Comment by throw0101c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw0101c | Hacker News Reader

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> Not just politicians in general, but people, of course, are always surprised how expensive housing is, but then reject any kind of streamlined mass-manufactured option.

You can build a tract of homes in 90 days (or less) using stick frame. They won't be fancy, but they'll be up to code (and with a little extra cost (<10%) and effort, they can be made much more efficient than just code).

A crew of 4-5 guys (plus some subs) can build a custon home in 80 days:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYd73YP57Ik&list=PL8XEQ1XKYN...

If you pipeline that and use a standardized, cookie-cutter plan an entire row can be build out in a similar time frame. Production builders do it all the time:

* https://www.newhomesource.com/learn/custom-or-production-bui...

There are of course mass-manufactured elements that can speed things up, like using trusses. There are also now services for pre-cut framing that saves on-site effor of measuring and such:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2FdAdxjSpw&list=PLDYh81z-Rh...

The building of the structure is not the bottleneck, it is the approval process and NIMBY road blocks that can add 2(+) years to a project.

It's not just the cost of building the house. Utilities and infrastructure (and the taxes to pay for it all) add up. Now, if you were to build smaller, densely, and close enough to amenities that residents could walk or bike to their daily activities, or to public transit that can take you farther away, you save a significant amount on initial AND recurring costs. And what's better, people WANT that! Or, a least, they're willing to eat the downsides in order to benefit from the upsides, including lower costs. But there lies the rub: when these types of places get built, they get offered at market pricing, not in a way that reflects their lower costs. So people say, "Why spend the same for less?" and move to a traditional suburb (or, more likely, put off home-buying altogether).

The problem with housing in America always comes down to the way it was financialized and securitized: too much relies on "line go up, forever". There's no room for new blood/capacity (read:competition), there's no room for "investments" to lose value.

Market prices is not the problem. The problem is getting these bigger projects through permitting is. The cost savings are lost in litigation.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/market-rate-housing-will-make-...

Charitably, that's a very flawed blog post. Studies of housing affordability in Finland should not be used to make points about America. Finland has a number of legal protections that shield its citizens from the rampant price-fixing, collusion, investor-oriented building, and other predations of the American market.

That's not to say housing construction regulation isn't a problem. It is, but two things can be problems at the same time.

Without reading your link: this is a problem across new and existing builds, so it can't be an issue wih permitting. Housing cost growth has outpaced wage growth for decades. We are reaching an inflection point of unaffordability (unequally distributed geographically, of course). The problem is that market rates must support a number of (often unnecessary or inflated) concerns, including but not limited to permitting and litigation. Profit for a rotating cast of securitized mortgage holders is another major one. Insolvent municipalities that can't see property taxes fall is another.

One of the problems is that the people who need housing aren't buying new houses.

Nobody is going to spend $x on a brand new house without having some say in it, and so those houses tend more and more toward "high end/luxury". After all, why go through the hassle of all the paperwork and building and NOT sell for the highest price you can get?

Same thing happens with cars; the market for car buyers is much larger than the market for new car buyers, but only new cars ever get made. Nobody is making used cars, or even the absolutely cheapest possible, which affects the whole supply.

Most new houses are only slightly custom. You generally start with a floor plan from the builder, and then choose the color of the walls or other minor details. Sometimes a new house is cheaper than a used one because you can move into a used house much quicker, while a with new house you have to wait for them to finish. Usually a new house is more expensive than a comparable used house, but not by much. Even a fully custom home is generally not much more expensive because your builder will tell you what costs a lot of money (if you ask for 8.5 foot ceilings the builder will talk you into 9 foot because those are much cheaper since precut parts are available), and what is insignificant. Generally walls can go anywhere and are cheap to move around.

> they get offered at market pricing, not in a way that reflects their lower costs

Well, duh!

Yep, speed is pretty good, though there's still a long way to go.

As mentioned in this comment[0] land and labor are still the dominant part of the costs. So if municipalities would allow and prefer denser housing cost would be lower.

And of course if we are already talking about quasi-standardized (cookie-cutter) units, then there's even more reason to scale up projects so prefab components could be shipped in. (Though of course we again run into the tragedy of small scale. Metro areas are made up of too small suburban cities, they don't want a big project, they don't have the infrastructure for it, they don't want the extra traffic, and so on.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42932445

In my experience pre-built framing just moves the error down into the foundation.

> In my experience pre-built framing just moves the error down into the foundation.

There are ± tolerances at every interface, so if you're off a bit on the foundation, you can balance things out in the rough frame, so by the time you get to finish framing things are pretty square/plumb/level.

But if the pre-built stuff is ±0, then there's no wiggle room in that part of the build, so the rest of it has to be that much tighter as you've not nowhere to adjust things.

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