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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

I think this is true, but even after a construction company works through all the approvals the sheer cost of construction is insurmountable. A big part of this is obviously (sometimes union) labor. This happened recently in NIMBY-HQ Berkeley as interest rates crept up [1]. Pre-approved construction sites are sitting empty.

I am off the (not so controversial) opinion that labor should be paid fair wages, but I think it's also fair to use tech like this to multiply labor productivity.

The last piece is the cost of raw materials, which has also ballooned.

[1]: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2025/04/04/berkeley-housing-dow...

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> A big part of this is obviously (union) labor

I live in Wyoming. We don’t have many unions. The cost scourge is still there due to red tape and general fuckery.

Red or blue, those who own property own the levers of power to determine what gets built.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who thinks utterly stifling construction restrictions are a good thing, yet they seem to exist everywhere.

Unions don't help but in most casese they are a tiny problem. The real question is which red tape is really there for good reason.

In the best case they certainly would help workers be able to afford the homes they built though. My friend was telling me today that his grandfather came out to California to work as a farm hand, and used that income to buy a home in the area. Imagine doing so now.

I really wish people would be more specific when they complain about "red tape." I think a lot of people just use red tape as a generalization that means "every government rule and formality that I don't like." Exactly which "red tape" is adding how much cost to projects? Arguers should enumerate them and explain why each cost is unnecessary.

That is a lot of work. It is easy to complain about 'red tape', but ever single line is there for a reason. So the real arguement is what isn't good enough to be worth the cost. I don't want a building to fall, but I also don't want inspectors to insists on additional bracing where the isn't even a stress point (which I have seen)

You wrote this in a separate comment: "There is a well-documented cost premium to building in America that isn’t explained by complexity or wages."

I am fairly confident that Europe has a lot more red tape than Wyoming. Yet it's considerably cheaper to build large projects in Europe.

Correct. My point is this isn't caused by labour unions.

> Europe has a lot more red tape than Wyoming

In general that's true, but perhaps not when it comes to construction, especially for large public projects. In Europe, the goal of such projects appears to be to complete the project and have the thing that they're building. In the US, at least as of late, it seems like the goal is to pay various interest groups in money or patronage, and whether the thing gets built or not is only of a secondary significance.

How much capability do European governments have to perform/construct or closely monitor these projects?

I have a theory that in-house expertise is cheaper in the long run.

My university has an auto shop for this very reason - at a certain size, it makes more sense to care for your own fleet than it does to contract it out, even though the auto fleet peeps have approximately zero overlap with educational goals.

I found this interesting:

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/us-construction-has-prod...

More than just red-tape there's whitecollar processes in pre-construction that take months. Just estimating the cost of each subtrade is a process currently done by hand on blueprints (what I work on automating).

`white_collar_automation * robotics_automation = building more, cheaper`

> The last piece is the cost of raw materials, which has also ballooned.

Which is about to explode as the tariffs hit the US market.

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