills are in demand, and self-select for learning a skill that they will enjoy and get compensated a fair wage to them. Every single person who loses a job, provided they eventually get off the government dole, will have to find something new to do. Working for a while at a restaurant or warehouse isn’t something they have to do forever. There is just a distinct lack of belief in human agency in your postings.
A contractor in a town where the jobs dried up might work at Lowe's now for example, where they would be kept under 20 hours a week so Lowe's doesn't have to pay benefits, and they could look forward to living in a van off of social security when they retire (source - this is my brother in law at 55 y/o - he has no idea how computers work, and desperately just wants to go back to laying tile like he did for most of his life - lost work - got a job at Lowes a few years back - just laid off actually, due to the virus - he's 100% screwed). There are a lot of these folks floating around, and what has happened to them is absolutely tragic.
Ideally he should re-train in something, but what often winds up happening is that they get sucked into for-profit colleges that encourage them to take out predatory high-interest loans for training that lead to job markets that are either oversaturated, or misrepresented. Then come the payday loans, then come the repossessions.
Ideally those people would just buy a bunch of NoStarch books and become fullstack developers or something, but that's not how people work, unfortunately and we just haven't figured out a good mechanism to help keep those folks on their feet.
The person you're responding to is waaaaaay too angry, and I don't believe you deserve to be on the receiving-end of that, but they may be going through some really rough stuff right now. There's a lot of people who have suddenly found themselves unemployed and homeless and they may very well be in that situation.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-state-of-amer...
https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/what-is-middle-cl...
There's economic optimization, and social optimization, and those are two different things that are often totally orthagonal.
Economic progress is often horrendously negative for people's lives and livelihoods. People don't just pick-up and move, or re-train in a completely different field with the fluidity that is often indicated, and disruption often destroys lives. This is why income inequality is getting really worrisome, and there's the huge debate over college education costs, and you see so many people now living in their cars because they're chronically under-employed. This is why Trump was pandering to Pennsylvania coal miners and the like. There are millions and millions of people kind of stuck and not sure how to move forward. Everybody in this country can't just be a fullstack web guy, and the alternatives are increasingly working for minimum wage at two jobs, each of which keeps you under 20 hours so they don't have to pay benefits.
That being said, you can't just put the brakes on progress so that people doing things that we don't need anymore are kept happy.
Ideally, we'd have mechanisms in place to help people transition, but we really don't. The best we have is things like the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, various infrastructure programs (just big employment schemes), and affordable Community College vocational programs. The worst we have are predatory vocational programs that re-train people with useless skills, which are essentially scams to cash in on predatory student loans and GI Bill money.
This is the crux of the 2016 election, and although the virus has hijacked 2020 it probably would have been the crux of that one as well. You have Yang and Sanders proposing massive reforms, AOC with the Green New Deal, contrasted with Trump pushing a regressive approach, and everybody's polarized and yada yada.
Nobody has a good answer yet, or 300 million people wouldn't currently be arguing about it. Ideally we'd have a temporary system of 'engineered inefficiency' in the economy that would help people with legacy skills transition into new fields when employment dried up. But, nobody knows how to politically design, implement, or fund anything like that. So, what we have is this and it sucks.
I hope people smarter than me are working on this problem. I feel horrible about all the folks who have just gotten screwed, and have lost their homes, and are trapped in cycles of poverty. But, I mean, we are debating with strangers on the internet, so you know, no ill will towards anyone even if they disagree.
Economic freedom leads to personal freedom and increased happiness. The never ending desire to have the government solve all our problems is what got us into this huge mess in the first place. I know that people are hurting, but the solution will emerge.
I am curious what the mechanism is from the free-market side to prevent increasing income inequality, and regulatory capture by corporations and the wealthy? If we de-regulate, what stops Bezos and Exxon, EvilCorp, and whoever from doing whatever they want (assume for a second that's not already happening to some extent under the current setup)? I guess that there's a market-based mechanism that is supposed to prevent that, but I don't know enough libertarians to have heard the argument.
I'm not convinced we should legislate our way out of anything either, but I can't get over the idea that deregulation = noone looking over the shoulders of those with absurd amounts of money and the wolf eats the whole damn henhouse.
If I were to write my congressman tomorrow, what do you think I should say? What are the top-5 key actionable bullet points?
Genuinely curious. I like to hear all sorts of ideas for how we can steer the country (hell, the planet) in a more positive direction.
For a top 5 (or 7) wish list it would be along the line of:
- Outlaw billionaires the same way we’ve outlawed (at least on paper) monopolies. At that scale individuals have the power to sway governments. (A billion is likely not the right number, but it’s a good starting point.)
- Kill the money in politics. Make lobbying illegal.
- Kill the filibuster
- Kill the electoral college
- Decouple healthcare from employment (The only realistic solution I know of is socializing it).
- Provide a robust safety net (but get rid of the checks balances to prevent “abuse”). Just blanket give everyone $2000/month.
- Eliminate exemptions to providing benefits make it proportional to hours worked (worked an average of 10 hours a week for a month? That employer must provide 1 week of benefits to that person.) There is no common good from giving employer a massive expenses break to employ 2 people at 20 hours a week instead of just hiring one full time employee. This is gaming the system plain and simple.
1. Kill solarmist (it's good starting point).
So you are asking me the wrong premise - if the state has no power, what regulation can a corporation capture?
I like corporations because businesses provide value. They can fail. The organizing principle has a straight-forwards goal of earning money. I don’t see any states failing (except for socialist ones like Venezuela) in a way that can put them out of business - they tend to grow forever in all directions, capturing more wealth and diminishing freedom.
The next question - do I care about inequality as a given? If everyone on earth had a healthy, purpose driven life but one family had 99.99% of all the wealth, would this be a problem? Basically do we dislike inequality because of envy or because most people genuinely have nothing?
You are correct that corporations are already running the show. Our biggest corporations are more powerful than most countries on earth. Because innovation in free societies is emergent and decentralized, the best the government can do is play whack-a-mole every few years as the free market laps them over and over.
I like the chaos, I like the unpredictability, I like weird people, I like having the freedom to do whatever I want. I want maximum freedom in all things and the least amount of coercion.
One area you should look at if you aren’t familiar is cryptocurrency. This is the most powerful innovation in regards to regaining individual freedom - financial freedom - that has come in centuries. The ability of governments to print their way out of debt is coming to an end, and individuals all over the world are going to have an escape valve from corrupt elites.
This was kind of a rambling response, no beer involved. Cheers
Oh man, things aren't looking good for any of us on either side.
Let's check back in 10 years.
While libertarians lack official power, the market is so powerful that it drives tons of human activity without people even being aware. Also, the belief that the government is all-powerful and can actually solve problems is 99% fiction. So while people look to the president as someone to blame for problems or praise for solutions, the truth is that very little of consequence is in the president’s (or government’s) control. So being a libertarian is a state of mind - the acknowledgment that the source of happiness and purpose is ultimately your own concern and no one else can do this for you. Not having a seat in government means nothing because libertarians generally don’t want government and it’s usually fairly easy to ignore, legally avoid paying taxes to through a variety of loopholes and structures in our Byzantine tax code, and is so ineffective it’s mind boggling that it ever gets anything done beyond corruption and graft.
So to come full circle, I believe governments are far weaker than most admit or recognize, and power is increasingly in the hands of private people and organizations. And I welcome this shift in power.
At some point automation eliminates jobs wholesale, and there aren't replacements waiting. People always refer to cars replacing horses and point out that all those jobs surrounding horses were replaced with something else - manufacturing plant jobs, car salesman, etc. What they fail to mention is that HORSES were replaced with CARS - and we've got far, far, far fewer horses on the planet today because they're just not needed.
We're the horses...
Any cool moonshot ideas for how to approach it?
Job losses are only going to accelerate for the foreseeable future across most industries and they won’t be replaced by anything or at most a small fraction of what was lost.
Instead of the Jetsons (everyone’s jobs get simpler and simpler until they’re trivial, which seems to be what you’re leaning towards) we’ll have huge swaths of people that have so much time on their hands the time value of labor will drop to almost $0.
Eric said they should have given the workers spoons if that was the goal, which caused a couple laughs that were met with anxious stares by local officials.
I'll restrain myself from any commentary on what sort of person that shows him to be, other than that implied in this sentence.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
Though he's best known for it.
It's the ultimate jobs program.
There's a straightforward transaction that occurs between healthcare provider and patient. But every...single...dollar that flows through the healthcare system is diverted through the massive private health insurance industry, which is essentially an artificial middleman skimming money off the top of the transaction between healthcare provider and patient. This provides employment for millions of accountants, and MBAs, and marketing people, and database engineers, and statisticians, and lobbyists, and etc.
It's the more touchy-feely cousin of the Defense Industrial Complex that must vacuum up money somewhere in the same order of magnitude.
Those trillions would have been better spent expanding government programs in: land preservation, social services, healthcare, stem, and infrastructure maintenance and expansion. Instead it's just sloshing around the accounts of people who neither understand nor care about the plights of the average American.
I think a better way around that need would be to bolster training of skilled people which would lead to increased labor supply to meet this demand, rather than trying to figure out how to wring the last dime out of everything.
> To what end?
To the end that you can get your house built on a schedule that you want. A neighbour is a general contractor who has a good reputation: he, and the specialty teams he uses, are booked at least a year out.
This isn't too say we shouldn't train more skilled trades, but having a spectrum of of people available helps those you can't afford to pay top dollar for top talent to also get quality results.
It should also be noted that not everyone is gifted enough to be a top or even decent trade, yet we want as many people as possible to be productively employed. There will some percentage of the population that may be most productive simply following what the computer tells them to do:
If you want to do that just be straightforward about it and directly raise that money via taxes and give it to families.
It will be increasingly obvious as increasing automation kills jobs that ultimately probably wont ever be fully replaced that we need a solution that isn't deliberate inefficiency to maintain jobs.
That said you’re not totally off the mark, but comments like “It astounds me that people on HN think that eliminating jobs without any thought to the social impact” is why you’re getting down voted.
How do you know now I or anyone else hasn’t given this thought? If you browse though old stories you’ll see tons of discussion on this topic.
My point of view on this is “It’s too late. The genie is out of the bottle and no amount of trying to avoid job losses is going to be productive.” Instead we need to work towards making our gross economic output support everyone. If basic necessities are all provided for (such as though UBI or some other idea) then no one will care if jobs are lost because then people can focus on figuring out how to productively use their time rather than worrying about finding a shitty, or even non-shitty, job so their family can eat and stay out of the weather. And without that we’ll continue hemorrhaging jobs until we reach a critical point where there will be an honest to god revolution in the USA and things will be violently reset (not corrected).
Note unskilled tends to come with a lot of other negatives.
There is a building going up in Oakland right now where Factory_OS put out a press release that they had built it in ten days. But they spent 7 years getting approvals, 18 months in site prep, and they've been detailing and finishing the building for more than a year since the press release, so it doesn't seem like the method of construction was a very important factor.
You're looking at single pieces of a complex and already optimized-for-several-factors system and assuming it would be trivial to do it better for one factor without taking others into account...
There are options for prefab as you saw - but when building on site we have the saws and other tools needed anyway, so it isn't a big deal to use them. With prefab they don't normally use those tools so you have to account for the cost of getting them out putting them away.
The biggest challenge we faced, even with a skilled crew, was simply getting the pieces into some of these lots in the ADK. Between the tight winding roads and lot elevation, it was quite a battle.
Source: My family has been in the modular and manufactured housing business since the 60s.
Technically, it might be a win. It's not enough of a win, however, to bring many new converts. It simply doesn't scale to enough large savings to make much of a difference in the construction budgets OP actually was writing about.
I hate painting. I'm also a terrible painter. However, I've given up on ever hiring painters. Every professional painter I've used has either prepped the surface improperly, or put the coats on too thick, to the point where I rub paint off if I brush up against the wall.
I'm willing to pay more for better work, but I can't easily tell who will do a better job.
How many coats are they putting on the wall, 5? I've never heard of paint rubbing off because there's too much of it.
We are starting to talk about externalized costs with regards to the environment, but this concept applies everywhere. We have a problem in this society paying the true cost of damn near everything and that includes physical labor.
(1)https://www.nahbclassic.org/generic.aspx?sectionID=734&gener....
We are going with company that actually assemble full house inside and bring it to site fully equipped: electrical, plumbing etc.
Houses are usually a leveraged investment. If you put down 5%, and prefab saves you 5%, you have massively reduced your risk of default during a downturn.
And if you expect it to take 20 years to pay off your mortgage, and framing saves 5%, that’s one year saved, which is massive IMHO.
Obviously a lot of assumptions to the above e.g. everyone else doesn’t get the 5% savings, and everyone doesn’t just bid up new house prices by 5% (because they are bounded by their mortgage which is related to their earnings, not costs).
In many communities, they have.
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/mhs/tables/time-ser...
I'd hypothesize that access to affordable, reproducible, medium-scale home production would allow a lot of new places to try to develop. Land prices, permitting, & regulation are very different in different places. The places where these are not the major factors could have a better chance, if home construction could be more economical & effective & appealing, which pre-fabs might be able to help with.
I'm currently gut remodeling a small house in Oakland. Permitting and regulations are a whopping 3% of the cost.
The land (the existing property) is 50%, and 40% is building costs.
Land costs (addressed via incremental upzoning) and build costs (addressed with more efficient building technology) are the 2 biggest things to address to make housing affordable, not the cost of permits.
On top of the carrying costs there are impact fees. These vary by city but you can see how crazy they are. In Fremont you will pay $160k per dwelling, that's just cash out of your pocket. Totally crazy.
https://www.spur.org/news/2018-05-09/it-all-adds-growing-cos...
I guess its a matter of how much is too far? Windows come as a unit. So do some doors. Certainly the appliances do. Nobody has to get a tinker in to make the toaster. Even so, sometimes there are hitches.
I think we have to iron out the order-to-fit issues (wrong dimensions, wrong fuel, mismatch color or design) when done by rushed workpeople on a schedule. Fix that, and you could go much further without trepidation.
For now, my house was stick-built from a drawing (not an architect) and mostly correctly. The issues came when changes were made on-the-fly, not from the initial planning.
Everything in a new American home is standardized. Building a production home today is like building a Rails / Bootstrap app. 90% of the work has been done for you, you just have to assemble the pieces to suit a narrow set of choices (before you get truly custom) and this serves the needs of most buyers at a price that (outside of places toxic to new buildings) is very acceptable.
The availability of labor changes with the times. Prefab houses are like low/no-code solutions. They’re great for starting out and temporary problems, some far out last their design and that’s ok. The rest of the industry is about solving the changing tastes and needs of its customers with a standardized and VERY EASY to work with set of tools, and that’s ok too.
Nobody except Bob Villa is hanging bespoke doors.
We didn't save that much by going with a prefab home. We also didn't save much time, because we got stuck waiting for a sub-contractor and inspector during the finishing process. If I'm not saving money or time, well, what's the point?
It's a decent-quality house; as good as anything built on site. But nothing special. One of the main reasons to go down the pre-fab path at this price range is because there are relatively few custom home builders who will bother with homes that don't cost at least $500,000. Their margins are about 20%, but regardless of the size of the house, they are completing only three or four a year. They need higher top line projects, otherwise the don't see much bottom line.
a) The largest benefit seems to come when building a similar building each time, any changes make it hard for the crew to assemble.
b) The site has to be cleared of trees and rather open to allow access of the crane.
I have since moved to a hot housing market in New England, and see many lots leveled and replaced with new homes. All of them are stick built on site, and this doesn't appear to be an issue. The number of days for an experienced crew to stick build a house is short, and many of these homes are very custom. The site/house is normally optimized to get the largest sale value, not the easiest built. The other interesting this is it is generally impossible, or not cost effective to use a crane to lift parts on many of these lots. Even if having pre-built sections is a cost savings, it would be such a small difference it wouldn't be worth it with the possible risk of quality of the pre-built items and/or timing of construction. Home building is a complicated process and many companies seem to be providing solutions without looking at a total solution.
Answer: It has, just not all the way.
Modern American construction makes extensive use of prefabricated roof trusses, for large developments it is common to see parts of the framing prefabbed. The drywall interior fixing systems are designed to substantially reduce the amount of on-site work required. Modern plumbing fixtures can often be snapped together or joined with glues/expoxies rather than needing to be soldered. Domestic electrical can come as pre-wired conduit and you better believe that large developments are selecting those sizes carefully to reduce on-site work. Windows and doors arrive as single units which just need to be fitted, again a lot of attention is paid to ease of fitting since they are selling to series building professionals for whom labour time is money. Kitchen cabinetry is supplied fully prefabbed.
Modern flooring is also based on easy-to-assemble systems. Compare the effort required to put in laminate vs old-school parquet, hardwood boards, or marble.
Of course if you just put a whole ground floor together in a few modules in a factory, you will save even more labour time. The question is whether the greater transport costs and reduction in flexibility* will make it worth it in the end.
(*) If your factory isn't mass producing the same product over and over, you're going to lose a lot of the productivity gains from factory production.
Does that answer the question?
Intuitively, it seems like there should be quite a bit of room to decrease costs by using engineered, pre-fabricated/panelized construction. There should be less waste, less manual labor, and less re-work. Yet the best case seems to be approximately the same costs, though I would expect at improved quality or improved first-time quality.
Another system for engineered building, though based on wood, is Blueprint Robotics: http://www.blueprint-robotics.com/
I actually started my personal line of inquiry favoring steel construction as well, though some research convinced me that using a home as a carbon sink through wood construction from sustainably-managed forests made significant sense. For something like an airtight, well-insulated (Net Zero or better) home using wood-based sheathing, the coefficient of thermal expansion compatibility with wood structure also makes sense. That being said, it appears the Bone structure folks have their own solutions to prevent thermal shorts between the exterior and the steel structure, as they have apparently used their system for Net Zero and Passivhaus construction.
What labor is done on site in a typical stick built construction project is mostly the same manual labor that needs to be done in a factory. Which isn't surprising: construction sites are just mobile factories for buildings. When you have to make something with lot of empty space is makes sense to ship the factory to the final location.
Shipping is a factor too: a stick built house arrives on one flatbed truck. A similar prefab house needs 3, and special permits to get it down the road (which includes checking for lower hanging power lines).
Like we often see with automation and rigor, I suppose the up-front costs really only get amortized over multiple units produced. The Blueprint Robotics company I mentioned as an example apparently now focuses on multi-unit dwellings.
Quality and repeatability, usually things that (IMO, sadly) are not highly valued in the North American market, are almost certainly improved through engineered production, but I suppose if you don't value those things, you can also keep labor costs down.
Anyway, it would be nice to see some typical and aggregate quantification of these things to really understand.
Not affiliated with them. I built the walls of our summer house out of jumbo straw bales straight from the farm.
Meanwhile the Swiss are developing robots that build houses... https://youtu.be/fxxcEw98Njo
On a TV episode of Grand Designs (UK) a few years ago, the German company Huf Haus (www.huf-haus.com) sold a prefab home to a family. Their approach to labor? Ship that too.
The whole crew arrived with the house components. They knew exactly how to assemble it on the concrete base the local crews had put in place. It went up ridiculously quickly, and once done, they got in the trucks and drove back to Germany.
So I think the key takeaway of this article is that it's hard to drive from Germany to California.
Buy your prefab, crew shows up.
So what I'm saying is - there's a mental block for people in accepting these houses that has noting to do with reality and everything to do with perception.
As someone in a big city, daydreaming about picking the family up to a bigger living arrangement, hearing that there are perfectly-serviceable houses being ignored sounds like a great opportunity
Depending on what you are looking for in life, I suspect there are lots of places in the world that could work for you.
bone structure pre-cuts the steel framing for each project because it's not nearly as easy to deal with on-site as wood framing. it's also not cheaper, because wood framing is relatively available everywhere, flexible, reconfigurable on the fly, and easy to manipulate, unlike steel framing.
and as others have noted, framing is a small fraction of home construction, and these walls must be put together on site, so it's an overreach to even consider this prefab. it's just pre-cut.
that said, it'd be great to see more prefab systems, even just embellished boxes, to accelerate housing construction in tight markets, and ones like LA where homelessness is an already widespread and growing problem.
11% of global CO2 emissions are from construction. Using pre-fab steel modules are not only more recyclable but the building process emits about 50% less CO2 as well. Building in earthquake resistance is much easier than steel-reinforced concrete. So it's not just an optimization on on-site time.
Unfortunately no translated captions in https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1mK411p7X4 but the wall-to-wall robot in the factory gives you an idea of what the future looks like.
The short answer to this question is "because we haven't figured out how to make it less expensive than regular site built construction".
The longer answer: prefab, or modular, construction has made inroads in various construction niches. Parking garages are nearly all prefabricated concrete for instance. Light framed buildings (either wood or cold formed steel) frequently have their structure panelized off site. Hotels (especially in places where the cold weather means a short construction season) are sometimes built using prefab modules.
It's also super common to have prefabricated lower-level components - wood trusses, bar joists, hollowcore panels, etc.
But any higher degree of prefabrication tends to be more expensive than conventional, not less. They mostly get used when their perceived benefits outweigh their costs. (If you look at a panelizer like Entekra's benefits page, they don't list "cheaper" anywhere). Two major exceptions to this are parking garages and HUD homes, which (among other reasons) are heavily optimized for a particular form factor.
Regarding Bone Structure, it's an interesting system, and I love seeing people tackle this problem space. But I rate the chances of a custom fabricated steel structure ever being less expensive than conventional wood framing as "very near zero". This seems limited to the high end custom home market, and their marketing material seems to indicate that as well.
I have been working in and around the construction industry for the last 35+ years in Italy and in the '90's the firm I was working for had a department for pre-fabricated (concrete) buildings (more like condos or office buildings than "single" homes), which was led by an engineer that was - really - a technical genius and - besides him - we did have exceptionally good staff, both the technicians and the workers.
In the arc of more than ten years we tried everything and the contrary of it and after several , generally successful or mostly successful, built projects (with only a few minor issues in a few of them) we came to these conclusions:
1)you can make cheaper pre-fabricated buildings only if the level of finiture and overall result is cheaper or feels cheaper or looks cheaper
2) you can make pre-fabricated buildings that are as beautiful, functional and what not as "built-on-site" but that will cost the same (or more) as the corresponding built-on-site ones
3) the one and only difference was time, with pre-fab buildings we could build in 6-8 months time buildings that would have otherwise taken 18 months or more (this worked very well for rebuilding after an earthquake)
In the years since I was involved in several more similar to the US timber based projects for single homes or anyway one/two storeys structures, and "components" (like pre-fabricated bathrooms "cells" for industrial buildings and hotels) and my experience did not change the overall opinion much.
For anything that is "modular" or very, very "standard" (i.e. homes from catalog) there may be some space for fair competition (slightly lower cost for same or similar "quality" of end results), but when you start to include in it:
1) the local building codes (and possible needed deviations from the "standard")
2) the customers' changes/preferences
3) the architects/designers (with all due respect for the category) "whims"
It invariably ends up costing the same or more (money) and almost the same (time).
Certain type of prefab help, i.e. things that would normally stall a project, or things that are generally the same. For example, a new house I just bought uses some prefab concrete plates where the amount of variation is limited. On-site, some minor changes were made and it sped up a lot of the foundation, walls and floors.
Other elements, like entire frames with windows and doors etc. are 'prefab' as well when you think about it. We have had those for years, but it didn't always be modular like that.
The real 'custom' stuff so far is the roof, which is a well-known pattern and construction method, but the final size and shape depends on the house. Same goes for details in your walls like where the doors and windows go.
If you optimise 'too much' for some of the construction elements you stand to lose more than you gain (i.e. now you have to keep a larger stock of prefab stuff due to the amount of variations -- or people might end up with a choice biased towards something that is easy rather than what they actually want). It's also easy to think that a complete module could be prefab and the design re-used over and over, but that only makes sense if all houses are the same and all land is the same (Which is not the case). Then you end up with prefab stuff that doesn't fit and you have to either live in a crappy not-really-fitting-well house or do a lot of (more expensive) local changes at installation time.
Having some re-usable modules is the way to go if you want to optimise; especially when you think about things that are similar in a lot of cases (be it by choice or by building laws). We're already doing a lot of that, and optimising it further (be it selection or scale) would probably gain you more:
You can design with ready to use components where applicable, you can build with known-good components, methods and time scales where applicable and as the one buying the house you still get to make whatever choices you want without the risk of simply getting a 'badly modified prefab'.
Price is still an issue.
Part of the reason is that we pay no penalty for crappy energy hog homes. You can build with prefab panels and get airtight really quickly. So all the extra $$$ goes into better build and overhead for the factory.
You pay higher heating and cooling costs over the lifetime of the building. It's just the penalty is a 'death of a thousand cuts' that may be less noticeable than a proverbial broadsword to the face of paying for some extra insulation and proper house wrap upfront.
Just improving airtightness and mandating blower door tests in building codes would probably go a long way towards more efficient homes. Once you're more airtight you then of course have to ventilate right: HRV/ERV for refreshing of the air and stand alone dehumidification units.
And people now pay a lot of money for those prefab houses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prefabricated_houses
This article, from a builder, indicates that Sears homes are considered prefabricated by some people in the industry:
https://www.protohomes.com/blog/prefab-vs-modular-manufactur...
What is your differentiation between kit homes and prefabricated homes?
Kit home: Everything you need to build a house is in this box. Just add labor. Sort of like buying a lego kit that you know has all the pieces to build a Millenium Falcon out of.
Pre-fab: Important/time-consuming elements are constructed off-site and transported in a (nearly) ready to assemble state to the site. Sort of like having the Lego factory assemble the 7 major parts of the Millenium Falcon, and sending those to you so you can just connect them to each other to have the final product.
As I understand it, the Sears homes were kit homes by those definitions, not prefab. E.g. you would receive a bunch of 2x4s in a railroad car, not a ready-built wall you could just raise into place. Kit homes can also be pre-fab homes, but I don't think the terms are interchangeable and not all kit homes are pre-fab.
But I appreciate the distinction you are trying to make.
Sears homes did include extensive, hand-made details such as hand-made stained glass, cabinetry etc. So it may be a grey area and not perfectly match up with the vocabulary of today.
The bone system even looks like something I might be able to put together myself (besides stuff like foundation, pluming, and electrical).
It's nice and easy to modify and repair also. Unfortunately most of the money people use to buy goes into the price of the land, leaving little extra for a quality build.
That's right. The parent was complaining about homes built from sticks and cardboard, and indeed, one can actually use foil-faced cardboard for sheathing the shear walls (one product name is ThermoPly, there are others). You attach these to walls you build 24" O, slap 3/8" drywall inside, put vinyl siding, make absolutely no effort whatsoever to air-seal anything, save on gluing subfloor to joists (nobody will mind the squeaking), and the list can go on and on. House built like that will be utter garbage, will be expensive and uncomfortable to live in, and if it doesn't collapse due to water-damage induced rot, it's only because of high robustness of wood-frame construction.
However, you don't have to build this way! You can build a solid, sturdy, well-insulated, well-ventilated, soundproof, rigid and long-lasting house using wood-frame construction. It will just cost more. The great thing about wood-frame construction is that you can actually make these kind of decisions, and you can pick and choose parts which you care about, and the ones the quality of which you can give up on. Moreover, it's pretty easy to upgrade things later on, easy to fix if something breaks, and easy to build additions to.
I grew up in a country where lumber was too expensive to use it for construction, so everything was made from concrete (typically using CMUs). I used to think that this is a way to go, but over time I really became converted to American-style wood frame construction.
Flatly stated, prefab has always been about cost control, and people regard housing as an investment, and nobody is interested in "investing cheap."
"Why haven't Content Management Systems made web development cheaper?"
Sites like nytimes.com etc. are essentially prefab websites where all of the work is on the system to automate the building and distribution articles - the articles themselves are not bespoke HTML / CSS.
I've often compared HTML, CSS, JS to a house. HTML is the foundation, studs, joists, rafters, sheeting, subflooring, etc. JS is the wiring, plumbing, HVAC, etc. CSS is the paint, tiling, carpet, millwork, and other decorative elements. Maybe the prefab system can be the HTML and JS and then decorative elements can be layered on top to make it look like very different designs.
But in the UK at least you can buy traditional styled homes in kit form from a framing/panelling manufacturer https://www.potton.co.uk/our-show-homes
There's a reason that modern architecture developed around the international style when concrete, steel, glass, and mechanical HVAC all developed and became cost effective at the same time as open-floor plan living and the decreasing number of household staff. All of these factors go hand in hand and a robust solution would have to touch on these deeper considerations. Not to say it's impossible, but trying to put out there that architectural design is more than skin deep.
To use your analogy, you can use React to build what used to be a mid-90s static styled HTML site, but you probably wouldn't.
What trends do you see in architecture/modern (as in tools, best practices and techniques) design and home building?
Also could you recommend any good primers on these ideas/problems for the layperson?
I've been wrapped in that very question. I'm trying my first spec home right now and residential construction is a total mess, as the article makes clear. Small, informally organized contractors are a real problem at this scale, and the labor + material cost is already so high that it's a real struggle to compete with existing buildings in my market. I'm expecting to break even or perhaps net $50k for about 1.5 years of work, but part of that is tuition for the learning process.
At the high end - commercial buildings, complicated skyscrapers and so on - construction work is becoming vastly more streamlined, controlled, and predictable. It's now possible to have daily laser scans of your construction progress, automated inventory management of pieces scanned on site, detailed digital models that everyone can access and comment on, and all of that is becoming the norm. Check out Leica laser scanning, ProCore, and Trimble Connect for examples. From the design side, the push is heavily into generative design with some progress being made with machine learning informed generative design. These processes are mostly about enabling new, more complex designs or more fully optimizing specific parameters, not about automating what is already tedious like updating drawing sets and checking that code compliance (especially ADA clearances) is kept after changes (a big opportunity for disruptive software to take on incumbents, I think). At residential scale and cost, generative design is generally a very high-end luxury. I worked at a high end firm in New York City that had some details that were done in Grasshopper, but we're talking about $5,000 interior doors fabricated from aluminum - well beyond what a typical residential customer would want.
The best tool for small scale and cutting edge design is Rhino with their included Grasshopper plugin. There's no building intelligence in that tool so all the work is very manual, modeling each component in 3D from scratch. But that's the gold standard. The generative tools are visual programming interfaces, but there are many ways to delve into Python and C# if you're more comfortable there. You can write Python in Grasshopper and you can write C# and Python (with some limitations) plugins in Rhino. Revit is the standard tool for design (at every scale other than residential) in the US and they include a generative tool call Dynamo, which also supports Python and C#. Revit is a BIM tool so it includes components that can adapt to geometries, contain wall assemblies, nest objects like windows and doors on walls, and ties in to energy simulation more fluidly. For pure geometry development and home design, SketchUp is still widely used. I don't have a concise thing in mind about those but at least that is a starting point for you.
Something that will continue to become more important is environmental impact. Net-Zero and Passivhaus certifications will become more mainstream eventually. We're getting to a place where LEED is important but pretty watered down compared to more effective programs. Energy modeling (another software opportunity - better integrated and always-active energy modeling) will become the best way to control comfort and energy use.
In terms of best practice, the lesson I keep learning is that it's about interfacing with the industry. Contractors expect certain inputs like 2x6 stud walls made with Doug Fir No. 2 @16" on center. If you try to get them to use screw-together metal framing, true steel framing or concrete to get those expansive enormous windows, or even heavy timber, they will take longer and the product may be worse unless you find the right person. If you want to go down the cutting edge route, working closely with your fabricators is very important. What metals can they source, what tolerances can they run their particular laser cutter / CNC / water jet systems at, what software stack do they use etc.
For books... Form, Space, and Order by Francis Ching is a great first purchase.
For something light and very accessible, I enjoyed Bill Bryson's At Home, which investigates how the modern home came to be. Really fun. Doesn't really address what we're talking about directly but gives some insight into why you might choose different forms to express different cultural norms and ways of living.
If you're interested in emerging digital and generative design, I really like the AD Architectural Design series published by Wiley. They are hard to find and I would say they target both professional sophisticated laypeople. Their coverage of topics is great, though. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15542769 is their home page. There are some on Amazon but they're not really grouped and they're hard to search for. This is a good intro to where generative design was a few years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Scripting-Cultures-Architectural-Desi... You can pick up these journals on an iOS app here https://apps.apple.com/us/app/architectural-design-ad/id5071...
I'm not an architectural historian and I don't know a lot about the theory of detailing before modern architecture. But I do know that a lot of it boils down to thinking and especially proportional thinking from Ancient Greece and Rome. There is a strain of critical architectural history that even contemporary architects learn. Vitrivius - the Ten Books of Architecture, Alberti - On The Art of Building, Palladio - Four Books on Architecture, Semper - The Four Elements of Architecture, Le Corbusier - Towards a new Architecture. Sprinkle in some Laugier - an Essay on Architecture, Rasmussen - Experiencing Architecture, Wittkower - Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, Giedion - Space, Time, and Architecture, (along with a couple others I'm forgetting) and you have a good start on architectural theory. Those books comprised about 1/3 of my theory training. The rest was history textbooks. As a side note, architecture is interesting in that rigorous study can take place with pictures, so don't write off just getting photo books of buildings that interest you.
In terms of building technologies, Francis Ching is widely respected and very accessible. I haven't read his Introduction to Architecture but he's fantastic so give that a shot. What I have on my desk always are Building Construction Illustrated and Building Codes Illustrated. If you intend to take on a building project and be involved, I would consider those essential.
I just got The New Net Zero by Maclay and it is so far a really accessible and pretty comprehensive look at approaching zero energy buildings.
Modern Architecture Since 1900 bur William Curtis is my favorite textbook on the development of modern architecture (which is most of the important bit for contemporary work). Kenneth Frampton is an excellent architectural historian and his book Modern Architecture: A Critical History is great but more opinionated. His book Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture is not as accessible but is probably the best look at the topic we started out on - the relationship between space and technologies. Le Corbusier's Toward an Architecture is much more accessible and makes the case but just for the introduction of International Style.
In terms of getting at what architecture can be when it's truly executing as art, I can recommend three books very highly. Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, Pallasmaa's The Eyes of the Skin, and Peter Zumthor's Atmospheres. I really strongly recommend reading those as the primary way to understand what building art is or can be.
The other thing I would suggest is that if you're interested in developing your own designs, architects are incredibly cheap comparatively. If you want a recently licensed recent graduate to help you with the process, even suggesting books or just sort of meeting with you and critiquing your thinking, you could probably find that for $20-$50/hour. Even some very experienced good architects would do it for $120-150/hour. It's like the movie industry - as long as you're not booking the top A-listers you can get a lot of value.
This technology is indeed cutting edge and promising. I do dream of owning a BS home one day. It’s an engineering marvel.
But the reason it hasn’t taken over is simply because it’s still more expensive than traditional builds. At least in Canada where wood is cheap and buildings don’t need such high earthquake protections.
Cool time lapse of a build: https://youtu.be/vOC_V76v9j0
They were a 60's prefab house called a "deck" house. My dad ended up buying one later with a large addition once my parents split. They were pretty good, except the roofs which weren't great for snow (pitch) and lacked insulation. I helped replace one of those roofs and the lack of pitch made it easier to work on. (friends father was a civil engineer).
Pretty well made, considering, and the open layouts were pretty great.
prefab is around, just a niche.
A check of google, "deck" company still exist as a branch of a larger prefab house company:
https://www.deckhouse.com/brand/deck-house/
photos of one:
[1] https://www.curbed.com/2017/10/25/16534122/prefab-homes-manu...
Could that have anything to do with how the Japanese dislike "old" homes, and tend to demolish an existing home when buying a lot in order to build a new one for the new owner?
This sounds exactly like software development
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka
[3] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%BB...
There's not much benefit in doing custom wood framing in a factory, a nailgun is a nailgun.
Unless you have a complex wall assembly, it’s probably not worth it.
"almost months" so, 7 weeks?
Factory-churned suburbia is the last thing we need.