Ask HN: How can we digitise housing | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can we digitise housing

8 pointslondondev4515 comments

Let's be fair... If automation dies what we all probably think it will. Everything is going to be abundant and free. Music perhaps is the best example. It used to be £25 to buy an LP in the UK. Include inflation and it's a lot more.

Forward to today, housing is in crisis everywhere. From London to Sydney, every single western city is unaffordable for all.

My ask is this, can we yes WE digital folk, do what has been done for music to housing. So that we can stop working our lives into the ground to afford it.

Ideas wanted, I'd quit my job to work on this.

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Seems the problem is supply. Build more. Problem solved? Why don’t we build more? Politics, locals often don’t want more housing near them so you can’t get a permit to build… many people in life don’t want change and oppose it as they only care about themselves and not the greater good (and their house price increases in value because it’s an “investment” more than a utility).

What can we do? Change local opinions, make the problem more visible in the news with actionable things people can do, find a way to reach people to remove red tape and get higher density, mixed use and more land available. Maybe community builds where people group together to build pre-fabs as a collective.

I personally wish this situation could be improved, we have recently been evicted by our landlord who’s selling in to the local price bubble and now all renters are looking simultaneously, we’ll likely have to relocate to find somewhere we aren’t price gouged… I’m sure you can tell this is a sore subject for me right now.

> can we ... do what has been done for music to housing

No, because unlike digital goods, houses (and land) cannot be duplicated at zero marginal cost.

> So that we can stop working our lives into the ground to afford it.

It's not houses that are expensive, it's the land, and as long as people speculate on land then land in popular cites will be expensive. Read Henry George's Progress and Poverty:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty

Also visit /r/georgism for a lot of discussion on georgism.

Interesting idea! (Although our bodies will never be digitized -- and they'll need some protection from cold and a way to sleep...)

The closest thing I've heard to a tech solution for housing is the 3D printed house that went on the market. That raises the question of whether there's some way to radically reduce the cost of creating housing. (Maybe interchangeable parts, like what revolutionized mass production?)

The only role I can even imagine for digitalization would be digital pictures of available properties -- maybe automating some kind of drone fly-by at addresses where properties are for sale, and then creating a better web site for browsing them?

Of course, there might be other fixes for housing too. (Encouraging employers to let people work from home, or at least creating jobs in a wider variety of places.) Someone once tried to convince me the solution was just to encourage people to have fewer children, because over the time the resulting population decrease would do a lot to improve the availability (and thus the affordability) of housing.

As others have said though, the issue with housing isn't the building, it's the red tape. Want to build high, nope, can't get the permit. Dense? No. Mixed use? Def not.

I think that 3d printing houses is going to be huge but it has a long way to go. They can print the main structure, but not do things like windows, plumbing, electric, trusses, roofs, etc. So a massive part of the construction is still manual.

When the entire building or almost the entire thing is truly automatic, that is going to be a game changer. Not saying it doesn't help now to be able to 3d print a lot of it. But it is in no way a fully automated construction at this point. So the economics are going to get dramatically better as the harder parts get automated.

I guess some kind of large rig, that could be lifted on to site and literally print the whole house there and then.

Well, they do have large rigs though. The problem is that the techniques are not able to "print" pipes, steel structural supports such as rebar or roofing/floor beams, windows, etc. They can mostly just put down layers of concrete.

Someone mentioned 3d printing homes which I think is going to be amazing especially as more of the construction can be done automatically rather than just the walls.

Another totally different take on this is information systems. For example, what if there was a single system where you could see a map and analyze all of the unoccupied homes in the us along with the homeless and housing-deficient?

I am afraid to mention decentralized systems because that usually gets my comments buried, but for a large scale project like keeping a database like that up-to-date I think they would be useful.

What I am suggesting is, what if there were a aggregate information system that allowed us to know exactly how many people needed more affordable homes, how much their income was, what unoccupied buildings there were in each city and area, development plans, etc. And there were a way to identify each person and allocate them housing credits if necessary. Instantly. Such as a cryptocurrency.

It takes a lot to comply with established building codes and practices. While they all exist for good reasons, it means the existing housing supply is inflexible and reconfiguring it to meet new demands is very expensive.

I believe the solution lies in reconfigurable, self-assembling building components. If a home can adapt to its environment and the needs of its residents, the cost of planning drops dramatically. Imagine upcycled plastics or recaptured carbon bricks that could be extremely strong, yet migratory on-demand. Such a material could help us adapt to changing populations and climate conditions while slashing cost and waste. While I think 3D printed concrete is neat, it’s meant to be fixed. I want smart legos, or the microbots of Big Hero 6 as my walls.

Ehh, building codes and land ownership mean that I don't expect much progress.

Two things that jump to mind. Build houses out of old tires. There's a lot of them and mostly they get burnt. Not enough for everyone to have an old tires house in their lifetime, but enough that maybe 10-20% of houses could be old tires?

Shipping container homes that can be transported easily that hook into some kind of "dock" providing septic, power, etc. Most would probably consist of a few segments, but even one 40ft high cube is bigger than many people's apartments. Of course basically what I'm describing is an RV, so why aren't those more common?

Housing isn't infinitely replicate-able like music is. That's why music is basically free now, and that's the fundamental obstacle I think.

My off-the-wall hair-brained solution would be to infill a ton of the ocean. Since the Earth is 75% ocean, we could double the available landmass and still have 50% of the ocean! That would be plenty of land for everyone!

Not to be petty, but water is about 8lbs per gallon. A ton is only 250 gallons. So filling in a ton of the ocean isn't going to be very much.

Should read 'if automation DOES...'

lol you can’t. Try digitizing government inefficiency first that’s at least more achievable.

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