Apartments are a different beast.
This was an explicit goal of the designers of the early building code split: make single family homes as cheap as possible, and apartments as expensive as possible.
What does it take to get a more efficient building market? Lots of building, lots of competition in building. Low barriers to new contractors becoming builders, etc.
It's truly only the YIMBYs who ever talk about any of this stuff in my experience.
Yonah Freemark has some OK work, and that's a fine piece in isolation, but it's an outlier in the literature but gets trotted out because NIMBYs want to use it to block housing, not because it's a significant piece that applies across the nation.
a market with regulations: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
crazy that there were more houses being built pre-GFC when all those burdensome regulations were so suffocating and it never rebounded
Actually building is the same as building to regulations. Regulations make it more expensive. You can't just hand-wave separate them.
As in, the cost to build things in ways that completely ignore regulations. Regulations about building materials that won't collapse, and won't catch fire, and won't give everyone living there cancer. Regulations about safe electrification; safe, clean, adequate water; wastewater systems that won't drown the lower floors in raw sewage.
Do you know about the Grenfell Tower disaster?
70 people died, 70 more were injured, and hundreds were left without places to live, because the builders didn't think it was important to follow regulations. So they could make an extra buck.
So tell us about what the "cost to actually build" is. Please. Just remember that cost isn't only denominated in dollars and pounds.
You would be surprised.
What? What?
I dare anyone here who's simping for regulation to try to develop from scratch something that does not benefit from the myriad of exemptions that apply to 1-few family residential development (because there'd be no political will for the racket if the average homeowner was subject to it).
Those $500k costs include $100k of which is engineering for a SWPPP that any sane site planner who doesn't want shit to erode in no time flat would have gotten 95% of the same effect of anyway.
And the dirt work guy's bill includes god knows how many extra hours it takes to get it all spot on to meet the plans. He could've shot from the hip and done the job but there were plans and had to hit them.
And of course the lawyer has to go rounds with the town over what level of maintenance detail needs to be specified in the SWPP.
And of course the rent has to cover the landscaper who comes once a month to mow the ditch grass and stuff because that contract is how they cover their own ass.
The reason every goddamn modern property looks the same with the same shitty corporate bland sidewalks and same planters and same parking lot and entry way with the same five styles of door and the same light level and same everything is because every party involved if formulaically trying to meet the regulations related to their trade as cheaply as possible. And everyone knows this stupid. Every single party in the chain of developing a building from the initial survey to specing the lightbulbs knows they could, without even getting close to underperforming solutions, deliver infinitely more value if they could just exercise their goddamn professional discretion.
The guy delivering a rented trench box to a construction site that's chiseled out of bedrock knows what he's doing is wasteful and stupid just as much as the guy signing the check and the guys wasting their dime dropping it into the trench but hey, the rules are the rules and they're all billing the next guy down the line for it so it all goes on.
I can do that easily. Give me a ~10ac property where what isn't steep is stream or bog. I want to clear ~1ac total for 5-houses on 2ac each and the road to reach them needs to cross a stream and traverse some bog (read: offsets). The houses will have to be on piles because as expensive as that is that's cheaper than cutting flat land and doing walls or offsets.
surveys and delineation $20,000 bridge $25,000 road and driveway $75,000 stormwater $40,000 Wetlands offsetting $25,000 250 Permitting $140,000 the houses themselves (remember, they're on fancypants piles) $100,000 septics (mounds) and wells $75,000
total: $500k, 100k per house.
You could cut some out by DIYing the actual permitting submissions but even if you don't make costly mistakes in wording and/or detail level there's a lot of value in having your shit cross the government's desks on the letterhead of an engineering firm who's stuff they've approved a million times before.
The developer needs to then build the houses rich af on the inside and generally check every box to sell for enough to cover the costs. This kind of stuff is why so much of the development in Vermont is rich assholes from NYC in brand new million dollar homes on the world's shittiest gravel road with the world's shittiest driveways. Granite countertops and picture windows the size of rail cars are damn near free compared to the cost of putting a shovel in the ground.
thankfully we have regulations that disincentive those projects. there are plenty of other spots to build especially in the denser areas
Used to be, the contractor would rent a trenchbox at his discretion. But that means "almost never", because the contractor that doesn't has lower prices than one that does, and just has to pay the occasional OSHA fine. But workers keep dying in trenches, so the government has to step in and make a rule "thou must always use a trenchbox".
We can't go back to "contractor's discretion", because then people die in easily preventable ways. The other alternative is MORE regulation, and the contractor has to do a soil study to know if they're required to use a trenchbox for this particular trench.