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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

There’s something similar to Amdahl's law at work here. A lot of house building isn’t amenable to mass manufacture, so mass manufacturing the parts that are doesn’t speed up the overall process that much. Maybe it’s different in the Midwest, but in Maryland virtually every house has a basement. Our neighbor has a modular home (a nice one with two stories and three bedrooms—looks just like a stick built house) and they wanted a basement too. Grading the plot, digging out the basement, and dealing with drainage and whatnot takes a lot of time and skilled labor. The actual framing and finishing proceeds surprisingly quickly in comparison. Then, electrical, plumbing, insulation, HVAC, and other skilled trades take forever and cost a fortune. So speeding up and reducing the cost of throwing the structure together doesn’t revolutionize the pricing.

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Where I live, the biggest costs of building a single family home are: 1. Land, 2. Permits and paperwork, 3. Everything else. You’ve spent the majority of your budget before a single shovel gets put into the ground. Seems like these would also be good things to start with when addressing the price to build a home.

Permits and paperwork are probably mostly a time and restrictions on what and where you can build cost rather than a direct monetary cost. But certainly indirectly have a lot of influence on where and how you can build.

Whats the cost of only being allowed to build a SFH

What is SFH?

Single family home, usually also implies detached.

The article is about a single family home. And pretty much all the costs mentioned in another comment (and maybe more) apply to a manufactured home as well.

That shows up in the “land” field.

That would have to be calculated as an opportunity cost, That can be fudged to anything. Many real estate development are only successful because the property was bought from the original bankrupt developer.

Opportunity costs can also be a negative number.

permits aren't too expensive that's true but the surveyors and engineers are.

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.

I’m really surprised that permits and paperwork could hold a candle to actual buildings costs.

Sing it with me: ♫ Cal-i-forn-i-a! No doubt about it! ♫

I think you need a notarized document from the county in order to simply gaze at your property in this state.

You want the basement floor to be below the frost line, so I'd imagine going north of Maryland (or anywhere with colder winters) would encourage basements at least as deep.

Also: for discussions of construction and cost, see this blog: https://www.construction-physics.com/

There are new-ish monolithic pour techniques that enable slab foundations in frost prone areas. In particular, the usage of rigid XPS insulation in the soil and maintaining a minimum temp in the structure allow more efficient foundation construction.

I grew up with a basement (in MD) and have one now (in MA). Basements seem so incredibly practical and useful that if I could have one, I’d choose one for sure.

It depends somewhat on how dry they are. Mine isn't very. But there's generally a fair bit of utility infrastructure that has to go somewhere. And even if it's not a finished basement it provides a lot of storage which is really useful if you don't have an attic.

Not disagreeing (have a finished basement myself), but what's in question here is affordability and efficiency.

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.

Much of the US South doesn’t have basements. Maryland is an outlier for climate (colder winters) and demographic (wealthier) reasons.

(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.)

> Much of the US South doesn’t have basements. Maryland is an outlier for climate (colder winters) and demographic (wealthier) reasons.

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!

I think they meant that they were an outlier from the rest of the south

An outlier versus the South, not the rest of the US.

Maryland and Kansas overlap in terms of temperature overall. Wichita Kansas is on average 5 degrees warmer in January than Frendsville MD, High 40f vs 36f vs low 25 vs 20. Kansas City in the northern bit of Kansas and only goes down to 39° / 21°.

So there’s not that much of the US that’s actually colder than MD.

What style of multifamily are you referring to here? Every townhome and apartment style I’ve ever lived in has discrete electrical, plumbing, and HVAC.

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’ve seen modern townhomes and apartments in Maryland with shared electrical and HVAC; not sure about plumbing. I’ve also seen constructions in North Carolina with shared electrical and plumbing, although each unit had its own HVAC.

(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.)

> A lot of house building isn’t amenable to mass manufacture

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.

There are absolutely companies that mass manufacture houses and put them on concrete pads. And there's some market for that. But, as other comments mention, custom building costs for that class/size of house are not really the major cost issue in the scheme of things.

Very good point.

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.

What are the options for a foundation? Why can't you just put posts into the ground? Or on the ground and adjust? Like a mobile home but without the wheels.

Typically the alternative is a concrete pad. That's what my brother's fairly large house on the coast of Maine has.

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.

Ground isn’t stable. A house by contrast weighs 100,000-200,000 pounds. The dirt under the house will not only settle under the weight, but will continually shift due to surface and underground water movement. To prevent that, you need grading to make the land flat and direct water away from the house. You need to tamp down the soil so it doesn’t compress. You need drainage layers to allow water to percolate downwards (instead of saturating the dirt right under the house). You need layers to keep plants from growing straight through the middle of the floor.

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.

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