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Comment by thesausageking | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“ 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.

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

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.

Looks great for movie sets.

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 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

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