America's affordable house of the future failed
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
I think you need a notarized document from the county in order to simply gaze at your property in this state.
the waiting can be very expensive for individuals as they have to live somewhere. for developers it's more about the indirect cost of having a lot of capital tied up during that time.
then there's environmental assessments, some places have to deal with archaeological assessments too. developers need to pay people to deal with the permitting processes. lawyers are often involved throughout as well.
architects and engineers need to be involved, often repeatedly, if you're modifying an off-the-shelf design too.
as with buying a house, there are a lot of expenses that very few people consider, and are hard to predict even if they do.
Opportunity costs can also be a negative number.
Also: for discussions of construction and cost, see this blog: https://www.construction-physics.com/
In that context, a monolithic slab has a lot of benefits including reduced material that has to be removed, reduced site prep, reduced construction time, reduced material costs, reduced labor costs, and reduced complexity.
If the goal is to make more housing, more accessible economically, then it makes sense in that context.
(Separately, this is one of the great reasons to prefer multi-family constructions, and why US building trends have slowly realigned towards them: you only have to build one basement and electrical/HVAC system for 20 families.)
I’ve only rarely seen condo styles with shared systems and those typically come with unappealing expensive management fees, insurance, and shared expense to the tune 500+ per month on top of the price for the unit itself. My father used to mantain the infrastructure for such a development and those were prices circa 2000 or so.
(I don’t have a sense of expense for any of these things, but I assume they wouldn’t build them this way if there wasn’t some economic envelope that they fit into.)
The Midwest, Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and most of the West have as cold or colder winters than Maryland. Indeed, it's largely only the Pacific coast and South/Southwest that don't have colder winters. Hard to call Maryland an outlier when like half the country lives in places that get that cold or colder!
So there’s not that much of the US that’s actually colder than MD.
That's because we keep making houses as these boutique hand crafted items. If we can't mass manufacture basements, then don't make the basement part which we can't mass manufacture. We're able to mass manufacturer cars, which are devilishly complex machines. Houses are simpler, but bigger. We could mass manufacture houses if the right incentives were put in place.
Hilariously, once self driving car technology lets us have self driving RVs, we'll be in a place where we are mass manufacturing homes.
When the Lustron came out, The Home Depot was not yet even a startup, and there had never been anything like that. Consumers had never had a fraction of the convenient access to the building materials that's now been expected for decades. And key materials realistically had been mass-produced for a number of decades earlier, before there were considerations to appeal to retail DIY consumers.
When the cost of labor skyrocketed in the 1970's, tens of millions of Americans were rapidly excluded from the new home market for their foreseeable future. Even though they had been on the verge of participating, on the reliable path that had been established for so many millions that had come before, it just floated further out-of-reach. The ground was fertile for The Home Depot to sprout and grow.
If you watch a subdivision of raw land be built into a neighborhood using the typical "ASAP at all costs, but cheap"[0] approach, this is so mature that specialized tools, materials, and workflows have been honed to drastically minimize the hours that actual skilled workers are on each home. They really have been working like an assembly line for quite some time.
So mass production had always been part of the equation, Lustron had a superior technology product that could compete on costs but didn't turn out to be cheaper though. To some extent there might have been an underlying dependency on a hail mary for it to end up so cheap they flew off the shelf. There were a number of reasons that didn't happen, obviously a bonanza is the exception not the rule, but without 20/20 hindsight at the time it's easy for anyone to overlook something that can be pointed to later.
The real problem for them was the (large) capitalist market that they were trying to operate in, when they were grossly under-capitalized for the competition, on terms that were beyond their ability to significantly influence toward overall advantage.
They would have probably been better off circling the wagons and not trying to make waves in a huge established market. Firmly occupying their unique adjacent niche sustainably, and then venturing forward from there in ways that previous progress will not be lost if goals are not fully met.
[0] All costs to be borne by the buyer, so pull out all the stops.
Even a simple concrete pad will crack and heave in a few years without a proper foundation. We recently had a 8x30 paver patio/driveway built in front of our house. It took a team of 4-5 guys more than a week just to dig out the foundation, lay gravel drainage layers and landscape sheeting. Actually putting down the pavers took just a couple of days. And that’s for a patio that’s supporting at most 10,000 pounds of cars, not 200,000 pounds of house.
I assume if you just put in posts those would tend to rot over time.
ADDED: Per sibling comment, a concrete pad is often not about just pouring a load of concrete.
Beside that homes are not for single individuals, but for families and families are not that standard... So well, they are a hard task for mass manufacturing and those who have tried mass manufacturing them have designed almost only crap.
IME:
- first choose wood :: it's easier to rework/extend/modify by the owner, if someone want to buy a cheap home ALSO plan to do plenty of stuff alone to lower the final price;
- second carefully designs flexibility :: let's say just electricity, consider a modern "start-like" distribution BUT every room just get a derivation box with all relevant power circuits and anything depart from it, it's not super cheap, but in gross terms it does not count much and allow much flexibility, similarly design easy access to plumbery;
- third do not assume furniture :: just design the home, offering some options but allow the owner to choose all the rest;
- fourth take easy repair into account :: let's say just windows, if they are mounted with some factory-assembled strange setups are a nightmare to substitute thereafter, mount them in ways they can be unmounted with very little effort, use as much as possible "common", "standard" components and so on.
PERHAPS at that point you get some meaningful results.
We need places to put the homes and rules that allow for denser homes. We're doing just fine on "cheap homes".
Oregon, for instance, built more apartments (low-rise apartments are the least expensive form of housing here) in the 1970ies than today: https://www.sightline.org/2023/02/07/yes-oregon-there-is-a-w...
Of course, it is expensive to build things in the US in general, and that's a problem worth pursuing as well.
We don't have a housing problem; the problem is that affordable housing has undesirable locations.
Make the locations attractive, and all of a sudden, there is no housing problem.
(I don't claim to know how to achieve that)
Disposable income of the 70s was a tiny fraction, many orders of magnitude smaller than the disposable income of 2024.
In addition, houses in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s are not comparable to houses today. Modern houses and cars should cost a lot more because they offer a lot more.
All I am saying here is that the picture is a lot more complicated and nuanced and needs a more detailed evaluation than a simplistic scaling factor into the past.
The cheap housing of that era (even discounting the lead paint and asbestos-based insulation) might not be something you would want to live in today.
Housing is more expensive because people value it more than in the past.
They might value it more because housing is much better than in the past. That could be a simple explanation to what we observe.
ADDED: And a lot of the jobs associated with those cities are actually a fair distance outside the cities anyway.
A curious tale.
Sounds like a political failure, more than anything else. I also wonder how, in August of '48, Time reported that Lustron has got no steel to build its houses. [2]
[1] http://www.singingwheels.com/business-week-article.html
[2] https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,888...
His idea of an all concrete house made using a single pour of concrete. Even the cabinets, beds, toilet were supposedly part of design and created during the concrete pour.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/06/thomas-edisons-forgott...
Doesn't sound like much of an achievement.
The town I live in (in Norway) is full of wooden housing built in the same period or earlier. I'm pretty confident that far more than 75% of them are still standing.
The brick built house I owned in the early 80s in Southampton, England, was one of a street of hundreds of houses built in 1890. The whole street is still there together with dozens of others of similar or greater age.
The point isn’t that houses from the 40s are still standing. The US also has tons and tons of those. The point is that the cheap, modular, assembly-line houses are still standing. Cheap usually equates to non-durable so it’s notable that these cheap houses are an exception.
I don't know about the parts that were enamel coated, but I imagine some of the cost might be recouped from recycling the steel.
I don't think I've lived in a building newer than this era since I was a child, and I've moved quite a bit in both brick and wood framed houses in the Midwest US.
“Houses . . . consumed like cars” makes for an interesting thought experiment, like “The Roads Must Roll”[0] but doesn’t strike me as a meeting an actual need. Maybe I’m wrong.
In support of this is China, where there are similar cultural views about “used” homes being undesirable. Yet (to this point) prices have appreciated and they have used them as investment vehicles.
To put it another way, would Japanese homes really depreciate with rapid population and economic growth? There is just no way.
Point being maybe its demographics and regulation, with a cultural attitude that jives with it and even explains the regulation to demolish, but not attitude being operative.
source: discussion with a small business person around 2005
Turns out leaving all of this to the profit motive puts people on the street. Amazing.