Modular Homes for Under $50k | Hacker News Reader

Modular Homes for Under $50k

boxabl.com

369 pointsyehudabrick333 comments

This house is 375 sq ft and uses low end materials, and it doesn't include setup, so it's going to cost ~$100k, or $266 / sq ft. Most new home construction is more like $150 / sq ft. And with this system, you're very limited in what you can build.

Who's the target customer for this?

In the bay area, $250-300/sq ft is a more realistic low-end of the range.

So about the same as this.

I love the idea of modular houses, but they seem so expensive. Especially when factoring in the inability to sell the same as houses, etc etc.

please do tell which contractor charges $250-300sq/ft?! I've contacted at least 10 different contractors and they're all in the 400-500 range

These are numbers from 5 years ago. I didn't increase them to be conservative. 400-500 today wouldn't surprise me.

A friend is getting a master bathroom redone. $100k.

The bay area is insane.

The construction prices you quoted are not correct at least in the Bay Area. And I am guessing $150/sq ft achievable at scale.

Pricing ADUs is tricky because the some of things in a house cost same for a small to medium size home. For example, the costs of plumbing, electrical, kitchen, bathroom, etc are more of less the same between a 500 sq.ft. house and a 1000 sq. ft house.

> the costs of plumbing, electrical, kitchen, bathroom, etc are more of less the same between a 500 sq.ft. house and a 1000 sq. ft house.

Don't larger houses have multiple bathrooms, thus not the same cost for plumbing? At least when I watched Selling sunset, it seemed it's about having at least 3-4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms in a house...

The 1000sqft house versus a 500sqft house probably only adds a half bath. Its not like you're going to jump from one bath to five in another 500sqft. The plumbing work on adding a half bath in new construction really isn't too much when properly planned.

Proper planning generally means those bathrooms are right next to each other, so the toilets use the same drain and vent pipes and water supply except for the last 2 feet. You ideally put the kitchen and laundry close as well. Of course you often cannot put everything close and that add cost, but it is attempted.

The drain's practically the only hard/slow part these days, and it's not really that bad. PEX makes everything stupid-fast for the water lines, given unfinished walls & ceilings.

In the same way a lot of products have become cheaper because of some process optimization (packaged more compactly to reduce transportation costs), I'm excited to see modular homes/home 3d-printing etc. play out and become cheaper over time until they are more affordable than convention home construction or somehow unique and better in ways that conventionally constructed homes cannot be.

To answer your question, one possible target customer is the rich (wo)man who wants a cabin house far away but something more comfortable than a cabin house.

Maybe people in hurricane and flood zones? If you insist on living there, might as well live in a disposable house (Possibly want to get the price lower than 50k).

Small aside, I just looked up what houses look like in other parts of the world. Very few look like houses found in the US.

If you are rich, there are a lot of options that are likely to better cater to your richness. Or why build a 50k shed on a million dollar piece of ground?

In Elon's case so you can have a few hundred on the not very expensive land at Starbase Texas.

As always, the premise is “you should” not “I should.”

Savings of time to build and use, can be removed as easily as it’s deployed.

$50k will buy a reasonably nice RV that includes wheels and a hitch and such options abound.

RV's have a ton of compromises to make them light that do not restrict this solution.

There is simply no comparison. Buying an RV to park it permanently would be daft.

RVs have much higher maintenance. Maybe Tiny homes would be an alternative.

> (wo)man

'Person' is the non-gendered word that goes here.

But with ‘son’ in the word doesn’t it’s usage continue to promote the patriarchy?

No, “Son” as in “male child” is derived from Porto-Germanic “Sunnus”, “person” as in “human being” is derived from Latin “persona”. It’s just a coincidence that in modern English we write them with the same characters.

There are some (fringe?) groups who'd argue against this, evidenced by variant spellings like "womxn" and "womyn" that are attested since the 70s, in order to remove "man" from the words. Different in that "woman" is etymologically an extension of the word "man", but somewhat absurd because the etymological root was gender neutral, with a separate word attested for "masculine" man.

Point being, perception of a word can be more meaningful to some people than the historical meaning.

Good 'ole prescriptive vs descriptive linguistics...

I guess you can find fringe groups against anything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This kind of thinking, linguistic relativity - that the words available to you shape your worldview - is not really held in high regard as I understand it. At least not in the hard sense, where one is completely unable to conceptualise something because they don't have the words to express it.

For example, some have claimed that if we had no separate terms for "man and woman", "male and female", etc, we'd be unable to perceive a difference between the two.

> the etymological root was gender neutral, with a separate word attested for "masculine" man

For anyone playing at home, this is "were" or "wer". The phrase "man and woman" would once have been something like "were and wif", which is where the "were-" in "werewolf" comes from, and is the ancestor of "wife".

If we want English to be more gender-neutral, we could revert to werman, wifman and man.

Oh, for sure. I didn't mean to suggest it's a common or respected belief, only that there are some who support it.

(and probably more who use examples of it in bad faith arguments presuming that such groups exist in larger numbers, e.g. "look at those crazy feminists!")

> If we want English to be more gender-neutral, we could revert to werman, wifman and man.

There's a part of me that loves this idea, even if I recognize the absurdity of suggesting it. I guess it's made more sense to me than trying to replace a large portion of English vocab en masse, like all the vocational terms ending in "-man".

A curious example of a Germanic cousin of English that underwent the same "masculinization" of the word man but "came back" is Swedish, where the word "man" means "adult male", but is also used as a neuter pronoun meaning "generic person" (usually translated as "one" in English).

As far as I know the other Nordic languages didn't develop this usage, but I'm less familiar with them.

> A curious example of a Germanic cousin of English that underwent the same "masculinization" of the word man but "came back" is Swedish, where the word "man" means "adult male", but is also used as a neuter pronoun meaning "generic person" (usually translated as "one" in English).

We sort of have this in English too: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind". Although I can't think of any cases where we use "man" alone to mean "one".

Also German, kinda: Man darf nicht.. Frau/Mann

"That's one small step for a person, one giant leap for personkind"

Time to rewrite the history books! (1984 anyone?)

"_Man_ borde inte tvinga andra att anpassa sig efter en skrikig minoritet" (_One_ should not force others to conform to a loudmouthed minority)

In my native language (Ukrainian), the word "person" (людина) is always feminine. Even if someone wanted to say "I'm a very masculine person", they would still need to use a feminine form of the word "masculine" to say "masculine person". And no one has ever had any issues with that, ever.

That would probably be because It's just a superficial issue for people with too much time and money on their hands to enforce their ways upon others.

In Italian (which shares I believe no common roots with Ukrainan) it is the same, "person" (persona) is always feminine, and of course goes with feminine articles and adjectives are conjugated at the feminine gender and as well noone ever had issues with that.

Yes, it is the same thing. Italian and Ukrainian belong to the same language family (Indo-European), so they are distantly related.

Well, quite distantly I believe, I mean Slavic vs. Latin/Romance languages.

In old English man was gender neutral. Wer, as in werewolf, was the masculine. World comes from Wor-old, or literally, age of males.

Are there any countries or communities that currently use "old English" as their native language?

No, that's why we call it "old" English, as opposed to "South-African", "New Zealand", etc.

> No, that's why we call it "old" English

Which surely means it has little relevance to a conversation about modern English then, no?

Pedant comes from French or Italian and meant teacher or schoolmaster.

We know. But language shifts.

That's a contrived example. I assume someone rich would hire a construction firm to make a fancy treehouse.

The target audience for these are squeezed between owners of trailer parks and cheap shacks.

The substack Construction Physics has an excellent overview of the now 100 year failed promise of modular building and the eternal cycles of the exact same value props being pitched in ambitious efforts to reform construction and why conventional construction has refused to be disrupted.

Some great posts are:

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/building-componen...

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/operation-breakth...

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/construction-effi...

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/book-review-indus...

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/industrialized-bu...

Despite this, he's cautiously excited about some of the potential future industrialized systems such as Foldable Buildings https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/folding-at-home 3D printing https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/3d-printed-buildi... Plywood Systems https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/facit-homes-wikih... And Broad Homes https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/broad-group-part-...

Thanks for sharing these links! I was looking for an analysis of B-Core from Broad and I finally found one.

Although I don't quite understand why they initially excited about B-Core but later call it poorly thought out. Is it because of the cost of stainless steel?

In what you linked first, his criticisms are (rightly) directed towards pre-fabed concrete. That's not this system.

This is a folded system - exactly what you indicate he's cautiously excited about. As am I. Let me link together two or three of those modules - say a living room/kitchen/laundry and two bedroom/bathroom modules. Would be perfect!

I was wondering that myself. I fantasize about plopping a house down out in the desert, but their video shows a crane used to unfold it. By the time you get all the heavy machinery out there to prep the land and assemble the structure you're most of the way to just building something unique.

Once you have found the contractor to do all that, you’re all the way…and off the end of the runway with two points of failure and no single responsibility when things don’t line up.

And the contractor is only making overhead and profit on half the work of a tiny budget which means that you are not a priority…even if the construction cycle was flat which it isn’t.

The efficiency of the market is why people don’t build this way much. As Heinlein says every generation thinks it invented sex. They think they invented modular housing too I think.

After they move in to their modular home and have sex a few times they will invent distance education.

My friend and I were having a similar fantasy of putting places like that all over the western US so we started with a one-off project to build a tiny house so that it can just be “plopped” down (or rather rolled in).

How big were you thinking? Something like 400 SF? Or a proper house?

As I said in another comment on this thread I think it’s possible to build something totally custom for a similar budget (200-250 psf) as long as it’s on a trailer because you avoid most of the code and inspection issues in several western states by putting it on wheels.

https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR

Still working on the interior but this house is built better than my actual house in a high-cost market in California. It is super tiny though (200 sf and that includes the loft).

edit: formatting

Using a trailer is the technique to bypass council judgements in Australia as well. Here are some Airbnb examples:

https://cabn.life/book-now-2/

Some of these would cost AU$70-110k though.

It depends on the State, but in most parts of Oz, you need a Building Permit, then a Certificate of Occupancy to be able to live there.

The exception appears to be where there is already an approved dwelling on the land, and even then a Caravan can only be used temporarily (eg in your example of temporary AirBNB accommodation).

I know because I've just lost exactly this battle with the local council.

Possibly that small, but I'm a family of five so sleeping that many quickly becomes a problem. Bunk beds and squeezing in are fine but we're +1 over what almost every dwelling considers family-sized.

I hadn't considered a trailer because that usually requires a commitment to owning a huge truck. But are these trailers you are referring to more semi-permanent?

Semi-permanent trailers are common. Most camper trailers are not designed to go cross country - they are for the family who does a couple in-state vacations every summer. (at the cost of fuel a mini-van + hotel room is the same price as a truck + camper if you drive for 10 hours every day - that is assuming you have the truck and camper anyway and so there is zero cost to buying it)

Yeah, agreed, I've had so many conversations about this where people like the idea in concept but when you hear about people actually living in these it quickly becomes clear that it doesn't work for some folks. Specifically, though, in the 400 SF version that we'd like to build next (assuming we're able to actually sell the smaller one we're currently building) it would be on a 30-foot trailer and actually have two sleeping lofts. In that model, a minimalist family of 4 (minimalist, he says, as if!) could totally fit with the two adults in one loft and the two kids in another. At 3 children you start getting more difficult, but I'm sure you could do a 600 SF house, but then a trailer large enough to build such a thing becomes difficult to move.

Re needing a truck, plenty of folks tow tiny houses so that's no problem assuming you don't want to constantly move it. If you wanted to be truly mobile I personally question whether a tiny house really is the right vehicle (ha!) for that lifestyle. And the trailer we're using has jacks, which stabilize the trailer so, no, it's not semi-permanent, but when you jump around in ours you can't feel it moving at all. We also had a thought about adding a skirt to the trailer itself to increase curb appeal if someone purchasing it is going to leave it fixed in one location, but that's for when/if we sell. Gotta finish the interior first.

See: Destination Trailers

https://www.forestriverinc.com/rvs/destination-trailers/sier...

Thought the same about the crane. Surely there is a way you could adjust these to avoid the crane? As in, have a pulley mechanism that could be built into the frame to lower the floor? And roof panels that slide across rather than fold over?

But I guess you need to deliver the thing, and that means truck and crane anyway, unless they're towed to site and the trailer is part of it. Couldn't slide it off a trailer without damaging it. Unless you reinvent the trailer which significantly ramps up your costs.

There's a render on the site where a regular looking pickup truck tows it to a site, then it unfolds itself magically. The video of an actual unit had the crane assist. Elon's house aside the product seems to be mostly vaporware so who knows what it actually requires.

Crane is likely just for efficiency when working with labor paid by the hour.

You could rope a few friends in and put it up with cribbing and a come along but it would take longer.

$400 a day for the crane. Not a big deal.

Fully flat pack would make more sense. U-build have been doing some interesting thing: https://u-build.org

Plus it can be self assembled

>but their video shows a crane used to unfold it. By the time you get all the heavy machinery out there to prep the land and assemble the structure you're most of the way to just building something unique.

This[0]

Is[1]

A[2]

Solved[3]

Problem[4]

But many municipalities prohibit it because if you make housing too cheap the "wrong kind of people" might move in. In the desert you shouldn't have problems though.

[0] http://www.illmoveit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/IMG_1521...

[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/x9MwVxBK254/maxresdefault.jpg

[2] https://ewscripps.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/994f83b/21...

[3] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BhU7yhMVdfE/hqdefault.jpg

[4] http://www.pacificwalkhomes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/a...

Isn't the insulation on those types of homes terrible?

It doesn't have to be. They have a video where he hits the exterior with a propane torch - not all construction materials are the same. These appear to be quite well constructed and as long as they have figured out how to prevent air infiltration at the joints once it's unfolded and fully assembled these should be far more energy efficient than the vast majority of tract housing being mass thrown up.

The Boxabl house folds up much more compact and in their render at least it is being delivered behind a pickup truck. So it seems they are solving a different problem and might be able to get these things into places a large tractor with an extra-wide load might not be able to access. Though that is negated somewhat if you need a crane to deploy it as the video shows.

A boom town where labour is really expensive and there is an acute housing shortage ??

Or someone who thinks it's the future and love telling his or her guests about it. Or someone who's fascinated by IKEA furniture.

Interestingly IKEA has been building homes for a while in Scandinavian countries: https://www.boklok.com/

They also seem to be getting into the tiny house game: https://dornob.com/flat-pack-ikea-house-built-shipped-for-un...

Driving to Minot a decade ago... you'd see more modular houses on trailers on the road than cars at times. The flood of 2011 messed up a lot and this was also in the oil boom there.

There were even tent cities for people there after the flooding.

Yes, these modular houses would have been quite welcome there.

A tangent question to this is "how easy is it to undo it?"

A guy I know wants to do some major renovations on the house - gut it and fix it. It will take a year or two to do. In the meantime... where do you live?

Another situation where this could have been useful would have been Biloxi after Katrina where, again, housing is needed in short order.

> Who's the target customer for this?

People who fall for stuff like Hyperloop. The biggest problem with housing is not the building itself, its the land and the scarcity of it. This is yet another tech 'solution' in search of a problem. And that problem is political, not technical.

INB4: but we're gonna deploy these on Mars!!

Land is not scarce. We literally make as much of it as we want. What makes it scarce is legislation and zoning.

Look at Manhattan or Hong Kong. You just stack the homes and offices and stores on top of each other.

Allow me to rephrase: space in desirable urban areas. Land is too specific.

Also, land with services connected - water, etc. Loads of cheap blocks of land out in the deserts of Texas.

Right, which is exactly why this technology does nothing to solve the problem. The housing shortage in SF isn't because they can't build like Manhattan or Hong Kong there, it's because they choose not to.

Certainly it would be possible to build higher than construction currently goes in SF, but permission is not the only reason why there are fewer skyscrapers. Manhattan and Hong Kong are essentially massive regions of granite that you can build pretty much anything on top of. That sort of geology is not particularly common. You can't just put up skyscrapers everywhere. They'd fall over eventually.

https://blog.epa.gov/2015/07/14/the-manhattan-skyline-why-ar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Hong_Kong

Counterpoint: Chicago skyscrapers.

Chicago typically doesn't have well accessible bedrock. I know of one civil engineer who unexpectedly ran into granite and was able to sell it for added profit on a project. Point being, CE's don't typically expect great bedrock yet have developed methods to build skyscrapers in a city that was formerly a swamp.

"He says even though new technology makes it easier to find solid bedrock beneath 100 feet of wet clay, it doesn’t always make sense to drill that deep. Modern engineers still use the same general principle Burnham & Root employed when they floated the foundations of the Monadnock Building on an even flimsier layer of soil known as desiccated crust: They just spread the load."[1]

[1] https://www.wbez.org/stories/building-skyscrapers-on-chicago...

> The housing shortage in SF ... it's because they choose not to.

And the choice it's entirely driven by financial speculation, nothing else.

Utilities?

> This is yet another tech 'solution' in search of a problem. And that problem is political, not technical.

And the problem they search for has been solved half a century ago — the modern highrise apartment building.

But that would mean you wouldn’t be able to use cars and a public transportation system would have to be built.

It looks to be such a small, and insignificant detail :)

Oh no, that sounds terrible?

I wouldn't want to be the one to rob Americans of their trucks.

That's good. But if you did want cars - that's totally doable. You build the garages in lower floors / underground and the apartments higher up. There's lots of buildings like that in central Melbourne for example.

You could decide to have 5 floors of garages from the ground floor up, and have 5 floors of roads to drive on (especially easy if you make it electric only for most vehicles - maybe confine heavy diesel vehicles to the ground floor with appropiate ventilation)

Then on the 6th floor have a pedestrian/cycle floor that's sheltered from the elements, and the 7th floor have open parks, with 30 stories of housing and offices above.

I mean tech has been great at disrupting political problems by simply overwhelming then with money. See Uber and Airb&b

Since they're very up front about referring to them as Accessory Dwelling units, the primary market is likely people who want to quickly put an ADU in place alongside a traditional single-family home for extra living space or rental income.

About one-third of the cost of new multifamily development is typically tied up in zoning/permitting/planning processes. Against that backdrop, ADUs -- particularly if the city pre-approves designs, which seems like something this product would be ideal for -- are a growing part of housing inventory and housing affordability in many cities.

'Accessory Dwelling Unit' is the most depressing way to talk about a home I've ever heard.

Welcome accessory citizens to your new neighbourhood. A dystopia like this is not just on the horizon it's all but here already. "Middle class" is not meaningful any more. Working class has slipped into actual poverty and the middle class are now accessory to the wealth hoarders.

Educated twenty-somethings don't have much of a future to look forward to. They can't even afford the land to put an Accessory Dwelling Unit on, they'll have to rent one from an existing home owner. They will be living on a salary that stalled in the 90s, dealing with ever rising food and environmental costs, and subsisting in a world where we have a perma-health watch reducing their freedom to socialize.

What's a "perma-health watch", and how does it the reduce ability to socialize?

Guess

I assume you are living in a time where a perpetual pandemic is something you've considered as becoming a reality[1]. With Covid mutations pushing countries back into lockdown you must see where we are potentially heading. Young people have had their university experience revoked. So many people go to university partly for the education and partly for the social experience. Finding love, new life long friends, and getting an education is what university used to mean to people. This is no more and may never be again. We are living in a time where our old life is being disposed and we don't even know it. I feel like most people think this is just temporary, well it's been almost a year and a half and we are still here. Life won't go back to how it was, ever. Too many paradigms have changed, and we have band aids for Covid that are just about keeping our hopes up. This hope will wane and we'll be work ourselves through to the final stages of grief as we accept our new lives in semi-isolation.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/1c7266b1-1fad-458e-8585-12dc3164f... https://nationalpost.com/news/postpandemic/its-only-the-end-... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/13/moderna-ceo-says-the-world-w... https://www.businessinsider.com/when-will-the-pandemic-end-d...

All right. Yeah, I don't fully disagree. I just never saw the expression "perma-health watch" before, and was unable to parse it. English is not my native language.

'Permanent health-watch' is the way to read it.

Ah, that makes sense. I read it as "permanent-health watch". English compound words always confuses me. Thanks!

Seems like an intentional misunderstanding of the term to me. The building is an accessory to the house, not the person living in it..

I don't see it that way at all. Perhaps I've been too immersed in this terminology (I built an ADU a couple of years ago), but it makes sense given typical property descriptions: it's a dwelling unit (i.e. a place where people live) that's secondary ("accessory") to the primary dwelling. Or is the depressing part the fact that it assumes single family residences?

'Dwelling' sounds deeply depressing to me - to 'dwell' somewhere sounds like to simply exist in a space rather than actually living and thriving there. To 'dwell' on a problem means to sit and think quietly. And 'unit' to me sounds cookie-cutter and impersonal. This is your unit, just like everyone else's. Sit in your assigned unit and dwell in silence, human.

I guess 'dwelling' and 'unit' don't have all those connotations to you?

Why not just say 'home'? Even 'Accessory Home'.

It's a legal/regulatory term so I guess the coldness is to be expected: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accessory-dwelling-unit...

Guess it comes down to your target audience. If you're market primarily consists of landlords looking to make rental income, ADU seems to fit the bill.

I don’t know if you’re a non-native speaker, but there is actually a popular magazine called dwell - https://www.dwell.com/

Great for people who work in Human Resources.

Maybe they hope to get a beefy government contract to “end homelessness”.

Finland did that and reduced homelessness by 33%. It fell short of their goal of ending homelessness entirely, but it's hard to argue that a 33% reduction is anything short of amazing.

https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/eradicating...

“ Who's the target customer for this?”

People who otherwise could not afford to buy a house, I assume.

Personally, I don't like having neighbours, I like nature, I don't mind living small. Such a house would allow me to put more of my resources in land. Then if I need more room for stuff I can build that myself (stuff requires less isolation and there are less strict rules for it in my country, etc).

Pretty sure you'll still need a concrete foundation, or else the house will slowly drift away. But plumbing is probably the hardest/most expensive thing about it.

I've said this elsewhere in the thread, but putting a small/tiny house on a trailer is a good option and won't drift away (at least not in the foreseeable future since it's on wheels with jacks to keep it in place). I think we've reached a point with composting toilets and grey water where plumbing is not that hard, nor expensive. Yes, you still need a water source, but running the actual plumbing lines is low-cost and as long as you're willing to use a composting toilet (no plumbing lines for that obviously) and make use of your grey water in/around your property (which in a lot of the western US should be the norm instead of the exception) it's pretty reasonable. Does require a different way of thinking about things and in a lot of urban areas the "state" might have regulations that prohibit some of these things.

A single wide mobile home, which is x2-3 as big as this, is cheaper than this costs. And, in most parts of the country, you can buy a full home with land for less than this costs installed.

Their advantage seems to be how quickly they can deliver and install them. Digging into their website, it sounds like they're targeting temporary housing for natural disasters, etc. which makes sense.

What are you basing a $50k setup cost on?

Transportation, assembly, foundation, utilities, sewage. Ive looked at similar systems myself.

EDIT: They also state this in their FAQ (https://www.boxabl.com/faq/):

  - Transportation = $2-$4 per mile from las vegas
  - Assembly = "Boxabl only sells room modules. We will connect you with a Boxabl certified and state licensed installer in your area."
  - The rest = "Whats not included in that price is your land and site setup. This can include utility hookups, foundation, landscaping, permits, and more. Depending on your location and the complexity of your site, this cost can range anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000."

> They also state this in their FAQ

$5k to $50k is a big range. In the video on the article about Musk's unit[1] they state they're initially targeting Accessory Dwelling Units, and specifically California's recently relaxed laws regarding them. I'm not sure the laws specifically regarding those (but there's info here[2]), but I suspect it's a lot cheaper when you're allowed to hook up to the existing house's sewer and power.

It may well be closer to $100k all said and done for a unit not set up as an ADU, but I suspect that the answer to the original question (of who this targets) is "not the people that need to pay $50k in install fees, at least not initially".

1: https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-50k-house-texas-pictures...

2: https://www.hcd.ca.gov/policy-research/accessorydwellingunit...

yeah, its a big range, depending on if most of that stuff is already in place - in which case it has (mostly) already been paid for.

As for the target audience, i think it is people who want a building within a few days.

As I mentioned, I looked at a number of similar systems myself (we have a number of providers of modular or flat-pack buildings in Europe).

I decided against modular, and had a custom built 6x12m 1.5-story log-build. The pricing was similar - but it took months to complete.

If you think new home construction is $150 / sq ft. (in the US), you haven't been keeping up with the times. It was $220 / sq ft. before COVID, now its $300+ for stick built. Modulars are $200-$250. When material prices tripled, the cost got offloaded to the customer, and given the demand hasn't changed.. it probably isn't going to regress to the mean anytime soon.

Are you quoting prices including the cost of the land? Around here there's plenty of new construction being sold at well under $200/sq. ft., and even a fair amount at or under $150 / sq. ft. This is even when you include the price of the land.

Construction prices should not be assumed to be standardized, comparable or equivalent between locations.

agreed - many medium cost places in central NC are still under $200/sqft for new builds, including the land. It's typically a smaller lot than, say, 3-4 years ago, and the construction quality is (continually?) slipping, etc, but location is still a huge factor.

We were close to pulling the trigger with a builder last fall and it was going to be around $180/sqft, and it was a custom build, and included around .8 acre. Lumber and material spike through the winter here has put that on hold (and put a lot of their building on hold) and we might not be able to afford a revised price when things 'get back' to normal. We'd actually had plans sent to an engineering firm who came back and said "you have to redesign this, because some of the foundational materials aren't available, and won't be for at least 6 months". So we couldn't even get a final price had we wanted to, without revising the original plans, and... there was no guarantee that whatever the redesign included would be available at that point (possibly now it would - this was back in March/April?). We're basically in a holding pattern for a bit longer (as are some of the other customers they had lined up).

Supplies, land, labour, demand, location, taxes are some of the things that make it difficult to have a universal construction cost per sq foot.

At a granular level maybe some comparisons are possible.

The original premise of the comment above that because it’s not the same as where I am.. it can’t exist anywhere else is all I was shedding some light on.

Maybe $200. I’d be shocked if there’s still any new builds going for $150. Don’t just trust the “sticker price”. You’re almost always going to pay 25%-50% higher than what the builder advertises.

Even with current materials pricing? I live in a new development and the price went from $180/sqft to $300/sqft for the lowest end builds. We were all set to build our 'forever house' but we'd either spend 50% more or have to build a much smaller house, so we're just going to wait for a bit.

Yep:

https://bit.ly/3w3XyeR https://bit.ly/3hmGBak

There’s a big difference between spec houses and custom houses. I’m building a custom home in King County, WA right now, and it’s almost impossible to build under $300/sqft. And no, doesn’t include cost of land or land preparation costs.

You can build a custom home for the price of a spec home. However it means sticking to the budget instead of upgrading. You can put a $15 light fixture in the bedroom, or a $50 one - spec homes do the former, custom homes all later - it doesn't seem like much but these all add up. The cost to build a custom home and a spec home is nearly the same if you are careful not to do any upgrades. Those upgrades cost money though - if you are planning to live in the house for many years I'd say they are worth it but be aware of what you are getting into.

In my region, the material costs are just ~15% of the total cost to build. It's almost all labor costs.

That depends on the materials. Installing a $600 light fixture is the same labor as a $40 one. Thus a spec home the material cost tends to be a lot less a % of the total costs compared to a custom house. Though some custom changes require more labor, the effort difference between most is 0, and in a few cases slightly negative (if the material cost wasn't higher all spec homes would get these features)

I'm building a MFG home right now on 10 acres we're sitting at... $260 sq ft. That includes everything (home, site work and land)

Where I live the market rate was $100-125/sqft for single-family before the lumber supply squeeze. I think you just happen to live somewhere where inflation effects are ahead of the rest of us.

You can't just generalize like this. There is no standard price, as it is highly dependent on your geographic location.

Before COVID I just built a fully custom house in the OKC area for $142/sq. ft. including all my upgrades (base was $135 including land in a subdivision). Prices have definitely gone up due to lumber and are now in the $155-165/sq. ft. range base including land.

The target customer is people with extra land who would like to put up an ADU on their land to make extra revenue from AirBNB. It could probably pay for itself within a year.

within a year? probably pretty aggressive goal. Cheap case, $50k for the unit, $10k all setups (really really conservative).

that's $5k revenue per month, or ~$165 per night averaged. Yes, some places could rent for ~$200/night, but I doubt you'll have 100% occupancy rate.

If you go for the aggressive goal you’ll probably fail but still get farther than if you pursued the modest goal.

Besides, as an Airbnb rental it would definitely pay for its own mortgage over time.

In my CA county, the newest ADU rule states that it can't be used for short term rentals. Of course, you are grandfathered in if you already had an ADU.

If you can get this contraption on your property (foundation, plumbing hookup, electric, all permit fees.) for under 100k in a desirable area, like the Bay Area, it's a great deal.

If I had a flat lot that was accesssble, I would look into this further.

In my town, even with the protections Gov. Neusome provided, getting an ADU is still a hassle.

In my town, rich people are using ADU's to add square footage to their existing houses. Some are actually successful with getting a variance, if they kiss enough ass. Or, know someone on that council, but I can't prove this alleviation now. I could a few years ago. Variances are over $1000, and until recently very few, like less than 1 percent, were granted. The town kept those fees though. Gotta keep those fees, and fines.

That said, it's still a rich man's game:

1. Council members go over every aspect of your ADU.

2. They even had the gall to ask an older homeowner whom will be living in the ADU. The guy said it would probally be a attendant, but felt he didn't need to discuss his medical history on tv. (San Anselmo tapes their meeting. I guess it's for litigation fend offs? If that's the case, they are not doing themself's any good. They are obviously biased.)

3. The town has a right to tell you what color paint your addition will be.

4. The town tells homeowners to go to their neighbors, and basically beg for their remodel.

5. The town can determine where you place windows.

6. The town can tell you what kind of roof they will approve.

7. The town can tell you what kind of siding to use. Better not use stucco, if they want wood?

8. The town can dictate what plants you use around unit.

(I'm conflating an ADU, and a remodel--a remodel usually requiring a variance. I'm not sure how difficult is is to just put in an ADU. If any town signed off on these modular units, they are quite a buy. I have my doubts.)

I looked into building an adu a few years back, and I can backup most of what you said. At least in California, in an incorporated city.

We worked out that it would cost us $30k in fees, and required spending before we could even dig the footers. Things like a soil test, inspections, variance’s etc.

You can always build an ADU, but it’s a rich mans game. And not really accessible to most people. We calculated our unit to cost roughly $80-90k, and would be almost 2x $/sqft of our home. A remodel made more financial sense, but the above problems still persist.

>We worked out that it would cost us $30k in fees

This is a feature not a bug.

They don't want people who can't writing a 30k check doing development.

They want the old elderly couple of limited means to move out and make way for some yuppie who will pay big taxes, not slap a bottom dollar ADU up so that they can be cared for by live-in relatives.

It's literally the opposite. Old people are way richer and have the time and money to go through the bureaucracy. Also old people are much better connected to local politicians. Yuppies are who they're trying to repel, that's why they make it so hard. Its much more like a college student or yuppie would move into the ADU.

Not all of them are rich, unless you count the value of their 80-years old home. They may have a high net worth but be cash-strapped.

A house is much more liquid of an asset than most people make it out to be. Old folks qualify for reverse mortgages

Please, in California, that “old elderly couple” pays no property taxes and can spend their life blocking housing for new middle class families (and they do, all the time).

>Please, in California, that “old elderly couple” pays no property taxes

That's why they want them out. To replace them with someone who pays big $$$$. What's so hard to get about this?

They don't want them moving their caregiver into an ADU. They don't want them renting their ADU to supplement a fixed income. They want them gone. Since they can't tax them out they just prevent them from making money on their land value (via zoning) and let the COL do the rest.

>and can spend their life blocking housing for new middle class families (and they do, all the time).

The elderly sometimes do this but they are mostly scapegoats. The primary culprits are the 30-something on up through middle aged crowd who still need to work and need property values to remain high long enough that they can cash out of the ponzi scheme and retire to elsewhere.

You know the council doesn't directly receive the tax dollars, right? This is a conspiracy theory.

There are no variances for ADUs. The town is breaking state law. Talk to CaRLA about your options.

Those sound like good things. I live in a place where non of those demands are considered acceptable (or noone bothers to coordinate) and family-home suburbs look absurd. Every house is from another world, like the neighbors didn't exist. Color, style, fence, roof: everything is as random as you can imagine. It's a continuous spatial conflict.

I'm with you on wealthy people who want to build huge houses.

I'm not with you on the guy whom justs wants to remodel, with no increase on footage.

(I don't like the increase in Permit fees either. It prevents basic upkeep on a home. Towns/cities know they can increase revenue by raising fees on anything. That's why we have $270 green righ turn citation. (you can only turn left on a green in certain situations. You need to wait for a green arrow.) If a county can't afford to fund employees, especialy nonessential personnel--fire them. We are not running a charity ward, as they like to say when asked about helping the homeless?)

As far as I'm concerned what I'm talking about doesn't have anything to do with remodeling, unless you're doing something janky.

I am very curious why you would want your house to look exactly like ( or coordinated) with your neighbor? One of the things I felt odd in US is that every house in a sub-division looks like they were made from cookie-cutter. Isn't expressing individuality and having the freedom to make use of your own land in way that suits you more important, as long as it does not impact the living conditions of your surroundings?

Different folks want different things. Though as time goes on more and more houses look different in style in the same neighborhood. There are limits though - there are only so many ways you can do a garage and the required drive from it to the street so that always looks similar.

Most builders of spec houses intentionally buy just a few scattered lots in many different neighborhoods - that way they can build the same house they always build, yet not neighborhood has two houses that look alike. But there are neighborhoods where all houses are built exactly alike...

Copy-paste suburbs is bad too, that's the other extreme. What you want is for the architecture to have awareness of its surroundings and to have it seek harmony, not conflict.

Those sound like good things to you — some people prefer a world where they are free to do as they wish with the property they own, so long as it doesn’t cause a problem for neighbors (I.E. basic maintenance to avoid pests, overgrowth, etc.). I have the opposite take on the neighborhood you described: uniformity is boring, uninspiring, and depressing.

The word uniformity puts a negative spin on the sense of cohesion I'd like to see (like uniforms). What I'm talking about is how a group of friends adjust to each other. They show a sense of togetherness, self-awareness and interplay that leaves a sense of harmony. I'm not talking about a platoon of soldiers in uniform at attention.

The thing is, in the Bay Area, suburbs still look absurd because rich people can build anything by greasing the local bureaucracy enough.

It’s obvious if you’ve ever set foot anywhere south of San Francisco: depressing, no common architectural style, really dumb land use, yet somehow you’d need a million permit to change a window on your house.

It turns that I think it's really nice to be able to distinguish your house from your neighbors in a few words: "white colonial with a red roof, past the brick ranch and the blue Cape Cod".

Having to say "Number 12702" really isn't the same.

>If I had a flat lot that was accesssble, I would look into this further.

This was my thought as well. Seems like a quick and dirty solution to getting a house on an existing lot for immediate move in.

If you're cost conscious then going the longer term route of building your own might be better.

Looks great for movie sets.

Looking at this primarily on a cost per square foot basis seems like the famous slashdot mistake of 2 decades ago of dismissing the iPod because it had less memory than a shitty competitor.

I mean, it's an ADU, designed to be small, but would basically have the same fixed costs (appliances, plumbing, electrical) of a house twice the size, and I'm sure the manufacturers could make a house twice the size with only a marginally increased cost. But keeping it small is obviously ideal for people with limited yard space who are using this as an ADU.

The headline touts cost, I think it's fair to look at the actual cost benefits. If Apple designed the iPod and promoted it based on cost Slashdot would have had a point. Apple never says 'hey look how affordable our product is'.

This headline caught my eye as I'm interested in how the fuck people are going to afford homes in the near future. I am disappointed. The "home" is not somewhere young people can raise a family. It appears to be aimed at home owners who want more home which is entirely uninteresting to me.

I agree with your point, but you should s/cost/memory to make your comparison analogous. Slashdot was dismissing the iPod because it had less storage than a Creative Nomad and other popular players of the time.

Well obviously comparing an iPod to a home is stupid in the first place. An iPod is a consumer product, where a home is a fundamental life component. Most people evaluate a home in terms of size, location, and cost alone. People will move into a dump if it's the right size, location, and cost. In other words, people have been happily living in Creative Nomads for centuries and this "iPod" home is not going to disrupt that in any way at all.

The modular home does not innovate in the way an iPod uncovered a new consumer market. It does not exercise a cost advantage, or size advantage, nor does it out-compete a double-wide in terms of locatability.

It's really just a stylistic advantage that wealthy people will find appealing. So putting "ONLY $50k" in the headline is misleading as that is not the real story here.

>The modular home does not innovate

factory construction alone is a huge innovation - and if they have figured out a way to solve some of the transportation and assembly issues in a creative way they will literally be solving the biggest barrier to factory home construction.

Factory constructed modules are far more consistent and can be of far higher quality that field construction. The biggest factor - your building indoors out of the weather! Factory constructed parts can be built on jigs, making the resulting product a lot higher quality and more consistent. Finally factory construction makes creating specialized tooling that speeds construction while increasing overall quality financially feasible.

The big bugaboo with factory construction is getting the thing from the factory to the job site - and that's something they have a new take on and is what's really exciting. Within the next year or so I will be looking for a new house. If I could get a lot and plop something like that on there I would love it.

> The "home" is not somewhere young people can raise a family.

Thus is such a bizarre complaint. So what, of course not all housing types are for people in all situations. But a primary reason housing costs are so high is there is simply not enough housing. If something like this became popular and added considerable density it would make housing generally more affordable for everyone because currently unused land would have people living on it.

Why is this not a home? This kind of mentality is what is wrong with the US housing market. People have to have houses bigger than they actually need, maximizing square footage, with tons of features don't provide additional living space (fireplaces, walk in closets, mud rooms, giant master baths). ~400sf can be perfectly fine for a small family.

I'm a single dude with two dogs. I currently have five bedroom house - downsizing into something like this is pretty appealing. And yes, my current house is overkill and I ended up in it for a bunch of reasons unique to me - even still the majority of houses in this area have at least three bedrooms and two bathrooms; there just aren't that many smaller houses that are worth the money - which is why people end up upsizing even if it may not be the best fit. I would like something a bit bigger than the studio they are profiling - at least something with two rooms. A separate bedroom would go a long way towards making this very practical for an even bigger swath of people. They are pitching this as additional living space to an existing property.

I hope they don't stop there because I think there is a huge need for simple two bedroom one bath or two bedroom one full and one half bath layouts for single people or couples where you can use the second bedroom as an office or guest room. Not everyone has herds of kids running around. Nor do I need separate formal living or dining rooms. And I absolutely do NOT need two stories. Stairs suck for everyone but the builders who get to pile more square footage onto smaller lots.

This looks to be their first foray into this kind of modular housing. I will be keeping an eye on them - if they do come out with something slightly bigger like I talk about above then I could be very interested. Indeed I'm thinking of moving and there is a decent lot in the community I'm looking at where a micro house like this would be perfect. Just prepare a slab with the utilities and call them in. It's very appealing.

Quality control is the biggest thing that this kind of housing solves and why I'm very keen on them being successful. I've got friends with modular homes where the modules (walls as units, entire smaller rooms, entire sections of the roof) are built in a factory and the results are a LOT more consistent and the houses go up a lot faster too. Speed of construction is significant. My current house was stick framed on site. The main subfloor in my current house was open to the elements for almost a month while it was under construction. I'm surprised my stairs look as good as they do as they were exposed for weeks too. The amount of time it takes before at least the roof sheathing goes up is pretty vexing. I was here every day as the house was being built and I got a pretty good framing crew (I also brought them snacks, water and a few cases of beer at the end of the day - building rapport with people goes a long way) - some of my neighbors who were more hands off had all kinds of structural issues later where stuff was framed wrong and wasn't caught by the building inspectors or their home inspectors. If people even bothered with a home inspector; I found one that used to be a building code inspector and he caught a load bearing wall that was under framed under my dining room - so even though I was scrutinizing the crap out of stuff and was here every day even I missed it. When you have the same components being made in factories - indoors out of the weather, on jigs with specialized tooling, etc. you get dramatically more consistent results.

Factory building modular components removes A TON of variables.

I could see them being able to design customizable and modular homes where you pick the various parts of your home and link them up - want three bedrooms instead of two or one? Pick a different mix of modules. Roofing would be the biggest challenge but there are probably some solutions there with a little creativity.

Next to a house, a car is the 2nd biggest purchase most people make - could you imagine if four different trades showed up over a few weeks with various parts and assembled a car in your driveway? It's kind of nuts when you think about it...

And it’s modular so there’s probably the option to add on in the future for a lower cost. Adding a second story for example.

I agree with the iPod analogy.

No, I don't think they could make it twice the size -- it has to unfold from a standard TEU size!

Why couldn't you place two (or more) modules next to each other?

Certainly beats bringing a pile of raw lumber to a job site and constructing crap from scratch in the open elements for a few months before you get it closed in!

>Who's the target customer for this?

80% people who want the ease of setup of a double wide but really, really, really want to visibly distance themselves from the stereotypes and can afford to pay a premium and give up a lot of square footage to do so. (There's a reason this is on the front page of HN.)

20% developers who will pay big bucks to skirt some local busybody ordinance that says "no trailer homes".

Bingo. Same as "tiny homes". They're not solving a problem without an existing—possibly even superior—solution. They're just solving it in a way that doesn't offend one's class self-image. Modular homes, prefabs, trailer homes, RVs, all already exist and have for a long time—but they're associated with he wrong sorts of people.

people who don't think about that, but rush to sign up probably.

The first idea that strikes me (aside form the obvious in-law apt addition) is to use this approach for the homeless.

It's been shown that the best solution for many (non-mentally-ill) homeless is to literally provide a home. E.g., merely the fact of falling on enough hardships to lose a home and having no fixed address is a major impediment to getting a new job and becoming a homed, taxpaying resident.

Yet I've read repeatedly that California is spending net $1 million per home to create low-standard living spaces for the homeless. This is more than a 10X improvement in these costs.

In London, they used shipping container homes to house homeless people on unused local government-owned land. Pretty much instantly stories were in the media about how the conditions were "inhuman" (bizarrely, from people who had chosen to illegally immigrate to the UK from France, and complained that they had a nice house in Sudan or wherever).

So I think the reality of these schemes is often...difficult because they are a non-ideal solution to a non-ideal problem (and unf, the alternative in the UK is sheltered housing with huge levels of crime, B&B which cost taxpayers £150-200/day, or council housing that is worth £500k-1m...again, there are no real solutions here).

EDIT: btw, I should add...I have actually lived in a shipping container, I went to a boarding school and part of the school was being re-developed so a small number of proportion of the group had to spend a term in converted containers...no issue. It was totally fine. These kind of housing solutions are used pretty extensively in mining/oil and gas, and they are quite comfortable.

Indeed! there are all kinds of advances being made in everything from container homes, modular homes, "tiny homes", yurts, and more.

Although they are obviously not spacious mansions, they can be highly functional and comfortable, and obviously WAAAY better than nothing.

If I were in a situation where it was that or nothing, I'd be grateful for a small spot to call home (but then I decided to live for one summer job in a tent in a secluded spot outside of town instead of getting an apartment, and it was very enjoyable and functional).

Sure, though some of that relies on your city having large parcels of empty land to situate them on. And these are much bigger and nicer than the ones we recently rolled out here in Portland[1] but cost almost 10X more, so you'd hope they are.

1: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/tiny-home-pods-help-p...

The main problem with homeless people is not a lack of housing, but that the vast majority of them want to be homeless. That this is even a controversial statement to many is the real tragedy holding back "solving" the homeless problem. In this area the only time there are shelter problems are when it gets too cold for them to realistically stay outside. And yes, the shelters do provide them with networking opportunities, fixed addresses, services to ensure they are clean and have good clothes for job interviews, etc. The majority are not interested. For a wide variety of reasons (and no, not all of them are healthy reasons) they like being independent and not tied to anyone or anything.

Simply providing someone a home and trying to stuff them in there is only a minuscule part of the overall issue.

I see everything starting at $300 / sqft. Last time I got a quote for $160/ft I called the guy 2 months later and he said he redid his construction business to focus on kitchen/bathroom remodels.

Anyway, the site work for something is not going to be less than $50k. 50k if you're very lucky or are a contractor yourself.

A lot of the modular home type solutions seem to encounter the same thing.

Cost savings on the surface but when things come together they're just not there.

A lot of the actual prefabricated style solutions that do save money seem to be small changes within your traditional systems.

The real cost savings is they build exactly the same 4 floor plans over an over again, and very little modifications are allowed. They then have jigs to cut the pieces to the exact size needed. Instead of a carpenter with a saw measuring a 2x4, they cut everything to the exact size needed without using a tape measure.

Tiny houses have a large cost per square foot. One of the early forces in tiny houses remarked that his house was simultaneously the smallest in his city and the most expensive per square foot.

Part of it is the cube square law's little brother, the "square linear law?" You have proportionately more wall for the enclosed area. On top of that you still have the expensive bits… bathrooms and kitchens.

Yes this is true. $/ft2 is only really useful to realtors. Most home shoppers probably understand things more like cost per living space (rooms)

At that point, if you have the land for it, why not just go for an "efficiently sized" home. Like 500-700 sqft.

It's a big waste of energy to cool and heat a house bigger than you really need, an ethical problem in this day and age (global warming).

True, although a lot of smaller houses/tiny homes will use mini splits for their heating/cooling, which are significantly more energy efficient than central AC units. Insulation is also relatively cheap. Solar is an option to offset it as well, although extra insulation is a much easier and cost effective option here (at least in the short term).

Most houses that are classified as tiny are in the 200-400sqft area, so while a "small home" is about twice as large at 500-700sqft, we gotta remember that most houses are 1500sqft anyways, so we are still coming out ahead.

Plus, I think it's much much easier to convince the average joe to live in a 500-700sqft home than in a 200-400sqft home.

This is their first unit. If they keep going it sounds like they are planning to offer homes with more rooms. I hope so - If they had a two bedroom (so I can use the other bedroom as an office) one bath I'd be all over it.

And here is the prime example of perverse incentives when it comes to housing - particularly in the US. Only focusing on acquisition cost.

How about cost of utilities per square foot over 10 years? My money is on the smaller, vastly better constructed smaller home than traditional build to minimum code mass market crappy tract housing that dominates much of American suburbia.

Who lives in one house for the majority of their life any more? It's pretty rare. In my development it was only a few thousand more to double the insulation and convert to more efficient HVAC - less than half the people building a new house did it. Heck it was $750 to insulate the garage - maybe 1/3 did - you can tell because the people who did got insulated garage doors with windows. A neighbor across the street bought a house where the previous owner didn't insulate the garage. The master bedroom is over the garage. I asked him if his master bedroom got cold in the winter - he got wide eyed and said that as a matter of fact it did. I pointed out the insulation difference - he had a buddy come over and help him pull down the drywall in the garage, they insulated all the walls and added more to the ceiling and re-drywalled and the difference was night and day. Building codes tightened up quite a bit in 2010 so I think they force builders to do that insulation for everything now, but that's just one example of how people care more about granite countertops than paying attention to core infrastructure that could impact a building for it's entire life.

A pithier way to put it - much of your square footage discrepancy is from people sacrificing short term cost for long term costs we all pay for.

And then $80k to install between new electrical box, getting raked over the coals by your local water/sewer district, having to build a foundation, stairs from door, etc., etc.

And your property taxes will go up.

This comment deserves to be higher. People just think you can put these anywhere but you need water connection, sewer connection, electrical, telephone line/cable, permits and red tape, by the time you're done it'll be double. And I don't think these solve any of our housing affordability problems, the land in a desirable area will be far more expensive than what's on top.

So my question is, if you had a piece of land, concrete foundation, electrical, water and sewer connection, is it possible to get something better for 50k?

is it possible to get something better for 50k?

If you are willing to do a lot of work yourself and value your time a $0 and aren't in a hurry, probably. Otherwise, this looks pretty good.

>If you are willing to do a lot of work yourself and value your time a $0 and aren't in a hurry, probably.

I wish I could vote you up more than once. If they are taking advantage of economies of scale they should be able to obtain for higher quality materials (and in looking over their materials this is not stuff they are buying at Home Depot). Couple that with the advantages of building all this stuff indoors, sheltered from the weather while under construction and that they can afford to create specialized jigs and tooling to not only speed the construction time but also produce far more consistent and higher quality results they should be able to do things that you simply can't do on site in the field.

Transportation of prefabbed housing has always been the major issue, which is why they spend so much time talking about how they are solving that :)

Absolutely possible. 50k for a 400 SF house that's built to modern code given those things you mentioned are already in place. To be specific, that's a full kitchen, with decent appliances, a full bath, 1 bedroom (though you _could_ fit 2 in 400 SF), a living room and some storage space.

Not that it helps to write checks you have zero way of cashing, but we just built this: https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR/comment/2099542904. We're still working on the interior, but this design, if we increased its size to 400 SF, and given the things you mention being in place, could be had for 50k or less even, and it would be built better than most homes in the US.

Just one guy's take, but my friend and I are trying to realize the dream of building more affordable housing that doesn't compromise on quality and design. We're just starting with this one project, though, so obviously a long way to go!

>is it possible to get something better for 50k?

Theoretically, yes. In practice, finding a builder who wants the job is pretty impossible.

We need a better way to distribute land than the one we use now (=based on money and inheritance).

This is the problem which smart people should be working on, not some prefab home.

People should be free to buy the land they want with the money that they've earned or otherwise legally acquired. It's just a basic principle. The principal below that principle, is that you have autonomy over your own body, and your own labor, and you have a choice as to how you apply. And you have a right to the fruits of your labor and creativity and entrepreneurship. And you can spend those fruits, and all the ways that are legal, including buying land, including buying expensive land in desirable places. And that kind of land is expensive. Not everybody can buy it.

Land is different from consumer goods.

How would you feel if companies started to divide the available drinking water or breathable air? That rich people controlled who can drink or breathe? And that inheritance determined your odds of survival, not based on genes but on access to basic resources?

It is OK if hard work is rewarded with money.

However, it is not OK if people use that money against the rest of us, who made different life choices.

Since land is a limited resource, there is a problem there.

Back in 1600 someone declared they owned all the land in a valley. Their descendants still own it, or have benefited from selling it off at various points.

It seems wrong that a decision 400 years ago has bearing on people today.

In the UK it's even worse -- much of the land is still owned by the families that were mates with William the Conquerer back in 1066. About 1500 years ago the king fell out with some landholders (monasteries) and confiscated it, giving it to his mates, who still own it.

Land should not be owned, it should be rented from the people. You improve its value? Great, you shouldn't be charged for that, but the unimproved value of that land is something that should be of benefit to society as a whole.

Better then the market?

When people say “we” must “distribute”, it usually rather means that the state should take with force from owners - where oneself is often excluded.

The most well known example of implanting land redistribution on a large scale is known as Holodomor.

“Man plans, God laughs”. It is prideful vanity to think one can plan the economy better than free people who care for their own.

There is no shortage of cheap land. There is however a desperate shortage of land on which you can legally build. And that of course is due to zoning regulations.

There's a lot of buildable land. It's just not highly desirable. The land is good, and green, and the neighbors are agreeable, but it's not close to a major city.

EDIT: Case in point, my first purchase in 2017 was 5 acres of buildable land 30 minutes from a tertiary city, with an existing 900 SF manufactured home and 400 SF garage. Total price: $30,000

One of the only real bright stars from the COVID fiasco of 2020 - large swaths of people realizing they can work from home as effectively, if not more, from home. I think we are on the cusp of seeing a population migration that will make the post-WWII suburbanization move look tame in comparison.

And I think we will all be FAR better off for it!

What if we flip the problem around, and figure out how to distribute high quality lifestyles, like the ones offered in the big cities, to the outskirts where land is plentiful and cheap?

I was totally about to agree with your post based on the first part (needing a better way to distribute land). But I don't feel that idea and the idea of prefab homes are mutually exclusive.

I have worked on this problem but stopped because I need to build an app. I wish to continue.

Your estimate is way too high. At least in most parts of the country. I know because I’m building right now in a mid-priced coastal metro.

A small monolithic slab foundation is maybe $8k at most. Running buried electric on a 20 foot setback is $2k. Water and sewer lines are $3k. The municipal water and sewer tap are $5k total. And the county capacity fee is $4k. Altogether these ancillary “hookup” costs are $20k, and that’s for a “get it done fast” job at a period of labor and material shortages.

I wish some of these interior designers would check out European or Japanese apartments for the layout. You could do a lot better (and I would never want to have to use the sink proposed in that clip on a day-to-day basis). That A/C location is just plain wrong (the kitchen is where you'll spend the least time). And that shelf splitting the living room + the bedroom? What?

Meanwhile you have like... storage for plates for 20 people as if you could ever feed more than 3 people at once. And that double-door fridge... I imagine that if you're in a more rural area it's more necessary but there's a lot better choices here if you are actually trying to make a livable space, instead of a place that offers good shots. This looks a lot like a "set up your own AirBnB" thing. So much so I wouldn't be surprised if AirBnB made a strategic investment in this.

Similar concept in Norway with better interior design I think. Some pictures if you scroll a bit down. https://www.lampholmen.no/rom-for-a-leve/lampholmen--mikrohu...

> This looks a lot like a "set up your own AirBnB" thing. So much so I wouldn't be surprised if AirBnB made a strategic investment in this.

In another video they talk about how initially they are targeting the recently lessened restrictions on backyard units in CA, so yeah, AirBnB and people looking to rent out granny units are the current target I think.

> Meanwhile you have like... storage for plates for 20 people as if you could ever feed more than 3 people at once.

Assuming you can't have outdoor furniture and and host people outside? One of the benefits of a small house might be more usable outdoor area. In Northern California, you generally get at least 3/4 of the year with good weather you can be outside fairly comfortably, and you get quite a bit more in Southern California. I've heard Arizona is quite nice all the time except for the summer months.

That AC location easily covers the entire main room. You could put it on any wall and it would be effective in that tiny of a space. If you put it on the opposite wall now you potentially have plumbing on the front of your house, or longer line sets to tuck the exterior unit around the corner - increasing complexity and cost.

As for the kitchen I know this may shock a lot of people but there are ways to feed yourself that don't involve restaurants, take out or delivery. If anything I'd prefer a slightly larger stove/oven even if it intruded into the other space more. I enjoy cooking for myself so a decently sized fridge and pantry storage is more than superficial. Heck there are two story four bedroom houses that were built in the 70's around here that have similarly sized kitchens - it's insane when most RVs have better kitchens these days.

I do agree the TV shelf thing seems more like an opportunity to be clever with a rotating TV but that's a relatively minor quibble - the rest of the layout is actually quite functional.

This company is popular for being the company chosen by Elon Musk[1]. He's supposedly living in one in Starbase, Texas. I guess it's also a study to understand the dynamics of living in a small space as any dream of inhabiting some other planet passes necessarily by the adaptation of a lifetime in a tiny space.

[1]https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-50k-house-texas-pictures...

> I guess it's also a study to understand the dynamics of living in a small space

How out of touch must one be to even consider this? News flash: the vast majority of mankind lives in what a North American would consider "small places" [0].

Same goes for population density - North American and Australian urban sprawl is largely unknown in most areas of the world. If you want to "study the dynamics" of living closely together in tightly packed spaces, just move to Hong Kong or Singapore for a year.

[0] https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e7b2a43103...

I'm talking about him. I didn't say it was a scientific study about the world. He, one of the richest men in the world, is experiencing living in a small space with houses from this company. This company has also demo videos about houses on mars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvtJPDpAY7c

I really want one of these and I don't know why. I'm struggling to come up with uses for this other than for AirBNB style short term rental places or pre-planned communities for helping homeless people get back on their feet or something. Doesn't seem as portable as a mobile home, and doesn't really have enough of a rustic look for me to want to consider this as a cabin.

I feel like I'm missing a big use case here, but unless I planned to live in this full time, what are the benefits over buying a sprinter van or something.

In one of the videos on the site it is explained that they are currently targeting people who want to build "backyard houses" or "ADUs" that are popular in some places like in California. Family members can live in them or you can rent them out, provided it has a foundation, power, plumbing etc.

Probably a way to industrialize it a bit. Run a management company that leases these out, handles site prep and paperwork and offer the homeowner a buyout option after a few years.

Add an Airbnb service on top that markets, cleans and maintains it for those that want to dip their toes into it.

Then start stacking them on top of each other until something gives.

To me it's a modern cabin. And a place to live while a primary residence is being built. And then it'll be a place for visitors to stay.

I absolutely love this, and I really want one. Have you sold many/any yet? What stage of development is the company at?

Also, what sort of time frame can I hope to just order one and have it show up in a month or two?

"Starter home" is the niche this fits. It wasn't all that long ago that sub-1000 square foot houses were a normal thing people bought and lived in until they could afford (and had a reason to) to move to a house better suited to support spouse/kids/etc.

I also want one of these, because I want starter homes to be that again, not just an impediment to scrape off of the lot to make way to build the largest house that zoning allows. It's nice in some ways that ADU options like this seem to be prying open that niche again.

The UK is full of these in holiday parks, either as homes for middle class retirees downsizing to a nice little community in the country (the economics aren't quite as impressive when you consider the annual charge for the park land and facilities...) or as holiday lodges, including holiday lodges exclusively used as summer/weekend retreats Technically these are all "mobile" but they won't move after delivery.

examples: https://www.tingdene.co.uk/residential-park-homes/our-homes

Someone I know is looking into building tiny home communities for the impoverished. He has not been impressed by the available resources.

Overwhelmingly, these tiny/modular homes are hype. If you want to build a tiny home (or really any home), do it with 2x6s and nails. You can get cheaper roughing with rammed earth, CMUs, etc, but finishing is more expensive.

Timber homes at that size can almost compete on price (because most of your members are under 12'), but some of the new energy saving building codes are not timber frame friendly.

You can buy a prefab SIP home, but generally it will always be cheapest to just build the thing in place. Especially if you are planning on building more than one at a time.

If your friend would like to crank out multiple tiny homes, they should look for a company nearby that has automated Light Gauge Steel Framing machines. An example of a manufacturer of such machines is https://www.framecad.com/

Once your design is done, they can easily spit the parts out in an automated fashion, the parts form the wall and roofing panels. The panels are easily trucked to the site and erected.

Not sure if you have in-depth knowledge about this so I can avoid doing a deep dive on the linked site, but what's the cost of something like this? If you were going to do a 20x20 footprint, what would those 4 walls cost if you assume 3 penetrations for a window on each wall and a door on the 4th wall?

Totally get it if you say "go to the website" but if you're involved with one of these companies maybe you could answer that more readily than I can figure it out.

Timber prices have quadrupled last few months.

There is an economy of scale and efficiency in building large prefab pieces of a house on a factory, as opposed to the ad-hoc local conditions. Machines can do a lot on a factory which they cannot do on a traditional construction site, and human labor is not cheap in the U.S., especially if you want licensed contractors to build a house according to the code.

Also, these homes don't look the cheapest edifices you can produce. A part of their value proposition is deployment speed. IDK if it's an important differentiator for that market segment.

I also suppose that such homes can be rolled back nearly as efficiently as they are deployed, several times, so they can serve as mobile homes for disaster relief, construction in remote parts, etc.

> There is an economy of scale and efficiency in building large prefab pieces of a house on a factory, as opposed to the ad-hoc local conditions.

This is only true if you are building 1 home. If you are building 25 or 100 homes, on-site construction is the way to go.

My idea is that you cannot have a huge machine that produces a whole wall in one go on a construction site of a single-family home, but you can have it on a factory. And the machine can work like 10x as fast as human builders.

Of course, to be economic, that machine should produce these walls day in day out without much interruption, hence the economy of scale.

Putting walls up is incredibly cheap, that's like the least interesting thing to automate. Plus it'd be hard (read: expensive) to move them from the factory to the site, and it'd be hard to get them into place when they're on site.

For things that are actually hard to build or easy to move, like cabinets or roof trusses, we're already building them in factories

Only if you are building the same wall all the time. As soon as some decides they want their house to not look like the one next door and thus makes some "trivial" changes your machine can't make the house anymore.

That is why you can't scale: people want their house to be unique.

This is exactly what my friend and I have been thinking. People are being priced out of even the cheaper, though still desirable, mountain and other rural communities in the western US. I strongly feel like tiny houses are a good solution for some folks who don't feel like they need 300-400 SF per person in their home. And they can be built to extremely rigorous standards for _relatively_ little cost.

As I've said elsewhere in the thread, we're building one right now (https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR) and our hope is that this somehow is something we can reproduce, potentially on a cheap parcel of land, where people who can't otherwise afford a conventional house can afford these. We're definitely thinking it's for the not-quite impoverished, though, because when people have zero money/jobs you're relying on government to step in and fund/subsidize.

Of course lots of questions about entitlements for tiny house communities; affordability when financing isn't available; etc., but gotta start somewhere. Seems like there's a path to providing some long-lasting shelter for folks who otherwise would have to opt for single or double-wides or, worse, end up unhoused.

I have a 40 acre plot in Maine and ordered a "camp" hand built by Amish craftsmen using decent timber for 12K delivered. Granted, I have to build out the interior but when all is done I'll be into it for < 25K. https://themainelandstore.com/camps-sheds-for-sale/

I don't think it compares that well to a static caravan. The price here likely includes VAT (20%)

https://www.abiuk.co.uk/our-collection/the-roecliffe/

Aren’t caravans quite poorly insulated so if you heat it year round and don’t have extremely mild weather like most of UK then you’ll waste a lot of money keeping warm (or cool)? The attraction of a modular home to me would be that it can have proper construction with heavy triple glass windows and so on.

I can't tell you the specifics. I know from holidays that they have improved a lot. The newer ones have much better insulation and double glazing. Sure, they are geared towards a UK climate.

Every static caravan I've been in has been a horrible building. The walls are paper thin, the whole thing shakes when you walk around, it's poorly insulated, the furnishings are cheap.

I'm not sure how much of that requirement comes from weight limits due to road transportation vs cost cutting vs target market, but those things are just horrible to spend time in. Houses need to feel solid.

Dunno why you are getting voted down but you are spot on. Mobile homes have MANY severe compromises to keep the weight down that this solution does not have to worry about.

It's laughable that people think they are even remotely comparable.

There is so much marketing to the effect of "millennials love tiny homes!" I can't help but think if regular homes were even slightly affordable for the average 30-something, there would be no tiny home trend.

I don't think so. I'm currently in a 2800 square foot home full of stupid shit like a formal living and dining room that get hardly used. But it's trendy, "everybody wants it" and so that's all you get unless you are willing to be your own general contractor and oversee building a completely custom home. The only people benefiting from two story houses or formal living room/dining rooms are the builders and realtors that get more for money because of the padded extra square footage. I'm getting ready to relocate - and I will more than likely be targeting an older, more reasonably sized home this time. Ideally I'd love to find something with good bones that just needs updating - drywall may get cheap again someday - if it does rip it off, run all the networking and other cables I want, upgrade the insulation then re-drywall. Get a better than "new" house the way the vast majority of them are half-assed constructed to minimum code :p

How about we bring back Sears' prefab housing?

The standardization in the building trade didn't exist back in the Sears catalog days. For example, 2x4s come in 8ft lengths, using 16 on center studs, 8 2x4s will provide 8 foot of wall, and two sheets of drywall will cover it. And you can order all of the cabinetry, trim, shower enclosures, etc in a form that's ready for installation.

A Sears prefab home would not be cheaper today because the inefficiencies that they solved in the early 1900s are no longer a problem. That, and it's infeasible for a person to construct their own house anymore, given building codes and such.

Cookie cutter homes can be ridiculously cheap to build if done correctly. In really large developments, it's common for teams to move from house to house every day. Almost like an assembly line. This cuts down on a tremendous amount of wasted time.

> it's infeasible for a person to construct their own house anymore, given building codes and such

What has changed that this is no longer possible any more?

You need to be a licensed plumber to touch anything that connects to the public water supply. While there is nothing hard about plumbing, doing something stupid could poison the whole town and so towns are paranoid.

For everything else, you can do all the work yourself if you have time. I've done framing as a job so I have the experience to build a wall about as fast as any professional crew. I do my own electrical work but it takes me much longer than a real electrician (it passes intersection, though I'm more likely to need to fix something and get a second inspection). I can plan and schedule all the contractors for anything I don't want to do myself, but my inexperience means I would need to pad the schedule a lot more than a general contractor (and the fact that I'm not a regular customer means I'm not top of their list to get my job done)

Each city and sometimes inspectors have their own codes. Sometimes they are good things (going beyond the basic codes), sometimes the inspector is just making things to enforce even though there is no engineering reason for that.

There is no reason you can't build your own house (except plumbing). However it will take a lot of effort. Professionals are up on all the codes and the latest tricks and so will be a lot faster.

>doing something stupid could poison the whole town and so towns are paranoid.

Why not have a backflow preventer at the mains and call it a day? I get electricians in a way, but plumbing... eh.

There is more to it than that. The trades are a huge protection racket, and the municipalities are in on it. Yes, there are aspects of specialized knowledge where an actual tradesman provides significant value - but a lot of the bureaucracy exists to favor the incumbents, not to necessarily ensure you are getting a better or safer product.

Insert the George Carlin quote about clubs here...

>Professionals are up on all the codes and the latest tricks and so will be a lot faster.

"Professionals" also get preferential treatment from municipal governments. I'm pretty sure the only thing my local building inspector did was sign paperwork - good thing I found an actual home inspector that had a construction background because he found electrical, plumbing and framing issues so glaring it's obvious the local building inspectors "inspected" from the curb only :p

My parents built the house I grew up in and over the years I've helped several friends build their own houses and the amount of trivial crap they had to put up from drunk on power building inspectors is nuts by comparison. It's an utter farce. The problem is very few people will ever experience it, so it's easy to not even realize what's going on.

Until a large condo suddenly collapses in the middle of the night :p

Different cities have different inspectors. However you should take up local politics if professionals are getting better treatment for crap work.

That said, my experience with inspectors is they know who are the good ones and who are the bad ones. The bad ones get everything looked over closely. The good ones get a close look once in a while, but if the inspector is busy a quick look is all they will get. Trust comes from the inspectors experience in this case though, something that one off homeowners obviously haven't earned.

Well, I said infeasible, not impossible.

You can do a large chunk of the work yourself (with a crew). But utility hookups are a no-no without a license. And you'll probably need to hire a crane operator at some point. Plus, there are a ton of building codes in regions that are different from other regions. So you'd better get those all right unless you enjoy rework.

would be pretty expensive if made up to code.

Also, something many of us are forgetting about: value of house is mostly not a structure. Having this house on 1/8 acre lot in the middle of desert would be horrible. You need water, sewer, power, internet, grocery stores, farms, parks, hospitals, gyms, coffee shops, theaters, airports. Structure alone wouldn't provide for this. It's the access to all the infrastructure that makes home so valuable

Cover [0] also has a similar business based on this. They're focused on ADUs too, but their intent seems to be to scale up over time. They're starting at $81k.

I really want a modular home ala Japan in the US, but it just doesn't seem like this market exists yet. It's much faster and efficient to build modules and assemble them onsite than it is to build "from scratch" each time.

[0]: https://buildcover.com/

Surprised no one here has mentioned that Elon Musk is living in a Boxabl house in Austin, TX. This has totally perplexed the people who follow his every move.

https://www.chron.com/news/space/article/elon-musk-texas-hou...

I think that he might possibly be doing his homework. Can you imagine a Boxabl house outfitted with a solar roof, a Tesla battery and a Starlink dish?

I could see people having a remote cottage not hooked into the power line. I just know that Elon Musk doesn't do stuff without a reason.

that would be cool, I would buy that

"I think that he might possibly be doing his homework."

I believe you're dead on, this guy's an absolute baller of a CEO (running 3 totally game-changing startups) and completely immerses himself in his work and research.

“The coronavirus panic is dumb” -Elon Musk (March 6th 2020)

Everyone has the rights to behave as an idiot, including Musk. To his partial defense, he minimized the risks, got Covid, then it seems he changed his stance on the matter. A bit late, but better than never.

"To be clear, I do support vaccines in general & covid vaccines specifically. The science is unequivocal. In very rare cases, there is an allergic reaction, but this is easily addressed with an EpiPen." — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 7, 2021

I admire your admiration of him, it's a sign you haven't reached the level of cynicism required to classify him in the 'snake oil salesman' category yet.

Snake oil salesmen do not send self landing rockets to the ISS.

He may have a bit more hype and may be manipulative in some ways, but you have to admit that he has given a good amount of technological progress to the world.

Would you think the big car companies would scramble for electric cars if not for Tesla?

“Would you think the big car companies would scramble for electric cars if not for Tesla?”

Yes, I would. Technological progress gives lawgivers room to tighten emission rules, and that’s what drives car makers. Tesla sped up that process, but not by much, IMO.

I also don’t think ‘scramble’ is the right word. Tesla was (maybe even is: they make a profit from selling emission rights, and a big buyer says they don’t need them anymore. See https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-emissions-credits-sale...) wiling to sell at a loss in order to get market share and brand awareness. The big companies need neither, so they stepped in later.

I doubt it. The car companies have/had outsourced almost all of their manufacturing other than their core IP, engine production. If it didn't have an engine in it, it wouldn't have been built. They would have produced hybrids, but I doubt we would have seen any pure-EVs outside of hobbiest production or limited run hypercars by today.

Eventually maybe, but Tesla vastly accelerated that schedule.

Would you think the big car companies would scramble for electric cars if not for Tesla?

I feel some people give Tesla too much credit on this one. When I arrived in the UK (3 years ago), there were Nissan Leafs and Renault Zoes everywhere. It was rare that I saw a Tesla. Tesla's are much more common, now, but so are many other models. I would not say that Tesla has driven the market at all, here.

SpaceX sent a self landing rocket to the ISS. CEOs matter, but Musk seems to consistently get more credit for his company's successes than other leaders. His reality distortion field that enables him to hire very strong engineers is his biggest boon.

Musk is a lot more involved in day to day operations at SpaceX than a lot of people seem to understand. Shotwell on division of labor with Musk:

> The way Elon and I share the load, he focuses on development. He's still very highly engaged in the day-to-day operations, but his focus is on development. He was the lead on Starlink, and I started shifting my focus to Starlink around late spring, early summer of last year. Elon’s focus in that time was moving to Starship, that is his primary focus at SpaceX. It doesn't mean he's not thinking about the company on a day-to-day basis, but his emphasis is to get the Starship program to orbit.

Even if SpaceX was his only company, he still is just one person. I'm not talking about Musk specifically, but CEOs generally. In almost no circumstance does it make sense to assign engineering success to a CEO in the way it was done above. CEOs are responsible for hiring executives and setting and enforcing vision and values. That's important but it isn't the whole story.

What I understand is that Musk is very skilled at taking highly technical decisions, that have huge risks and financial implications.

Take the example of the decision to re use rocket engines. Its a highly technical decision that has huge financial repurcussions and essentially the whole basis for the low cost business model of SpaceX.

It would not be surprising if there were similar stories from Ramesh Balwani about the division of labor with Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos. SpaceX is no Theranos, but you shouldn't reach that conclusion from stories from the C-suite.

Elon Musk has repeatedly over and over made "bet the company" product decisions at all his companies. You aren't that lucky that many times without being able to skillfully grok technical things.

SolarCity failed. Investor fraud, not luck, saved it.

Elon delivered on his promise of using reusable rockets which other govts and billionaires could not do, how is that snake oil?

Hyperloop - snake oil

Crypto - snake oil

Colonization of Mars - (hilarious) snake oil

Starlink - (subsidized) snake oil

Tesla stock - snake oil

Mini rescue submarine - snake oil

Tesla cars from an ownership perspective - snake oil

etc.

You might find this interesting

Debunking Elon Musk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-FGwDDc-s8

I wouldn't be surprised if he was living in some space pod. Musk Elon is such a weird man.

My guess is that a man known for sleeping at the office is literally doing just that except with a bed instead of on the floor.

There's a video from Boxabl pitching their stuff to Elon https://twitter.com/i/status/1367548452633206789

The pitch kind of makes sense - he's trying to have a lot of people work at Starbase but there isn't much housing there so they could sort it by installing a lot of Boxabl units. Also the things are high tech made in a factory which fits a bit with the Tesla model.

I imagine he's trying one out for a bit before maybe ordering a bunch for the other workers. See also Teslarati https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-50k-house-texas-pictures...

I imagine the margin isn't there for it, but I wish someone would target the <= 120 square foot market. You would think the cost to build such structure would be less because it doesn't need to pass any code and has less features, but for some reason there doesn't seem to be anything between a $2000 tool shed from Home Depot and $45,000 options from companies like Boxabl. The closest I've found is Bunkie which has a Basecamp model but even at its base feature set is still almost $30k when including delivery.

I'd have to guess the market just isn't there for it, maybe everyone else just doesn't mind dealing with the building codes and permit requirements for larger units?

There's an economic problem with well made smaller homes - they have all the detail of a larger home without the square footage. Hence the cost per square foot is much larger than you would expect.

This ! What I learned during the construction of my home is that the structure is really only one part of a construction. It’s a lot of raw material of course, but relatively cheap one and the construction of the structure is pretty fast. What takes months and a lot of money is just everything else : networks, windows & doors, walls, finishing …

I’m in the middle of trying to figure this out with a friend by building an off-grid tiny house and this is pretty accurate. With our labor at a nominal rate (30/hr) it’s coming out to about $250 per square foot. We think on the next one we might be able to get down to $200 maybe $175.

Interior is not done yet, but exterior is: https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR

That 250 psf includes everything you need to live from the get go except you have to fill the 50-gallon water tank.

I’ve heard an aphorism to wit: length is cheap, corners are expensive.

There’s only going to be two types of customers for that. The Uber rich who can afford spending multiple thousands of dollars in what’s effectively a private hotel room you can install wherever you have land, and the extremely poor who will live in them because it is the maximum they can afford.

The negative PR from the latter set of clients can’t possibly be worth how much margin they can get from the former, especially when hotels exist in every city, town, and village.

There’s still probably a market for something that size from people who can afford 30k+ to handle the static costs of building a luxury cabin in the country and are still price conscious enough to want to limit how much they spend on building.

It’s extremely unlikely that there’s a market for deplorable houses this size that also fits in a middle class budget like 2k would

> The Uber rich who can afford spending multiple thousands of dollars in what’s effectively a private hotel room

In the vast majority of the US, these are called "cabins" and it is very common for people with very modest means to build them for recreation. Outside of urban areas, you don't have to be rich to own land.

Don't know why you're down voted. I've looked into my fair share of tiny houses and vanlife builds, and they all have one thing in common: it's either amateuristic (don't get me wrong, I love it, but the quality and looks ain't there), or it's superdeluxe comfy/beautiful and completely forgetting about all the hassle around it. I mean, one needs land and permission to put a 'house' somewhere.

There seems nothing in between. So now I'm looking into bicycle caravans. One can just put 'm in the woods, nobody finds out (and if they do, so what), it costs basically nothing, you can fix it yourself, etc. I might post my current bicycle caravan project to HN soon.

The problem is your assumption that "it doesn't need to pass any code".

It varies with location but in general you first need a Building Permit, then a Certificate of Occupancy" before you can live in it.

And of course for either, the dwelling has to meet local codes.

Incorrect. This is not an "assumption". Though I'll admit my comment is U.S. specific. Read up on your state and county laws, there are many states and counities in the U.S. where structures <= 120 square feet require no permits, no certificates, no regulation at all.

Also no one mentioned living in one.

RV's & trailers are right @ 120sq ft usually. Pick 1 from any of the few manufacturers and enjoy life.

There is even such a thing as a "destination trailer": https://www.keystonerv.com/rv-type/destination-trailers

which almost exactly describes what you are looking for.

Price: $30->50k brand new. Used models cheaper.

Look for wood cabin kits, something like this:

https://bzbcabinsandoutdoors.net/log-cabin-kits/escape/

Not well insulated but cute and cheap and makes a cozy little spot you can escape to. Obviously not for living, but what do you want for 120sqft?

Those Bunkies are all well under 120sqft and wouldn't need permits here in Solano county. Actually they could be a bit bigger; I'm looking for literal 12' x 10'.

There's been similar concepts in Europe for decades: https://www.alucasa.com/viviendas-residenciales

This kind of thing is great, though for areas where homes are expensive it's clear they'll be made illegal to remove competition for the housing cartel.

Reminds me of the Stacks in Ready Player One ...

Sure, maybe these are good as temporary accommodations ... maybe a garden shed or home office ... but take the new-home glaze off of them, and add the patina of life, and these will eventually be classified as slum housing.

I live in So cal and this is a super good idea. What many people don't know is that the cities have been big advocates for building Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU). These are smaller homes that are basically built in people's backyards. It is seen as a way to increase housing units without doing any significant rezoning of traditional zoning.

I was looking on google maps satellite view and noticed that the vast majority of homes with large backyards do not have an ADU so the potential here for investment is pretty significant I would say.

We are also in a housing crisis and rents are soaring.

How does this compare to mobile homes in terms of price and use case? Many mobile homes are only "mobile" in the sense that it's delivered and installed somewhere - 90% are never moved again, because it's costly and complicated to do so.

The modular idea is neat, but I'm not sure how practical it is, and there are laws in many states that prevent you from moving homes without a licensed professional.

It looks like the delivery crane does the unboxing, so I would presume the delivery would be done by some one licensed to move it. I think this is also not considered mobile.

Not sure how you would even have this as a "take out" option.

Dunno if the "mobile home industry" is actually useful to compare against anymore; they seem to be dedicated to selling the cheapest possible crap as an excuse to rope people into horrible financial schemes. "no down payment with land" is pushing some deals that'd make payday lenders feel moral qualms.

Not that mobile homes were ever a place to find quality construction, but now it feels like outright fraud.

Not bad price, although doesn't seem to exist at the moment, it's about half the price of a popup house in the UK (Shown UK price includes tax at 20% - so 5m*7m is £75k plus tax, or $104k)

https://www.theannex.co.uk/garden-annexes/annex-1/

Be interesting how quality varies

Am I blind, or is this home missing a toilet?

I am wondering the same.

Know it's not a like-for-like comparison as the boxabl units come with a mini-kitchen etc.

But think I'd far prefer something like the smaller units from Heb Homes – https://www.hebhomes.com

(Pricing is public but unfortunately need to register for plans)

These have piqued a lot of people's interest around me. My friend recently quit a steady job to go work at Modal https://livemodal.com I have wondered about the necessity of a crane though, seems like a pretty big limiting factor.

I thought about the crane too, but assume you need a truck and crane to get it delivered anyway?

We need to be building units like this for the homeless, in lots with services/resources. The faster we can meet offer everyone a “bed”, the faster we can legally ban urban camping. Encampments are growing out of control in SF, LA, etc and we need a housing-first approach.

If you're building these in large quantities doing it on site would be way cheaper. You can achieve similar economies of scale, and you don't have to design the houses to be mobile and you don't have to actually move them

"Accessory Dwelling Unit" seems like the perfect name for this dystopian live in coffin.

>Are they wind resistant? >Yes. Boxabls are rated for hurricane speed winds. They can handle the worst wind conditions in North America.

The entire tone of the FAQ took me from "Neat!" to "I'll believe it when I see it."

Doesn't look much cheaper than a regular home. Maybe faster to build, but not necessary cheaper.

It would not help battle the overvalued property prices, since in most expensive areas it's the land that drives home price up, not the building price itself.

Are brick homes common in the US? I see lots of mention about wooden frames when discussing tradition vs pre-fab, but nothing about brick.

Typical new house in the UK is two layers of brick (with filled cavity) with a wooden roof with tiles on the top.

Not common. Wood is a lot cheaper, strong enough (brick is hard, but it isn't actually very strong). Wood is also easy to modify in a few years when you want to make changes.

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/folding-at-home

Good recent summary on state of foldable construction.

Recent interview with the founder. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ck685sVmdkk&t=2s

Is it as easy to disassemble and move it to a different location?

From what I see, it seems the setup alone seems to be optimized, but once done, it seems more or less permanent?

Curious about how reversible the unpacking is. This means near no house destruction on site.. you remove your stuff, fold it and lift it away

Does anyone know of any kits that would work in a northern climate with occasional high winds that would be suitable for a small family?

This doesn't look like it's sustainable at all. But as they say themselves, it can be very useful for disaster situations.

I love the fact that they setup the house in just one day. And those big windows are a huge plus for a person like me.

I will not comment on the business, just the website. It is bad (not quite terrible). It is actually responsive, but it came from some cheap template.

I am not sure why is that. Does agencies charge way too much for their work, so they didn't want to pay 150K for website, but spent 150 instead. There should be a room in-between for this.

You judge websites based on how expensive they are?

Not how expensive they are but how much budget you spend on making them. You have to spend money to make good website.

But what do you think isn't good about their website?

Edit: I stand corrected, see below.

Sadly no in-unit washer/dryer.

Interesting that their product is called "casita" since the company "Kasita", which also specialized in tiny homes, recently folded.

https://www.kasita.com/

"Casita" simply means small house in Spanish. Also, the front page lists "washer/dryer" under "out of the box".

For the multistory ones how do you get between stories?

In one of the carousel of images they show more box layouts [coming soon](https://www.boxabl.com/more/) including a "stair box" with a stair case leading up in the back, but there's no accompanying "upstairs" layout with a hole in the floor, so I think multi story boxes are more of an idea for the investor pitch deck at this point. I think all they are selling right now is the one layout.

Tesseracts.

You WILL live in the pod

Instant ADUs... Great, an easy way to increase the density of suburban neighborhoods that weren't designed for it while enriching wealthy landowners and providing sub-standard housing to the lower class.

Shower thought: when will we see a company like Amazon or Costco experiment with providing an entire city, leveraging their efficient production chains and cost-cutting techniques? Would you live in a pre-fab town engineered to your demographics (even if Amazon owned all your data)?

Did you see the latest Loki? In the year 2050(?), they had a town in Alabama owned and operated by a company named Roxxcart.

>providing sub-standard housing to the lower class.

Can you elaborate on the problem with this? I don't see how adding an ADU to the market hurts the lower class.

> sub-standard housing

> increase the density of suburban neighborhoods that weren't designed for it

GP's vision of how this hurts the lower class seems readily apparent.

If the ADU is sub-standard, then the lower class can choose to not live there.

I didn't ask about the density statement, I understand the argument the GP made.

> If the ADU is sub-standard, then the lower class can choose to not live there.

Buddy, not for nothing but that sentence could be a textbook definition of a synonym for “Let them eat cake”

Are the lower class supposed to use their vast sums of savings to choose more expensive housing? If a 20 year old Toyota Corolla with 200k miles is substandard for them can they simply choose to buy new?

I earnestly believe that an ADU (or anything, such as a car) on market provides an option. That is what I was trying to say.

My original question was this: how does adding an ADU to the market hurt the lower class?

I don’t think providing an adu of <120 sq ft will hurt the lower class in the same that I don’t think sweatshops in developing countries are hurting the lower class. I get how they aren’t great but the fact that people will use/work at them without coercion shows that they are better than nothing. I agree that you are correct there.

What am I pointing out is how you phrased your statement like the lower class has other options than the cheapest option available, whether or not it’s sub standard.

If you are unaware the mythological story around Marie Antoinette is that when she was told the peasantry could no longer afford bread responded with “let them eat cake” because she did not understand that going above the basics was not a viable option.

The phrasing of your statement combined with the reality of the world came off like you were suggesting the lower class can simply spend more money if they didn’t like the low tier housing, regardless of your actual intent

This is part of an ongoing attempt to create quality affordable housing - just as other products have done over time.

If the product weren’t there, the option wouldn’t be there - and your reasoning functionally favors driving down lower classes by denying them steps up.

No, there is not some grand capitalist conspiracy to subjugate multitudes into poverty to seize their paltry holdings. Capitalism raises the poor by giving them options that benefit both parties; the burgeoning ADU market seeks to give better homes to poor, which is a hard goal with limited (but existing!) incentives.

I feel like no one responding to me in this thread is capable of understanding how the tone of your wording changes how it is received by others.

I understand how capitalism works and that this provides an option that wasn’t available before.

Telling people who have next to nothing that they can simply choose another house if they think this one is sub standard, while factually accurate, makes you sound like a complete asshole who doesn’t understand that they don’t have the resources to pick other options

That’s the entire point I’m making. Any response about capitalism or ADUs is ignoring my point and talking past me

Yes, X may be their only option. X sucks, and it’s not what anyone with options would choose. Well, except for Y, which is even worse.

You’re arguing that X shouldn’t exist, leaving only Y. This, in your words, “makes you sound like a complete asshole who doesn’t understand that” this is a step up.

the way I read the comment, it's a way to create a new lower class - while propping up landowners.

"enriching wealthy landowners and providing sub-standard housing to the lower class"

While I don't think all or most 'average home(land)owners are "wealthy" ' - It is an interesting view to consider - there is an income bracket that could afford these in someone else's backyard - and likely never save enough money for a down-payment on a similar located chunk of suburban land - and being in that spot you may see the average homeowner as being wealthy comparatively.

Just because I read it that way, does not mean that's the way the OP intended it - I dunno what the full though process was. This may simply reflect the cascading experiences I have had and lead me to think of it in that light.

I myself hope that ADUs are a standard option in all zoning across the country and only in rare cases prevented.

I can see positive and negative things coming from increased housing supply in areas, i think it's fair to consider many side effects and consider ways to buffer any negative effects as well.

Amazon is building a bunch of workforce housing in some cities I believe (probably someone here knows a bit more).

Also, queue up Sixteen Tons and some mentions of company scrip.

> Shower thought: when will we see a company like Amazon or Costco experiment with providing an entire city, leveraging their efficient production chains and cost-cutting techniques?

This was a thing a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes

Did you read that comment right? Selling pallets of materials and blueprints to individual people to make a single house is not even close to building up a wide area themselves.

> Shower thought: when will we see a company like Amazon or Costco experiment with providing an entire city

Hershey did that in 1903, although it was more a means to an end rather than a product in itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey,_Pennsylvania#History

I thought I saw a lot of corporate-branded housing (skyscrapers) in Seoul years ago but I may have been mistaken about their function.

http://www.koreasigns.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/apar...

They already did. Circa the early 1900s -- the Sears catalog offered kit homes by catalog. All the necessary parts would come, pre-cut, in a wax-sealed boxcar.

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