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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem in America: Things are inexplicably extremely expensive, especially if government is involved and nobody can give a straight answer as to why.

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It's pretty explicable. Our entire economic system is based on the premise that we should off shore the production of things to other places who are willing to deal with the nitty gritty and get it done at a price Americans can afford and then we regulate and enforce wages that ensure that those activities are prohibitively onerous and expensive to be done in the USA. This is literally by design.

It's great for multiplying the amount of physical things everyone gets to consume as long as the quality of those things isn't taken into account. It's a disaster in the event we actually need to build any physical things for ourselves.

We've been able to pretend this isn't true for the last 40 years as we wore our existing infrastructure down into the ground. It is becoming more apparent now as we fail to rebuild to the state we were in 70 years ago.

This can't be the explanation, because the US has never offshored construction. You can't offshore construction. It's a service business that requires being on-site.

Right, and this a big part of the reason that houses are prohibitively expensive. If you could offshore them they'd be affordable.

Americans can't afford to buy things made by Americans.

Again we papered over this issue with decades of supressed interest rates but the ruse can't last forever.

its been inshored to latin americans

It's not inexplicable.

The political system froze up to protect entrenched interests (NIMBY land owners).

It's making conscious efforts to make new construction onerous to get through permitting process. That restricts supply and enriches existing land owners.

If expensive permitting is the problem, since it's the government doing the building shouldn't that not really be a "cost", order the department to waive any fees.

Also, If that were the case I would suspect that adding a bathroom to your house in SF would cost upwards of a million dollars as well but I doubt that's true. Correct me if I'm wrong.

A similar effect can be seen in ancient Rome, towards the end of the empire the millers started to produce less and less product from the same amount of grain. The mint that produced the coins would mysteriously lose large amounts of them, or they wouldn't contain the correct percentages of metals and nobody in power did anything about it. Well that's not entirely right, one person did and they killed him.

> since it's the government doing the building shouldn't that not really be a "cost", order the department to waive any fees.

This assumes that the cost is due to fees imposed by the government.

From the article:

>> [The costs] include planning, drawing, permits, reviews and public outreach.

>> we expect to be able to complete [the toilet] in 2025

It couldn't cost more than say 200k (and that is pretty crazy the article says the plumbing hookups are there it's not like they have to dig up a city block to run a sewer line or something) to actually build the thing so we are talking what? A million and a half in illustration, planning and review for a single toilet?

I don't have any special insight here but, in other cases, environmental reviews and environmental lawsuits are tools used to stifle new developments.

> a rejected San Francisco apartment complex...required a more than 1,110-page environmental assessment [1]

It is not socially acceptable to charge a million dollar permit for constructing a toilet. It is socially acceptable to make the process so onerous that it costs more than a million dollars to complete. Think of the environment.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-04-20/the-landm...

Government has to get permits like the rest of us

This isn't a universal problem across America and even from a contradictory perspective it's certainly not an equally impactful problem across America. The inability to build and excessive costs of regulatory compliance when allowed to do so are very much blue team problems.

There is a straight answer. Government is far too big and inefficient, which adds tremendously to the cost when it is involved.

Getting a contractor to work on your home is ridiculously expensive too. The other day I paid $900 to replace a faucet for my tub.

Couldn't you do it yourself? It's typically a relatively simple job, no need to get a contractor in. The tools to replace it, if you don't have them already, would have come in at a fraction of $900.

I could and I will moving forward. My wife ended up paying him when I was at work and she had no idea what it was supposed to cost.

You can for now, while it’s legal. Electrical work is now illegal in many places.

I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with contractors. I had to do the exact same thing, while it wasn’t $900 it was $200-300 to have someone come out and replace a faucet. I ended up buying the tools and did it in ~20 minutes for like $20 in parts. I’ve done a lot of other projects and constantly get outrageous quotes from landscapers, plumbers, HVAC, etc.

My theory is that they prey on people that don’t know any better. Less and less people know how to DIY so they have no frame of reference for the real value of labor and get scammed.

I'd love to see a breakdown of wages paid to plumbers, tilesetters and carpenters as well as all material and equipment costs vs everything else. I'd gamble it isn't even 20% of the total.

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