A more equal comparison would be to a prefab or mobile home, which you can get for that inflation adjusted price.
That stuff was, evidently, so cheap from the perspective of people in the 1910s, that they didn't think it worth any amount of effort to sub in worse wood for places where looks didn't matter. These days, some of that would be hard to find at any price, short of salvaging it from old buildings like that. And that's the "crap" they put under the nice wood they used for finishing!
OTOH we do have drywall, which has got to be cheaper in pretty much every way than lathe-and-plaster.
It makes me wonder .. if the US shutdown Canadian wood imports, would that significantly lower prices for Canadian consumers? How low would it go?
I once asked a recent undergrad in Economics graduate, at a party, why one pound of bread costs more than one pound of meat (the inputs and processing costs are vastly different, through the life of the animal, the meat should be way, way more) but, blank stare, more beer.
I for one believe that most of the markets, most of the time, make no sense at all from the perspective of the real natural inputs, and all the sense in the world from the point of view of one human group selling things to another human group, any way they can; old timber included.
If you look at pure flour, rice, beans, pasta, and stuff like that, there are lots of cases where it drops from prepared-foods price down to something closer to its commodity value. Looking up rice, it goes for $14/c.w.t., which I think translates to a little over $0.10 per pound. You can't buy it at that price, but you can buy a literal 1 lb bag of the bad rice for $1.00. Consider larger quantities and you'll probably see an asymptote to a reasonable multiple times the commodity value.
Meat will not follow those rules. The floor for meat is much higher due to the physical inefficiency of production. Even at that higher price floor, there are huge untaxed externalities. A lot of people know the reality that we have to eat a lot less meat due to halt climate change. I think there is a strong business and social culture for businesses to move meat at close to its price floor, with business models like fast food.
Either way, no offense, but your economics grad needs to re-take some basic classes. To simplify, input costs only establish a floor on prices. Otherwise, prices are set by dynamic market supply/demand curves.
But you can't enter the market and compete with me, because you don't have the right grandfather.
Just saying that the free tree isn’t free
Protectionism isn't always a good idea. Doing so would've made the final lumber output more expensive for Canadian consumers.
Automation is coming for the good-paying jobs sooner or later, anyways. The solution wasn't/isn't to ban outsourcing/automation, it's to better distribute the gains from outsourcing/automation across society.
Now if only the lumber were properly dried instead of shipped slopping wet. (Actually, I suspect the kiln-dried lumber is destined for wealthy foreign markets; we locals get the c-grade crap. I have spent literally more than an hour picking through stacks to find enough good lumber to build a shed.)
A covered pile outdoors or in a warehouse will yield straighter lumber (or just don't crank the kiln to 11) but that is not economically viable for random pine that people frame things with.
It probably wouldnt go low because you are not recognising global demand and a growing global population, cost of automation for factory (automated built) furniture, bespoke furniture by individual or small teams of carpenters, cost of transporting wood to other countries where costs are different.
Here in the UK we have this place https://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/ it does real solid (oak) wood furniture, not some furniture made of chipboard.
It seems quite cheap but there are visible cost savings, like the furniture isnt that big, its suited to smaller homes than some grand mansion or luxury home, and with a lot of businesses, where finance/credit is available, sometimes the company main business is actually a credit broker/finance specialising in a niche market product.
Some people have said GE (General Electric) is now more a financial entity than a manufacturer, this is business diversification over the decades.
To be fair, pretty much anything built after 1960 is small, and all UK housing is small by American standards.
I also don't think most people in the UK consider OakFurnitureLand a cheap, or even an affordable place to buy furniture. Despite being made of cheap internationally sourced oak, and somewhat mediocre, it's definitely a premium brand. If you were to buy all your furniture there many people would consider you well off.
Spot on with the reality of their finance business though
Even the carcasses use solid wood. Some of the returned furniture had cracks in interior wooden boards where a composite like ply/chip/MDF would not have cracked. I guess solid wood is lighter, part of their brand and they have less diversity of material sourcing. It must pay off, even with slightly higher returns.
That's how most houses are built in central Europe for example: https://budujemydom.pl/i/2020/01/02/215608-d885-1100x0-sc1x5...
Of course later the insulation is added: https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pressland-cms/cache/__...
In the north masonry homes have a lot of problems with freeze thaw cycles. As far as upgrades , remodeling, overall costs goes stick built homes are superior.
That's weird, central Europe has pretty northern climate with cold snowy winters and hot summers and I've never heard about any such problems. I've lived my whole life in such houses. You just need proper insulation (but you need it anyway cause heating is expansive). I think Americans don't much care for good windows for example, at least in the movies they have these weird 1-layer sliding windows that nobody would use here :).
> As far as upgrades , remodeling, overall costs goes stick built homes are superior.
There's a bit of stigma against wooden houses here and they are considered worse investment because they degrade and lose value much faster.
^ this is pure speculation
For hardwoods, it's typically the heartwood that's more desirable. Walnut and cherry both have pretty strongly contrasting sapwood that does not match the customer's expectation for the color of those woods, for instance.
Trees grown among other trees have to grow up to reach sunlight. The innermost part of the lower trunk might have knots from branches when the tree was young, but once they reach harvestable size, there's a fair amount of clear lumber down low.
Trees grown in the open don't have the pressure to grow upwards, and end up with branches down low throughout their lives (from the center all the way through to the bark). As a result, there's very little clear lumber in them.
Disclaimer, I'm a furnituremaker, not a forester. The above is somewhat better than pure speculation, but likely misses some important bits.
The wood used to built those houses was the old growth timber of the western united states. Its basically gone now. As well as the second, third and fourth growth.
Wood of sufficient quality to do the things we used to do with it simply doesn't come from industrial forests.
https://miro.medium.com/max/2976/1*zUezbWclc1bubBJOS0qiew.jp...
Old growth trees aren’t exactly growing back on a timeline that matters to you and me.
To get that beautiful wood again, we would have to plant the forests, let them grow for hundreds of years, then harvest the wood. Well, that's not going to happen, so we end up in the situation we are in of having to use a very poor substitute.
Translation: it's made from the smallest possible tree you could plausibly saw a 4x4 out of. And the pith (the center of the trunk) running through the middle guarantees that the post will split along the radial plane as it dries.
If you go to a better lumber yard, you get better lumber. Except, apparently, for 2x3's. They are universally crap. Source: built a chicken coop with 2x3's and bought from a local outfit because they deliver inexpensively. Everything else was gorgeous compared to the box home improvement store. The 2x3's were pretty much the same.
Makes sense that the larger cross-sectional lumber needs to come from a larger cross-sectional tree with few defects. The crap-wood they can turn into 2x4, 2x3....
Wood can have a fair amount of internal stress in it, and cutting it can release it in ways that cause your boards to warp, twist, or bend.
(Freely available to download for anybody who's curious)
https://lostartpress.com/collections/books/products/the-anar...
Could that have been lumber from old growth forests that are now either extinct or protected from logging?
IIRC, lumber nowadays is basically farmed using relatively fast-growing trees.
Trees on plantation are straighter than wild trees.
Right after seeing that movie I visited an old house where everything is wood. Huge wood cabinets, wood floors, wood ceiling, etc...
I suddenly realised that I can't afford wood furniture any more! The IKEA stuff I buy these days is made of "manufactured" materials that are "wood-like", but have essentially cardboard honeycomb between two sheets of plywood or something.
I used to have IKEA furniture that was solid pine, but good luck finding anything like that in their store these days...
IKEA do have some solid pine (furu). Here is one https://www.ikea.com/no/no/p/rast-kommode-med-3-skuffer-furu...
It didn't take long to find it in their catalogue.
Anyway, IKEA is not the only company selling furniture.
You are correct that most solid woods are expensive (not pine usually though) but that is at least in part simply due to high demand for such furniture and the lack of supply of the raw materials.
https://taskandpurpose.com/mandatory-fun/constitution-grove-...
1. https://energynews.us/2019/12/02/estonia-is-beginning-to-see...
Lots of people want to build 900 sqft homes. It's just that with land costing 100s of ks and utility hookups etc at 100k, it make no sense to build a 900 sqft house.
Basically, areas with high house prices have created a situation building a little house on a bit of land is between very cost ineffective and simply impossible and then said "no one want to do this".
UK new build houses (as a type - of course there's lots of variety) are a strange breed. Small and crammed into tiny lots though cleverly designed to make the most of a small space. Energy-efficient but shoddily constructed. The cheapest premium-looking materials (i.e. brick). Generally nice enough to live in but a bit depressing.
Also, it is pretty common for county codes to require each home to be a minimum 1000 sqft (at least in FL and MI). Even if we don't want to allow tiny homes of sub-500 sqft to gasp potentially lower the value of my home by giving someone else a place to live, the 700-900 sqft range is still very nice for a lot of people.
Like you said, part of this is differences in what you get, building codes, and amenities.
That said, Craftsmen homes are wonderful and in some respects have better build quality than modern homes.
I dunno if you've dug deeply into most building codes but they're almost always overly specific in pointless ways and in ways totally unrelated to safety. Getting an engineer to sign off on a design should be enough, especially for a freestanding (tiny)house.
There's an unfortunate number of locations in the US where you must use wood frame for your house, or you must route your power in exactly this way, etc, even if it'd be equally safe or cheaper to do something else.
This varies widely by state. In some states, it matters if you're in a municipality or if you're rural.
Where I am, in this county, I do not require a permit or inspections or anything to build a house for myself unless I'm inside a municipality. The government doesn't care until it's time to pay taxes. I may need some sort of inspection to hook up to the electric grid though, or to get water turned on. In (edit: some) other states, you can barely build a small dog house behind your house in the country without permits, inspections, engineers, surveys, and all kinds of other stuff.
Here we just have city inspectors to check basic code compliance. They'll take a quick look at the framing, electrical, and plumbing before the sheetrock goes up, and then they come back for a walk-through before issuing the certificate of occupation. No engineers.
The biggest fees by far are the permit fees, but that's for revenue and would still exist if engineers were doing the analysis for the construction.
They cost like 3x what a newbuild does, this "but building codes" stuff doesnt stand up to scruitiny.
You dont have to use wood, we have brick. We've had automation and 100 years of growth in productivity.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. There is a fixed supply by definition of those old buildings, so their price will be pushed up by demand with little relation to their cost to build since they can't be built anymore.
A better comparison would be to look at the cost of new houses in developing places like SE Asia where there are little to no building codes.
They build using the cheapest methods allowed by law, see the choice to build with fireproof cladding (£24 psm) vs flamable (£22 psm). Building codes are about setting a floor in the construction quality, not a ceiling (pun intended).
The 1910’s were a very different time. Comparing houses now to houses then is like comparing a horse to a Honda Accord. We’re not just talking luxury features here —- You can be pretty certain that a home built in 2022 has indoor plumbing, a refrigerator, and a furnace that doesn’t require shoveling fuel.
That said, I think the difference is overstated. I have lots of friends who live in craftsmen homes. They resell at basically the same price as similar sized houses built 25 years ago (even with single pane windows ect) . If somehow you got one that wasn't upgraded since 1920, you are looking at a few tens of thousands to put in electrical, plumbing, and appliances.
Still, you are right that that they are not the same. But a lot of people today would kill to own a beautiful new craftsman home for 40k! I wouldn't trade out my car for a horse, but I would trade 40k a year rent for a craftsman home!
The point is that even you wanted to replicate an original craftsman home today, you wouldn't be able to do it for that price, even ignoring regulations. Labor costs have gone up, wood has gone up, minimum cost of every material used has gone up.
The craftsman homes that have survived for 100 years in good condition are. That’s a very different thing.
Old houses also have tons of problems even when upgraded, and they just aren’t anywhere near equivalent to a modern home unless you essentially gut them and rebuild.
Insulation isn’t nearly as good. Bathrooms aren’t nearly the same size. The floor plans aren’t nearly as open. This last one in particular is a big cost difference because creating large open spans is expensive.
Those things might not matter as much to you, but they are big differences.
>The point is that even you wanted to replicate an original craftsman home today, you wouldn't be able to do it for that price, even ignoring regulations. Labor costs have gone up, wood has gone up, minimum cost of every material used has gone up.
Depends on the part of the country and whether or not you can use modern equivalent materials.
Where I live, assuming pre pandemic prices, I could probably build a 900 sq ft, single story house with a wooden pier foundation, no plumbing, no electrical, no insulation (or maybe old newspapers like my great grandmothers house used for insulation), no driveway, no sod, and no inspections for $40-$50k.
That would be roughly equivalent to your average house built 100 years ago.
That especially is just fashion, I'd be really careful with that sort of conversion. Or, if the only 'problem' with a property is that it has too many segregated rooms, and that's depressing the price.. snap it up, fashion's bound to come around. (Unless it's for you to live in and you particularly care of course, live where you want!)
Cooking is also less frequent, extraction fans are better/cheaper, we don’t use wood burning stoves. When people do cook it’s less likely to be an all day process, and less likely to involve methods like deep frying in bacon grease. It’s also less likely that a middle class family has a servant to do the cooking for them.
All this leads to less need to segregate the kitchen from the rest of the house.
If you look at Victorian houses, kitchens were placed as far away from living spaces as possible. Going forward from the 19th century there has been an overall trend towards integrating the kitchen with living spaces. Culminating in the modern trend of combining the kitchen and living room into one large space.
Families are also smaller than they used to be, so there’s less need for as many rooms. Plus furniture is larger on average.
The point is there are factors pushing houses towards larger open spaces, and larger open rooms in general that are likely durable.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. I've lived in a Sear kit house. It had everything someone now would recognized as necessary for a house (including everything you mention, plumbing, wiring, etc and as opposed to a house built in the 1800s, which could have or not-have anything).
A fair comparison is a VW bug versus a modern SUV. The bug has everything needed to be a basic car but has nothing to make it special. And the comparison would be closer if only giant SUVs were being sold as cars today.
Maybe this is highly biased toward craftsman homes that have been well maintained due to how expensive CA housing is. But why wouldn't D.R. Horton homes also be maintained? They're theoretically equally expensive.
The average D.R. Horton home is built further out on lower density, less valuable land.
There’s also an element of scarcity here. There’s a subset of people who find older homes appealing specifically because they are older. The supply of older homes can’t increase, but the supply of D.R. Horton homes can and does.
https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/TOKYO-HOMES/...
They are going to last a fraction of the time that that $45 / sqft house from 100 years ago lasted
Also 250/sq ft is far from cheap/shoddy quality in much of the US. And with proper maintenance just about any house built to code in most places in the US will easily last longer than the average house built 100 years ago.
Lasting a long time does not mean a structure is better in every way. Old housing can be a challenge in terms of safety, cohesive design, lifestyle fit, land use, environmental concerns, etc.
In Japan, for instance, it is popular to frequently tear down housing rebuild it, and it works well for them.
I have lived in and fixed up many old houses with strong bones. They might stand for hundreds of years but everything attached to those bones is a patchwork of afterthoughts.
I haven't done the math, but I'd bet the energy efficiency requirements would more than make up for it. Uninsulated/underinsulated homes are a huge waste of energy.
I live in a northeast city, and the average house in a ten block radius was built between 1920-1940. They seem to weather just fine and gradual retrofits to things like electric panels eventually take place. You can’t compare that meaningfully to a mobile home, which is more like a car with a 20 year lifespan. Frankly, I think the building codes are out of control in some respects and add needless cost.
The standard of construction of a middle class home built in 1925 is better the 2022 on the basis of materials alone.
I grew up in a small farm house built in the 1700’s - post and beam construction, that will far outlast “code compliant” building methods of today
Also - building larger typically reduces price/sqm.
Complexity and feature set are probably the biggest. New construction single-family homes today are more likely to be customized, not kits, have way more features and way better mechanicals. That 1914 house had no kitchen appliances, no laundry appliances, no driveway, no garage, no insulation, no central HVAC, etc.
If you built a house today without electricity, with only cold water service, and an outhouse, I think you’d save a fair bit on skilled trades (and be pretty damn unhappy when you visited a neighbor and saw their utilities).
This is true but can be a little bit misleading.
You would expect new homes built in 1925 or 1940 to have many more of these amenities than the average. (you can see the flush toilet in the Sears 1914 home).
For context, The average home in the US today was built ~45 years ago.
Surely if our goal was to compare prices of TVs over the past 20 years, and if we found that prices of TVs haven't changed, you cannot then claim 'well, old TVs were 720p and modern TVs are 4K, so actually the price of TVs dropped 4 times!'
Today we have all kinds of things that increase productivity: electric power tools, prebuilt parts, laser levels and measuring tools, CAD software, flooring that interlocks, expanding foam that's easilly applied from a spray can, drywall and dozens of things I never even heard of.