I built my current house recently, and our builder used a prefab factory in the region for some of the construction. I would _never_ do it again. The process has all the pitfalls of the waterfall software development model, but at the end you have to live in the failed project!
It took months for the factory to do their pre-build engineering, and that's after they started the process using plans from my architect. The companies building these modules tend to sell mostly from their own catalog of floorplans and modules, so they don't have a strong incentive to hire skilled architects for the relatively small amount of custom work that comes in (I fell into this category). I'm led to believe that they hire draftsmen instead of architects.
They built one of the modules a foot too long, so it hangs over the edge of the foundation. They also messed up the roof line, so some guttering and geometry had to be changed for the garage that was stick-built onsite. They did all of the drywall wraps around the windows incorrectly. Every single door was hung incorrectly, some with chunks taken out from bad routing. The vinyl plank flooring has bubbles because they didn't float it correctly. They omitted electrical features that were on their own drawings. They ordered a few wrong windows, so they charged me anyway and just laid them on the floor when they shipped the module.
It'll all be fine at the end of the day, but the parts that were built onsite are all so much better. No cheaper, mind you, but faster and with much less drama. Maybe there are some parts of the industry that do a lot better, but I kind of wish I'd listened to my dad when he said "the pioneers take the arrows".
> […] so they don't have a strong incentive to hire skilled architects for the relatively small amount of custom work that comes in (I fell into this category). I'm led to believe that they hire draftsmen instead of architects.
If you're going to go with a vendor with a 'catalogue' of prefab plans, then I would think you'd want to choose from their pre-designed plans.
There's a middle-ground between completely prefab catalogue plans, and stuff that's built by on-site carpenters (which aren't a bad option if you're doing custom) doing 'stick built': and that's to hire a company that specifically does custom prefab frame walls:
Yup. The theme is "why isn't prefab assembly line production not taking over home building", and the (current) top comment is: prefab didn't work for my custom design.
While architects can be talented and make a great design on so many levels, can they really fully optimize space for usability and features to a deep level? I just think of RV interior design, which amazes me sometimes with the ingenious use of space that is clearly the result of dozens of rounds of iterative design over the year.
Not that a house should be that crazy (aside from the tiny house movement) with maximizing space, but if there were industrial production, then you could get to deep optimization of the floor design.
What always strikes me with (american suburban) houses, is that they are very inefficient at vertical storage of things like clothes, dishes, and a ton of other housewares that you need on a daily basis (so you don't dump them in the basement). I walk through 3000 and 4000 sqft houses and they are only marginally better than a well designed 2000 sqft house in usability.
You ever notice why all the people satisfied with their custom home are either obscenely wealthy or the kind of people who buy a front end loader just because it's a good deal even if it needs work? There are two ways to get a custom home done right.
1. Be stupidly rich and don't give a crap about how much you spend
Absolutely correct. In fact to expand on this slightly... I've had a lot of clients wanting to find land to build...what they don't understand is how few lenders are willing to lend on just land / single home building projects (at least in my market). Then you add in the well and septic where so many just waive their hands "no big deal right?" Um - it sure is a big deal if you are the "lucky" party who doesn't hit water for > 1000 feet. I've got a lot of prospective buyer / builders who show up with tech money and end up very surprised at how quickly you can eat through a million dollars cash when you start from bare land.
This. We live in farm country and bare land loans have gone from 20% down to 25% down in the last couple of years. You receive loans in chunks for building a custom home as the builder completes milestones. There was a "restoration" loan that came with certified builders and a government mandated architect that signed off on payment to the builder as milestones were reached. I am not sure if this type of loan is available any longer. In my opinion it is very difficult to purchase a mini farm (less than 100 acres) and make a go of it in the south. Some of our friends are building "barn" homes. Buy the land cheaply 5-10 acres. Have a metal barn built for less than $60k and then convert the interior to a home. This is very popular currently in Carroll county GA (feeder to Atlanta for jobs).
Although I think throwaway is correct that that isn't what they meant, people do indeed lease land in the United States. It's more common in commercial real estate, but there are also (predatory, in my opinion) land leases for "manufactured" (i.e. mobile) homes where the resident buys the home but doesn't own the land under it.
Yes, throwaway understood my meaning... and you are right too that there are circumstances where people own a home but not the land underneath. Apart from the example you gave, I'm also vaguely aware of cases where tribes own reservation land where homes have been built by non-tribe members who technically have a lease to the land.
And actually you bring up another wrinkle, which is if you don't own the land underneath, there are plenty of lenders who also won't lend to you to buy a manufactured home, because they consider it to be personal property rather than a permanent dwelling (which they could more easily foreclose and sell)
Isnt that the point of the article - the "bone structure" is supposedly built so that unskilled labour (ie you and three mates) can erect the building yourself?
I have to admit that having a prefab building that has one side a foot longer than the other side not sound like a condemnation of the concept but the factory that built it. I presume one would have recourse under contract for such a foul up?
> I presume one would have recourse under contract for such a foul up?
Possibly, but delays in construction are what kill you. You can't really FedEx overnight new structural steel framing components, so now you're blocked until they can get
It sort of sounds like perhaps if you are going pre-fab you shouldn't expect to be able to do any modifications or fit their pieces to your own plans? Instead just find a site that is suitable and plop down their exact premade floorplan?
I have no evidence, but I suspect that's likely to get the best outcome, as far as the factory's quality level is concerned. They're pretty heavily optimized for a particular set of processes, and anything that departs from that happy path seems likely to increase risk.
Yes, this story reminds me of some clients I’ve had that always want to customise off the shelf software to do what they want when it would be easier to build it from scratch.
After it was delivered (and it comes delivered with sheetrock walls, electrical, and subfloor), my coworker noticed that the the factory forgot a step: the plumbing. The builder had to rip out lots of the sheetrock and install plumbing.
Lots of mistakes occur while building a house. The difference is that when the workers are already in the field, it is generally quite inexpensive to identify and fix any problems. Not so for the prefab stuff.
I think these problems are unique to your type of home maybe.
I have been to a Bone Structure presentation. They fabricate all parts and interfaces using computer operated cutters with extreme precision from CAD plans. Note that parts are made of metal, not wood.
The structure is then aligns perfectly and all connection holes align perfectly as well.
The building is then assembled using just an electric screw driver, on sight. They claimed that almost anyone could do it, like IKEA. But they still require skilled technicians. But the point was that it isn’t a rocket science and plans are designed in such a way that you can’t really mess it up too much.
It may be precisely fabricated exactly as specified in the CAD plans. That doesn't mean the CAD isn't riddled with errors.
I've worked in traditional construction and the plans are never accurate with hundreds of omissions/errors/interferences. Those can be corrected in real time when something is field built, but are nearly impossible when the house ships wrong but nearly finished.
I can see it working with cookie cutter housing - first ~5 will be garbage as they find bugs then slap a thousand identical copies up cheaply. For custom it's a mess.
Getting on site to realise X is completely wrong is so standard most architects spend probably 20%+ of their time talking to builders. This level of QA never happens in a factory.
The buildings also look horrendous by default, artificial and cheap looking with a complete lack of character. I’m all for prefab in theory but it’s like building a whole piece of software without testing any of the interfaces fit together or that say logging and error handling are plumbed in without testing them. It’s clearly a recipe for disaster even with the best organised prefabricator.
We had a frank conversation with the builder about costs, as well as what was and wasn't worth fighting over. Some items were able to be repaired without impacting the budget by subcontractors that were already coming in to do other things. Other things we didn't care enough about to make a fuss over (like the roof line not matching up right on the back side of the house, where no one will ever notice). Some things we asked her to fix at her expense.
We were very aware that big projects, be they software or home construction, don't ever go perfectly, so we made a conscious effort to stay calm and solution-oriented through the entire multi-year process. We came in very slightly under budget, and things that need to get addressed are getting addressed, whereas a lawsuit would have turned things adversarial very quickly.
>We were very aware that big projects, be they software or home construction, don't ever go perfectly
Most large projects have some central features/processes that are by their very nature both very expensive and very complicated.
The entire prefab industry is built around minimising those things - but then something ELSE becomes the most expensive/complicated thing. You then have a situation where if you're seen as a bottleneck, holding up the expensive/complicated thing, then the total cost of the project will balloon.
Many prefab companies know this and are happy to sell modules with little QA work done, because it's unlikely that there will be serious repercussions. Once you accept the work then it'll be too hard for your legal team to fight for (or at least, not financially worth it).
I'm not saying that prefab companies are ethically bankrupt, but it IS an environment that promotes this method of doing business. I've been in construction for mining/oil&gas companies, on both sides of this situation, quite a few times. The amount of shoddy work you're willing to accept is quite terrifying once the cost for re-work gets into nine and ten digits.
I imagine it's because he would be largely up against a company and litigators skilled at meeting the letter of the contract if not the spirit. "Winning" would likely see him get a minimum level of corrections done to the house, which could be accomplished for less than the cost of a lawsuit.
According to my neighbor, who is a lawyer and likes to drink, this is pretty common. He is on a lot of cases where the lawsuit makes him (the lawyer) more money than either party would have saved or lost had they just settled up front.
The one I remember had to do w/ $1900 worth of lost wedding photos cuz a server died or got deleted. Cost more to twist the knife in court than to just settle.
Probably depends on your local jurisdiction... I am not a lawyer but my own experiences tell me that any kind of civil case below about $50K, the courts would really you rather not bother them with this, and you are going to spend at least 20% of that and several years before you may or may not see a dime.
Oh and the 15k are only for legal costs. Don't forget rent for 3 years on top of that. And all the money that you'll still have to pay for the construction. And stress (medical bills are not cheap).
It may not have been the customisation, more the processes of pre-fab in general and what the production process is. I didn't build my house but it's a recent pre-fab build, straight from the catalogue (a Swedish company). The amount of shoddy workmanship and shortcuts taken is surprising and I'm slowly correcting replacing a lot of the door & window surrounds, some floor supports, broken wiring, badly aligned panels, etc...
The overwhelming downside of not needing professional builders to build a house is not having professional builders build a house. Half-assed amateurs aren't going to give you the quality you expect for your home.
I can imagine that bespoke is not a great fit for prefab. My impression of prefab construction is that it's mostly used when lots of identical buildings need to be built. Then you can afford to have everything tested in advance to make sure it all fits together. If you're building something unique, don't you basically miss out on all of the advantages of prefab, while keeping its disadvantages?
This article seems to be missing some critical information - does this proposed system help with anything but the framing?
Because framing a house, even a two story house, only takes an experienced crew a couple of days. And in the neighborhoods springing up around here, they are using pre-fab framed walls (still using wooden studs (which are cheap and plentiful), but they arrive on site as whole walls).
Before framing, there's site prep, foundation pours (probably some early HVAC and plumbing as well), floor joists, and floor sheeting. After framing, there's sheeting (the outside), roofing, putting in windows/doors, waterproofing (can be avoided with some more expensive sheeting options), and siding (which includes caulking the edges of the siding, and around any wall penetration).
Then there's insulating the outer walls, framing the interior walls, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, electrical, carpeting/flooring, drywall, trim, paint, landscaping... and probably a dozen other things I don't know about.
Optimizing only the framing - something that's already been pretty well optimized - isn't going to change prices much. What's really needed is a way to be ship entire finished walls.
(Seriously, look up some videos about "Larry Haun" and watch him and his brother frame an entire floor in under a day, using mostly hand tools).
One big area where modular prefab can potentially make a difference is by reducing the need for skilled tradesmen, particularly electricians, plumbers and HVAC techs.
In most growing American metros, a major constraining factor on housing supply is the lack of these skilled tradesmen. In contrast, drywall, painting, and landscaping tend to be lower-skilled and easier to draw from the general labor pool.
You can have a high-productivity manufacturing center start with a pre-fab "core" built out of a modular shipping container, and pre-fab roof trusses. In parallel, you prep the site including any lot development and laying the concrete foundation. You then install the core and trusses on site, and can finish up the drywall and paining very quickly.
The core contains all the complex plumbing, electrical work, HVAC and kitchen work. The finished house looks indistinguishable from regular construction, and you can stand up single family homes or duplexes in under two months.
That sounds very much like the promise of low-code: use our pre-fab components to quickly assemble your software apps. You'll be able to this with lower skilled people, and no longer be limited by the lack skilled software engineers...
Offhand thought is the advantage to using lower skilled labor probably benefits Bone Structure more than it benefits the builder. Two choices pay bone structure a premium for custom cut metal framing or pay a premium for skilled framers.
Note unskilled tends to come with a lot of other negatives.
> One big area where modular prefab can potentially make a difference is by reducing the need for skilled tradesmen, particularly electricians, plumbers and HVAC techs.
To what end? As a country we're already struggling to create enough middle-class jobs and you're suggesting we try to gut another whole sector. So that owners/executives of prefab factories can pocket the money?
If you think it's going to reduce cost or benefit the consumer, you're crazy.
I notice you downvoted without responding. I presume you've got a plan to recreate those jobs vs. just transferring wealth upwards and are keeping it a secret.
It astounds me people on HN think that eliminating jobs without any thought to the social impact is somehow a righteous goal to strive for. Yet you can't even answer what the benefit is to society other than making some really rich dude a little bit richer at the expensive of hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs. And most likely an end product for consumers that's LOWER quality.
This is the fallacy - The Fallacy - that is always made by those who don’t understand economics.
Why did we build the car when it put all of the horse tradesmen out of business? Why do we use elevator buttons and put the doormen out of a job? Why did we create the Internet when perfectly good newspaper printers could pass information to us?
You are making an age-old argument that we need to reduce productivity in order to save jobs. If you spent your whole life scrubbing a floor with a tooth brush when right next to you is a mop, just so you can ensure more of your time was spent washing, wouldn’t you feel like your life was wasted?
I think your example isn't completely off the mark, but I do think the article itself actually answers this: there is a shortage in trade labour in the non-commercial construction sector in (North) America.
We are also at a cross-roads with regards to having a housing crisis. There are many places now (Bay Area, Boulder) where housing is skyrocketing not because the value is naturally increasing, but is instead being artificially inflated due to a shortage in homes. One "radical" solution to this: build more homes.
However, given the amount of labour and time needed to do so, we may not be able to avoid the housing crisis. One way the market is responding is moving to pre-fab construction, and trying to reduce time / costs that way. The article does seem to claim that the projects cost about the same, even if pre-fab is faster in terms of time. This _does_ identify a problem with pre-fab, namely, how come they can't fulfill this promise of being cheaper & faster. Seems strange that you save time but still cost the same when what you're proposing is taking away a significant chunk of higher-skilled labour from the equation.
Some of this is regulatory capture (wasted time / money trying to convince cities of the process), some of this is nascent technology sucking (see top parent comment, sometimes pre-fab doesn't get it right), and some of this seems to just be a lack of experience on behalf of the companies trying to "disrupt" construction.
The housing affordability crisis is caused by a set of polices designed to protect the equity of existing property holders by artificially constraining new housing supply and allowing a non-trivial numbers of properties to be removed from the long-term housing market by sitting unoccupied or being abused as short term rentals.
Further affordability pressure is also caused by the proceeds of corruption and organized crime being used to buy/hold housing as part of money laundering schemes. The sums of criminal money involved in the housing market are non-trivial and have been estimated to account for upwards of 5% of housing valuation in some cities.
Construction costs do not enter into this at all.
If you want to address housing affordability, only three things will make a difference: get rid of NIMBY vetoes on new construction, require all properties that are not owner-occupied to be tenanted, and severely crack down on money laundering through the real estate market.
The "housing crisis" is all about regulatory capture of local zoning laws and local oligopolies over development. None of that has anything to do with construction efficiency, which is already using "prefab" in the sense that the stud walls and roof trusses are already prefabbed offsite.
Not to mention non-commercial construction tends to employ a large illegal immigrant labor population, which tends to reduce relative wages.
I don't know that you could avoid the crunch. Markets take time to respond to things, and the kind of housing that is prohibited, multifamily and anything >2 stories, is one where you progressively need more and more specialized tradesmen.
The US used to have prefab apartment block construction, as did most Western public housing programs, but generally speaking they have not held up over time.
This is potentially very much like saying, "we burned this little bit of fuel, and all that happened was the fire got brighter because it spread to more fuel! It can never go out!".
There's no reason to expect the job-generation cycle to last forever. In fact there's every reason to believe it can't. The question is whether it ends on a scale more like decades or centuries. To blindly assume that things will continue as they have is foolish. (To be clear, I think the solution looks more like UBI than Luddism.)
I agree that the job-generation cycle may not last forever. But in order to oppose new tech as a bad thing right now, you have to make the case that the job-generation cycle is broken right now.
Arguing against new tech now because of some inevitable eventual breakdown of the job-generation cycle is just luddism with extra steps.
I think there is something to be said here. The car is a superior technology to a horse, but in many ways a prefab house is an inferior product. It's a regression, built from a need for skilled tradesmen and a lack of this labor supply.
I think a better way around that need would be to bolster training of skilled people which would lead to increased labor supply to meet this demand, rather than trying to figure out how to wring the last dime out of everything.
There was a story once told by Eric Schmidt that while on a trip to China he was touring a bridge construction and no heavy machinery was being used, the Chinese officials were pointing it out as something positive because it meant more people worked at the site and it generated more jobs.
Eric said they should have given the workers spoons if that was the goal, which caused a couple laughs that were met with anxious stares by local officials.
Large steel bridge construction involves much hand labor. Here's a big job in China.[1] If you're not seeing the foundation work or crane work, it may look like it's all hand labor. Large bridges are custom-designed prefabs. Somewhere else, there's a factory making the parts.
See also: countries that maintain a military big enough to fight off an attack from two hostile star systems at once, never mind two hostile countries.
The defense industrial complex is the go-to, but I got a kind of novel jobs program that doesn't get thrown around a lot: Private Health Insurance.
There's a straightforward transaction that occurs between healthcare provider and patient. But every...single...dollar that flows through the healthcare system is diverted through the massive private health insurance industry, which is essentially an artificial middleman skimming money off the top of the transaction between healthcare provider and patient. This provides employment for millions of accountants, and MBAs, and marketing people, and database engineers, and statisticians, and lobbyists, and etc.
It's the more touchy-feely cousin of the Defense Industrial Complex that must vacuum up money somewhere in the same order of magnitude.
In places with, relatively speaking, rich social services programs are essentially jobs programs. The budgets are caseloads are never reflective of need, and most families would be better served with getting a check than meeting with a burnt/checked out social worker. Often times programs run by the state are so taxed that they are entirely incapable of meeting the metrics required by law.
Those trillions would have been better spent expanding government programs in: land preservation, social services, healthcare, stem, and infrastructure maintenance and expansion. Instead it's just sloshing around the accounts of people who neither understand nor care about the plights of the average American.
I see you ALSO failed to explain what the replacement jobs for these highly skilled, well-paid employees will be.
Horse tradesman became car dealerships. Elevator operator was never a skilled position in the first place. The internet has actually created a massive crisis in the western world that we're just now starting to realize - local newspapers going out of business is HORRIBLE for a functioning democracy, and nations across the globe are suing companies like google because of it.
You're insinuating that there will somehow be a new job for the folks put out of work, but fail to explain what that is. Look no further than Detroit, hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs that are simply gone. More weight on the economy, fewer middle class citizens, but a handful of shareholders and executives that are significantly more wealthy.
While I appreciate the condescending tone, I don't think you've even begun to put critical thinking skills to the problem. You're just parroting the same old tired story that justified "trick down economics" which is also based on a reality that doesn't exist.
What’s better - everyone who lost their jobs picks a new career and retrains doing something new that is valued by society, or the government subsidizes unvalued industries that no one wants just so people never experience any pain?
I’m sympathetic that government can help those who lose jobs. My preference is straight-up cash transfers so they can pick their own schools and move to where jobs are, rather than a government-run school loaded with bureaucracy. But artificially preserving shrinking industries just so we can all act like we still need them around is a waste of tax dollars and is logically inconsistent.
You keep downvoting me, but you’ve yet to explain where these jobs are coming from. The jobs Detroit lost didn’t shift, they were just lost forever. The people who held them now work minimum wage jobs or live off welfare. What are the electricians and plumbers doing instead? You can keep saying people will just retrain and do something else but that’s about as useful as Trump saying he’ll bring manufacturing jobs back to the US without any plan. The end result is a lot of nothing.
I’m not downvoting you - on HN you can’t downvote someone you are replying to. It’s the rest of HN that is downvoting your arguments.
Tons of jobs we have now didn’t exist 5, 10, 25 years ago. Every time a mass amount of jobs are lost when an industry collapses, they always say “this time is different!” I just fundamentally disagree with that premise. There will always be work to do and someone willing to pay for it. If that ceases to be the case it would be the first time in human history, which seems way less likely than society continuing on like it has for millennia.
You also seem to think individuals are too stupid to look at the job market, see what skills are in demand, and self-select for learning a skill that they will enjoy and get compensated a fair wage to them. Every single person who loses a job, provided they eventually get off the government dole, will have to find something new to do. Working for a while at a restaurant or warehouse isn’t something they have to do forever. There is just a distinct lack of belief in human agency in your postings.
I think the sentiment you are responding to is the erosion of good jobs. There are tons of new jobs, but for those impacted by this stuff very few of them are good jobs that pay a middle-class income (I know, I don't have a cite, but I'm explaining a sentiment, not a fact - so iono I don't got it).
A contractor in a town where the jobs dried up might work at Lowe's now for example, where they would be kept under 20 hours a week so Lowe's doesn't have to pay benefits, and they could look forward to living in a van off of social security when they retire (source - this is my brother in law at 55 y/o - he has no idea how computers work, and desperately just wants to go back to laying tile like he did for most of his life - lost work - got a job at Lowes a few years back - just laid off actually, due to the virus - he's 100% screwed). There are a lot of these folks floating around, and what has happened to them is absolutely tragic.
Ideally he should re-train in something, but what often winds up happening is that they get sucked into for-profit colleges that encourage them to take out predatory high-interest loans for training that lead to job markets that are either oversaturated, or misrepresented. Then come the payday loans, then come the repossessions.
Ideally those people would just buy a bunch of NoStarch books and become fullstack developers or something, but that's not how people work, unfortunately and we just haven't figured out a good mechanism to help keep those folks on their feet.
The person you're responding to is waaaaaay too angry, and I don't believe you deserve to be on the receiving-end of that, but they may be going through some really rough stuff right now. There's a lot of people who have suddenly found themselves unemployed and homeless and they may very well be in that situation.
So what replaced the jobs in Detroit? You keep saying this but the numbers don't reflect what you're claiming. The middle class in the US is SHRINKING, their wealth is decreasing, and it has been since the 70s. All those jobs are going to other countries or disappearing entirely. You and everyone else on HN can keep parroting the same "it's different jobs" until you're blue in the face, but until you can show me some actual DATA to backup the claim, you're literally just making up a reality that doesn't exist. You're 4 responses in yet without a single citation to back up your claim that there are new jobs to replace the old, and I'm willing to bet if you replied 20 more times you STILL wouldn't have any facts to back anything up you've said. Going from a manufacturing job making $60-80k+/year to driving Uber making minimum wage isn't a "replacement".
> The people who held them now work minimum wage jobs or live off welfare.
You might want to provide a source for that one, there is still a huge amount of car industry expertise there including robotics, electric car engineering and thousands of support companies that feed the main companies.
I have friends who are economists, and I get in this argument with them all the time over beers.
There's economic optimization, and social optimization, and those are two different things that are often totally orthagonal.
Economic progress is often horrendously negative for people's lives and livelihoods. People don't just pick-up and move, or re-train in a completely different field with the fluidity that is often indicated, and disruption often destroys lives. This is why income inequality is getting really worrisome, and there's the huge debate over college education costs, and you see so many people now living in their cars because they're chronically under-employed. This is why Trump was pandering to Pennsylvania coal miners and the like. There are millions and millions of people kind of stuck and not sure how to move forward. Everybody in this country can't just be a fullstack web guy, and the alternatives are increasingly working for minimum wage at two jobs, each of which keeps you under 20 hours so they don't have to pay benefits.
That being said, you can't just put the brakes on progress so that people doing things that we don't need anymore are kept happy.
Ideally, we'd have mechanisms in place to help people transition, but we really don't. The best we have is things like the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, various infrastructure programs (just big employment schemes), and affordable Community College vocational programs. The worst we have are predatory vocational programs that re-train people with useless skills, which are essentially scams to cash in on predatory student loans and GI Bill money.
This is the crux of the 2016 election, and although the virus has hijacked 2020 it probably would have been the crux of that one as well. You have Yang and Sanders proposing massive reforms, AOC with the Green New Deal, contrasted with Trump pushing a regressive approach, and everybody's polarized and yada yada.
Nobody has a good answer yet, or 300 million people wouldn't currently be arguing about it. Ideally we'd have a temporary system of 'engineered inefficiency' in the economy that would help people with legacy skills transition into new fields when employment dried up. But, nobody knows how to politically design, implement, or fund anything like that. So, what we have is this and it sucks.
I hope people smarter than me are working on this problem. I feel horrible about all the folks who have just gotten screwed, and have lost their homes, and are trapped in cycles of poverty. But, I mean, we are debating with strangers on the internet, so you know, no ill will towards anyone even if they disagree.
Very well put! And I agree that our retraining systems are horrendous. I’m probably not anywhere near as reasonable as you, as I can point to the government for every problem - why is college so expensive? Federally backed loans you can’t discharge in bankruptcy. Why do so many jobs need licenses that take years and tens of thousands of dollars to get when, for example, cutting hair is something you can learn on Youtube? Why does starting a billion dollar software company have way less friction and red tape than starting a convenience store? Why is housing so expensive? I can go all day.
Economic freedom leads to personal freedom and increased happiness. The never ending desire to have the government solve all our problems is what got us into this huge mess in the first place. I know that people are hurting, but the solution will emerge.
So, yeah, I'm glad you're a free-market guy because I don't have enough free-market guys to drink beer and argue with. Although I'm not drinking beer (if you are, cheers), and we're not really arguing.
I am curious what the mechanism is from the free-market side to prevent increasing income inequality, and regulatory capture by corporations and the wealthy? If we de-regulate, what stops Bezos and Exxon, EvilCorp, and whoever from doing whatever they want (assume for a second that's not already happening to some extent under the current setup)? I guess that there's a market-based mechanism that is supposed to prevent that, but I don't know enough libertarians to have heard the argument.
I'm not convinced we should legislate our way out of anything either, but I can't get over the idea that deregulation = noone looking over the shoulders of those with absurd amounts of money and the wolf eats the whole damn henhouse.
Yeah, I can’t see how this goes on for much longer without the rise of a new land independent nobility that “employs” everyone else as “contractors” for food, clothing, shelter and very little else. This year amazon has grown enough to “hire” 500 more families in this city. Please put in your family’s application for warehouse attendant now. With the “white collar” jobs becoming like the butlers/valet of yesterday (the privileged servant class).
For a top 5 (or 7) wish list it would be along the line of:
- Outlaw billionaires the same way we’ve outlawed (at least on paper) monopolies. At that scale individuals have the power to sway governments. (A billion is likely not the right number, but it’s a good starting point.)
- Kill the money in politics. Make lobbying illegal.
- Kill the filibuster
- Kill the electoral college
- Decouple healthcare from employment (The only realistic solution I know of is socializing it).
- Provide a robust safety net (but get rid of the checks balances to prevent “abuse”). Just blanket give everyone $2000/month.
- Eliminate exemptions to providing benefits make it proportional to hours worked (worked an average of 10 hours a week for a month? That employer must provide 1 week of benefits to that person.) There is no common good from giving employer a massive expenses break to employ 2 people at 20 hours a week instead of just hiring one full time employee. This is gaming the system plain and simple.
I concede we need the state and am therefore not an anarcho-capitalist. My ideal state is as small as possible and no larger. Military and nuclear weapons are my biggest gotchas that I can’t reason my way around.
So you are asking me the wrong premise - if the state has no power, what regulation can a corporation capture?
I like corporations because businesses provide value. They can fail. The organizing principle has a straight-forwards goal of earning money. I don’t see any states failing (except for socialist ones like Venezuela) in a way that can put them out of business - they tend to grow forever in all directions, capturing more wealth and diminishing freedom.
The next question - do I care about inequality as a given? If everyone on earth had a healthy, purpose driven life but one family had 99.99% of all the wealth, would this be a problem? Basically do we dislike inequality because of envy or because most people genuinely have nothing?
You are correct that corporations are already running the show. Our biggest corporations are more powerful than most countries on earth. Because innovation in free societies is emergent and decentralized, the best the government can do is play whack-a-mole every few years as the free market laps them over and over.
I like the chaos, I like the unpredictability, I like weird people, I like having the freedom to do whatever I want. I want maximum freedom in all things and the least amount of coercion.
One area you should look at if you aren’t familiar is cryptocurrency. This is the most powerful innovation in regards to regaining individual freedom - financial freedom - that has come in centuries. The ability of governments to print their way out of debt is coming to an end, and individuals all over the world are going to have an escape valve from corrupt elites.
This was kind of a rambling response, no beer involved. Cheers
The problem with a state with no power is that it has no ability to prevent organizations from externalizing all of the costs of their profits. A simple place to see this is in environmental regulations. I can give plenty of examples, but before the rise of environmental regulation in the late 20th century, wide swathes of our country were regularly and freely polluted. We fixed lots of that through application of government power and imposed costs on polluters, both large and small.
Ok, so this is kind of interesting because to increase freedom, we would have to actively reduce existing legislation. So both sides, the side that sees government as the problem, and the side that sees government as the solution, have to get legislators on-board to actually do something to implement their plan.
Oh man, things aren't looking good for any of us on either side.
I have a minority view well outside the mainstream. Libertarians do best on individual issues. When analyzed in isolation the libertarian argument wins out for many things.
While libertarians lack official power, the market is so powerful that it drives tons of human activity without people even being aware. Also, the belief that the government is all-powerful and can actually solve problems is 99% fiction. So while people look to the president as someone to blame for problems or praise for solutions, the truth is that very little of consequence is in the president’s (or government’s) control. So being a libertarian is a state of mind - the acknowledgment that the source of happiness and purpose is ultimately your own concern and no one else can do this for you. Not having a seat in government means nothing because libertarians generally don’t want government and it’s usually fairly easy to ignore, legally avoid paying taxes to through a variety of loopholes and structures in our Byzantine tax code, and is so ineffective it’s mind boggling that it ever gets anything done beyond corruption and graft.
So to come full circle, I believe governments are far weaker than most admit or recognize, and power is increasingly in the hands of private people and organizations. And I welcome this shift in power.
Both you and the person you are responding to have held a very interesting and civil discussion on a topic that is often charged. Thank you both for expressing these ideas so sanely. I found both the retraining "valley" from the parent poster and your positioning of libertarian worldviews as a state of mind interesting and crisp. Cheers.
The concept assumes there are replacement jobs being created. That was true for a hundred years, it hasn't been for the last 20+.
At some point automation eliminates jobs wholesale, and there aren't replacements waiting. People always refer to cars replacing horses and point out that all those jobs surrounding horses were replaced with something else - manufacturing plant jobs, car salesman, etc. What they fail to mention is that HORSES were replaced with CARS - and we've got far, far, far fewer horses on the planet today because they're just not needed.
I disagree that’s what he’s insinuating. I take a much bleaker view of it. Those jobs are gone permanently and many of the new jobs we see on the lower skill end of the scale are ghost jobs that ONLY exist because it’s cheaper and quicker to just pay people to do those things than to automate them, but once the cost of development/automation has been paid for we’re going to see millions of low wage jobs disappear at a MUCH faster pace than we have to this point.
Job losses are only going to accelerate for the foreseeable future across most industries and they won’t be replaced by anything or at most a small fraction of what was lost.
Instead of the Jetsons (everyone’s jobs get simpler and simpler until they’re trivial, which seems to be what you’re leaning towards) we’ll have huge swaths of people that have so much time on their hands the time value of labor will drop to almost $0.
ATMs actually led to an increase in bank branches and employees, because while they did replace positions they made it cheaper to open branches; bank tellers can be used more profitably than just doing extremely routine deposit and withdrawals. If building becomes a lot less bottlenecked, the same may apply.
>> One big area where modular prefab can potentially make a difference is by reducing the need for skilled tradesmen, particularly electricians, plumbers and HVAC techs.
> To what end?
To the end that you can get your house built on a schedule that you want. A neighbour is a general contractor who has a good reputation: he, and the specialty teams he uses, are booked at least a year out.
This isn't too say we shouldn't train more skilled trades, but having a spectrum of of people available helps those you can't afford to pay top dollar for top talent to also get quality results.
It should also be noted that not everyone is gifted enough to be a top or even decent trade, yet we want as many people as possible to be productively employed. There will some percentage of the population that may be most productive simply following what the computer tells them to do:
No company exists to create jobs and nobody ought to wish any product particularly a vital resource like housing that everyone needs cost more in order to transfer money to the middle class workforce.
If you want to do that just be straightforward about it and directly raise that money via taxes and give it to families.
It will be increasingly obvious as increasing automation kills jobs that ultimately probably wont ever be fully replaced that we need a solution that isn't deliberate inefficiency to maintain jobs.
You’re comments come across to me as condescending, argumentative (without being productive), actively hostile to other users, and so one-sided you sound almost completely uninformed on the topic. All of which is unacceptable behavior on HN.
That said you’re not totally off the mark, but comments like “It astounds me that people on HN think that eliminating jobs without any thought to the social impact” is why you’re getting down voted.
How do you know now I or anyone else hasn’t given this thought? If you browse though old stories you’ll see tons of discussion on this topic.
My point of view on this is “It’s too late. The genie is out of the bottle and no amount of trying to avoid job losses is going to be productive.” Instead we need to work towards making our gross economic output support everyone. If basic necessities are all provided for (such as though UBI or some other idea) then no one will care if jobs are lost because then people can focus on figuring out how to productively use their time rather than worrying about finding a shitty, or even non-shitty, job so their family can eat and stay out of the weather. And without that we’ll continue hemorrhaging jobs until we reach a critical point where there will be an honest to god revolution in the USA and things will be violently reset (not corrected).
We are buying house from company that is building them fully assembled: house is assembled indoor and include all electrical, plumbing, HVAC, insulation. Whole system is based on few types of modules that you can connect together and it scale from tiny house to standard house sizes and modules could be even stacked to get multiple floor levels.
This looks similar to the modular homes that were popular in the US in the 60s and 70s. Sadly, they went out of style because they earned the reputation of being cheap and flimsily constructed. This was because of all sorts of financial shenanigans.
At least in the US, banks are reluctant to back a mortgage to a home like this. Many of these modular homes are on leased land. Once the lease was up the house became worthless and had to be destroyed.
Beyond walls, there's entire rooms, provided your client wants a lot of identical factory-finished rooms small enough to transport. Doesn't really work for your average private housing client who wants big open plan areas to add their own decoration to, but it's ideal for chain hotels and student/social apartments. That's where the construction speedup is more noticeable because the unit fitouts can take place in parallel to site prep and foundation works, and where you also get economies of scale and better QA from fitting lots of copies of the same bathroom on a production line.
If I order a catalog house from a manufacturer that does prefab it would probably either mean completely prefabbed wall panels, i.e. wall panels with a handful of layers (timber framing, OSB, plasterboard, wind/moisture barriers, lathing, external panel with a base paint), plus roof trusses. Or it could mean just the framing (wall panel timber frames and roof trusses). There would be passages for vents etc but you wouldn't see entire prefab "rooms", or even prefab walls with e.g. tiles or fittings like plumbing or electrical, like you see e.g. in large hotels or cruise ships.
Prefab is the wrong optimization. It targets a minor improvement in a small part of the overall budget. Most of the time and money of construction in America is tied up in land prices, permitting, and regulation. Prefab solves zero of these issues.
There is a building going up in Oakland right now where Factory_OS put out a press release that they had built it in ten days. But they spent 7 years getting approvals, 18 months in site prep, and they've been detailing and finishing the building for more than a year since the press release, so it doesn't seem like the method of construction was a very important factor.
The advantage to me seems like it should be in quality and consistency, not cost and speed. Building houses is fast enough, and as you say the cost of the land often dominates, but the quality of houses is appallingly bad compared to consumer items mass produced in factories.
The quality issues that you encounter in houses aren't the framing either, though. It's the roof sealing, ventilation, trim, plumbing, ... all things that prefab framing also doesn't address.
True, I don't see a point to prefab unless it involves a lot more than the framing. But it seems totally possible to do prefab installation of most of the ventilation, plumbing, electrical, etc.
Does prefab go much beyond framing? The NAHB estimates that framing is only 17% of the cost of a house(1), so even cutting that cost in half doesn't save much on the whole project.
> so even cutting that cost in half doesn't save much on the whole project.
Houses are usually a leveraged investment. If you put down 5%, and prefab saves you 5%, you have massively reduced your risk of default during a downturn.
And if you expect it to take 20 years to pay off your mortgage, and framing saves 5%, that’s one year saved, which is massive IMHO.
Obviously a lot of assumptions to the above e.g. everyone else doesn’t get the 5% savings, and everyone doesn’t just bid up new house prices by 5% (because they are bounded by their mortgage which is related to their earnings, not costs).
These are fair points, and if a buyer had 100% confidence in prefab, your argument certainly makes financial sense. But for most consumers prefab is a novel approach, and therefore likely to be perceived as risky. So that savings might need to be greater to get them to try something new. Given the failure of prefab to make a big dent in the market, that seems to be exactly what's happening.
I am currently in the process of buying prefab house and after visiting couple of local factories it seems like most of them is doing just framing and competing on price only.
We are going with company that actually assemble full house inside and bring it to site fully equipped: electrical, plumbing etc.
Huh? There's a shortage of carpenters so if you can go prefab it is a win. In fact the article shows that if you can build a house faster with prefab at the same cost as a traditional house that's a win.
There isn't a shortage of carpenters. There is a shortage willing to work for the wages offered. I've done carpentry work in the past, offer enough money and I'll leave my tech job. I'm not the only one who could do carpentry for the right price.
Any skilled job that can be done poorly with little training becomes a bit of a lemon market.
I hate painting. I'm also a terrible painter. However, I've given up on ever hiring painters. Every professional painter I've used has either prepped the surface improperly, or put the coats on too thick, to the point where I rub paint off if I brush up against the wall.
I'm willing to pay more for better work, but I can't easily tell who will do a better job.
It is not number of coats it is thickness of coats. If you put on a thin coat of good paint it sticks well. Thick coats of even good paint won't stick.
Same here. I'm a skilled carpenter and woodworker, but for a much higher salary and benefits I can sit on my butt all day long typing into a computer. They would have to offer me a lot more money than my current six figure salary to get me to do carpentry work all day.
Around here, the carpenters I know all drive very nice trucks and are booked solid making $$$$. These guys are running their own 2-4 person shops though.
In my area, yacht racing is what carpenters do on the weekends. No joke. Brand new sails, custom everything, and, of course, when the wood trim needs fixing or varnishing, it looks gorgeous.
Me too. I worked for 5 years as a carpenter and at the end of the day it just wasn't worth the paycheck and the back pain.
We are starting to talk about externalized costs with regards to the environment, but this concept applies everywhere. We have a problem in this society paying the true cost of damn near everything and that includes physical labor.
Problem is it isn't much cheaper. There is still work to do on site. Prefab needs labor in the factory. Prefab generally has higher shipping costs. These mostly balance out.
It's about scale, as the person you are responding to clearly said.
Technically, it might be a win. It's not enough of a win, however, to bring many new converts. It simply doesn't scale to enough large savings to make much of a difference in the construction budgets OP actually was writing about.
> Most of the time and money of construction in America is tied up in land prices, permitting, and regulation. Prefab solves zero of these issues.
I'd hypothesize that access to affordable, reproducible, medium-scale home production would allow a lot of new places to try to develop. Land prices, permitting, & regulation are very different in different places. The places where these are not the major factors could have a better chance, if home construction could be more economical & effective & appealing, which pre-fabs might be able to help with.
You say it’s the wrong optimization but your argument seems to be that there are bigger problems. I tend to agree, particularly with pernicious stuff like single-unit zoning and such, but that doesn’t mean that prefab is “wrong” overall. I don’t see it as a cost optimization, I see it as a speed and consistency optimization. Do we know if long-term maintenance costs of prefab construction are lower?
Seems like it would be hard to reason about. Consistency is great but it means if you order assembled wall panels from a factory, your foundation has to be exact in dimensions and dead level, or it's not going to come together. On-site framers aren't really bothered by this. I think it trades one kind of complexity for another.
This is really key. The quality of the end product will always be determined by the crew that sets the house. Same will be true for custom stick-built.
The biggest challenge we faced, even with a skilled crew, was simply getting the pieces into some of these lots in the ADK. Between the tight winding roads and lot elevation, it was quite a battle.
Source: My family has been in the modular and manufactured housing business since the 60s.
Well, you’ve certainly proved that I don’t understand this well enough to evaluate alternatives, fascinating though I do find this subject :) I guess the dimensions seem like they’d be easier to get right than leveling, though, maybe?
It costs more than it is worth to have them do better. As a framer is takes me a couple minutes more to compensate. To have the do it would take hours of labor.
I presume you're talking about scribing the bottom plate, or perhaps another board placed between the foundation and the bottom plate? Why couldn't a layer of that same sort of scribed board be placed on the foundation before placing the prefab modules?
Depends on where it was. The worst case I saw was a half wall, so we cut each stud a different length.
There are options for prefab as you saw - but when building on site we have the saws and other tools needed anyway, so it isn't a big deal to use them. With prefab they don't normally use those tools so you have to account for the cost of getting them out putting them away.
"What do you mean you didn't finish all the tickets in this sprint? Must be shoddy work."
You're looking at single pieces of a complex and already optimized-for-several-factors system and assuming it would be trivial to do it better for one factor without taking others into account...
That depends heavily on where you're building. There are plenty of places you can pick up a few acres for $10-$20k (with electric/water access) and have a minimal permitting process that's over in at most on the order of weeks.
> There is a building going up in Oakland right now where Factory_OS put out a press release that they had built it in ten days. But they spent 7 years getting approvals, 18 months in site prep,
I'm currently gut remodeling a small house in Oakland. Permitting and regulations are a whopping 3% of the cost.
The land (the existing property) is 50%, and 40% is building costs.
Land costs (addressed via incremental upzoning) and build costs (addressed with more efficient building technology) are the 2 biggest things to address to make housing affordable, not the cost of permits.
Remodeling an existing structure won't really expose you to the regulatory burden, which is good for you but isn't the full picture. If you wanted to buy a SFH and build a duplex or, God forbid, a triplex, then you'd be paying serious money, mostly in the carrying costs of your debts while the government dithers over your application. This is why in California one of the most important recent state law changes was 2017's SB35, which mandates that local authorities must approve certain types of projects in 90 days or less. But the types of projects which benefit from this are fairly few.
On top of the carrying costs there are impact fees. These vary by city but you can see how crazy they are. In Fremont you will pay $160k per dwelling, that's just cash out of your pocket. Totally crazy.
Locally? Because nationally manufactured home deliveries are a small fraction of what they once were in the 1970s. Adjusted for population they are down to 10% of their peak.
Used to be the lumber had to be cut from local trees on-site, and nails made by the blacksmith. Our current stick-built construction IS pre-fab by an older reckoning.
I guess its a matter of how much is too far? Windows come as a unit. So do some doors. Certainly the appliances do. Nobody has to get a tinker in to make the toaster. Even so, sometimes there are hitches.
I think we have to iron out the order-to-fit issues (wrong dimensions, wrong fuel, mismatch color or design) when done by rushed workpeople on a schedule. Fix that, and you could go much further without trepidation.
For now, my house was stick-built from a drawing (not an architect) and mostly correctly. The issues came when changes were made on-the-fly, not from the initial planning.
Exactly. Without changing buyer preferences we’re unlikely to see great leaps in optimization of the build process, because it’s already been done.
Everything in a new American home is standardized. Building a production home today is like building a Rails / Bootstrap app. 90% of the work has been done for you, you just have to assemble the pieces to suit a narrow set of choices (before you get truly custom) and this serves the needs of most buyers at a price that (outside of places toxic to new buildings) is very acceptable.
The availability of labor changes with the times. Prefab houses are like low/no-code solutions. They’re great for starting out and temporary problems, some far out last their design and that’s ok. The rest of the industry is about solving the changing tastes and needs of its customers with a standardized and VERY EASY to work with set of tools, and that’s ok too.
My current house is a prefab, modular home. It was trailered up from Indiana. A crane put the pieces together in a day (two halves on the first floor and four dormers on the second floor). The cost of the crane was about $5000. The cost of the 1500 square-foot cape cod was about $130,000. The entire project was around $330,000, but the property was raw land in an unincorporated area, which means there are certain line items that really jack up the bottom line.
We didn't save that much by going with a prefab home. We also didn't save much time, because we got stuck waiting for a sub-contractor and inspector during the finishing process. If I'm not saving money or time, well, what's the point?
It's a decent-quality house; as good as anything built on site. But nothing special. One of the main reasons to go down the pre-fab path at this price range is because there are relatively few custom home builders who will bother with homes that don't cost at least $500,000. Their margins are about 20%, but regardless of the size of the house, they are completing only three or four a year. They need higher top line projects, otherwise the don't see much bottom line.
10 years ago I purchased a Maronda homes in a yet to be developed housing addition. I was able to watch a lot of homes be built using there construction method of pre-built walls/floors/roof lifted via crane. It does seem like a great idea, speeding up onsite building, and preventing the wood from being left in the elements. These benefits appear to come at a cost.
a) The largest benefit seems to come when building a similar building each time, any changes make it hard for the crew to assemble.
b) The site has to be cleared of trees and rather open to allow access of the crane.
I have since moved to a hot housing market in New England, and see many lots leveled and replaced with new homes. All of them are stick built on site, and this doesn't appear to be an issue. The number of days for an experienced crew to stick build a house is short, and many of these homes are very custom. The site/house is normally optimized to get the largest sale value, not the easiest built. The other interesting this is it is generally impossible, or not cost effective to use a crane to lift parts on many of these lots. Even if having pre-built sections is a cost savings, it would be such a small difference it wouldn't be worth it with the possible risk of quality of the pre-built items and/or timing of construction. Home building is a complicated process and many companies seem to be providing solutions without looking at a total solution.
So the question: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?
Answer: It has, just not all the way.
Modern American construction makes extensive use of prefabricated roof trusses, for large developments it is common to see parts of the framing prefabbed. The drywall interior fixing systems are designed to substantially reduce the amount of on-site work required. Modern plumbing fixtures can often be snapped together or joined with glues/expoxies rather than needing to be soldered. Domestic electrical can come as pre-wired conduit and you better believe that large developments are selecting those sizes carefully to reduce on-site work. Windows and doors arrive as single units which just need to be fitted, again a lot of attention is paid to ease of fitting since they are selling to series building professionals for whom labour time is money. Kitchen cabinetry is supplied fully prefabbed.
Modern flooring is also based on easy-to-assemble systems. Compare the effort required to put in laminate vs old-school parquet, hardwood boards, or marble.
Of course if you just put a whole ground floor together in a few modules in a factory, you will save even more labour time. The question is whether the greater transport costs and reduction in flexibility* will make it worth it in the end.
(*) If your factory isn't mass producing the same product over and over, you're going to lose a lot of the productivity gains from factory production.
As the article points out, the cost of the house is the same as the cost of a traditionally built house in the most expensive home construction area of the United States, and at the same time you are extremely limited in the geometries you can use.
While this is fine as the high-level answer, the interesting question seems to be why the as-installed cost would be the same as typical wasteful North American "stick building"? I've spent some time thinking about better ways to build houses, spoken with like-minded architects, etc., and haven't gotten to the bottom of this question.
Intuitively, it seems like there should be quite a bit of room to decrease costs by using engineered, pre-fabricated/panelized construction. There should be less waste, less manual labor, and less re-work. Yet the best case seems to be approximately the same costs, though I would expect at improved quality or improved first-time quality.
I actually started my personal line of inquiry favoring steel construction as well, though some research convinced me that using a home as a carbon sink through wood construction from sustainably-managed forests made significant sense. For something like an airtight, well-insulated (Net Zero or better) home using wood-based sheathing, the coefficient of thermal expansion compatibility with wood structure also makes sense. That being said, it appears the Bone structure folks have their own solutions to prevent thermal shorts between the exterior and the steel structure, as they have apparently used their system for Net Zero and Passivhaus construction.
standard stick built has a lot of things already factory done. most lumber is a standard length/width, and the entire print is built around those sizes. 2x4s come factory cut to 92 5/8 long, which (after adding the other lumber needed for a wall) leaves a finished 8 foot wall ready for 2, 4 foot wide sheets of drywall.
What labor is done on site in a typical stick built construction project is mostly the same manual labor that needs to be done in a factory. Which isn't surprising: construction sites are just mobile factories for buildings. When you have to make something with lot of empty space is makes sense to ship the factory to the final location.
Shipping is a factor too: a stick built house arrives on one flatbed truck. A similar prefab house needs 3, and special permits to get it down the road (which includes checking for lower hanging power lines).
I believe the premise of many of these panelization/pre-fab companies is that manual labor is minimized within the factory through automation and also reduced on-site. There is also the waste reduction aspect. Definitely does seem that the devil is in the details on how much automation actually gets used, and to what degree the panels are finished vs. needing on-site tradeswork. Maybe in engineered production it is not far from a wash between less spent on on-site labor and waste vs. more spent on up-front engineering.
Like we often see with automation and rigor, I suppose the up-front costs really only get amortized over multiple units produced. The Blueprint Robotics company I mentioned as an example apparently now focuses on multi-unit dwellings.
Quality and repeatability, usually things that (IMO, sadly) are not highly valued in the North American market, are almost certainly improved through engineered production, but I suppose if you don't value those things, you can also keep labor costs down.
Anyway, it would be nice to see some typical and aggregate quantification of these things to really understand.
Have you looked into log homes? That may fit your criteria: lot of wood needed (so great carbon sink), good insulation, simple design (1 wall for support, vapor barrier, insulation , siding and inside panelling).
On a TV episode of Grand Designs (UK) a few years ago, the German company Huf Haus (www.huf-haus.com) sold a prefab home to a family. Their approach to labor? Ship that too.
The whole crew arrived with the house components. They knew exactly how to assemble it on the concrete base the local crews had put in place. It went up ridiculously quickly, and once done, they got in the trucks and drove back to Germany.
So I think the key takeaway of this article is that it's hard to drive from Germany to California.
A lot of carports and similar simple metal structures are built this way. My dad ordered a shelter for his pickup camper. He already had a concrete foundation where we'd torn down a different building. The crew showed up in two pickups pulling little trailers, and they were done in a few hours.
Real estate agent here... in my market there are a number of mid-century homes that have the very square look of a manufactured home. Even looking vaguely like a manufactured home is enough to keep people away from them. My own observations are that newer pre-fab / manufactured can be very well built. We have a lot of people coming here looking for rural retreats - truth is, if you are way off the grid, a manufactured home may be a very good option for you as it may be difficult to convince a builder to work on your custom build project if it's going to be a long commute for them.
So what I'm saying is - there's a mental block for people in accepting these houses that has noting to do with reality and everything to do with perception.
If you don’t mind sharing (I imagine it only increases business) what market is this that has plentiful, cookie cutter houses being declined?
As someone in a big city, daydreaming about picking the family up to a bigger living arrangement, hearing that there are perfectly-serviceable houses being ignored sounds like a great opportunity
Hello Townley - I sell in Washington state, but plan to be licensed in Oregon before the start of 2021... looking at your profile, it looks like you have been primarily centered in large cities... you might be surprised at the cost of homes and quality of life in small town, rural America. Where I live is a ~35 minute flight to Seattle, has several hospitals, everything within a fifteen minute drive, four mild seasons, and an average house price of $300K. It's also wine country. Main thing our market lacks is people with capital willing to update and reinvest in older homes and/or build out non-cookie cutter new homes.
Depending on what you are looking for in life, I suspect there are lots of places in the world that could work for you.
the title is grossly inaccurate. this is an advertorial for the bone structure company's pre-cut metal framing system, not about why prefab hasn't taken over. it's central reasoning that prefab is advantageous because there's not enough construction labor is also misleading. in most places, construction labor much prefers bigger jobs and repeat clients, rather than the harder to deal with idiosyncratic, one-off homebuilder, leaving them with a perception of shortage (even the beginning anecdote mentions getting multiple bids on a project, which wouldn't happen amidst a shortage).
bone structure pre-cuts the steel framing for each project because it's not nearly as easy to deal with on-site as wood framing. it's also not cheaper, because wood framing is relatively available everywhere, flexible, reconfigurable on the fly, and easy to manipulate, unlike steel framing.
and as others have noted, framing is a small fraction of home construction, and these walls must be put together on site, so it's an overreach to even consider this prefab. it's just pre-cut.
that said, it'd be great to see more prefab systems, even just embellished boxes, to accelerate housing construction in tight markets, and ones like LA where homelessness is an already widespread and growing problem.
Depends where you are. The company that built pre-fab parts for the 10-day 1,000 bed hospital in China is building a Huoshenshan equivalent hospital in Korea too.
11% of global CO2 emissions are from construction. Using pre-fab steel modules are not only more recyclable but the building process emits about 50% less CO2 as well. Building in earthquake resistance is much easier than steel-reinforced concrete. So it's not just an optimization on on-site time.
Unfortunately no translated captions in https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1mK411p7X4 but the wall-to-wall robot in the factory gives you an idea of what the future looks like.
Background: structural engineer, have worked with prefab construction in various capacities
The short answer to this question is "because we haven't figured out how to make it less expensive than regular site built construction".
The longer answer: prefab, or modular, construction has made inroads in various construction niches. Parking garages are nearly all prefabricated concrete for instance. Light framed buildings (either wood or cold formed steel) frequently have their structure panelized off site. Hotels (especially in places where the cold weather means a short construction season) are sometimes built using prefab modules.
It's also super common to have prefabricated lower-level components - wood trusses, bar joists, hollowcore panels, etc.
But any higher degree of prefabrication tends to be more expensive than conventional, not less. They mostly get used when their perceived benefits outweigh their costs. (If you look at a panelizer like Entekra's benefits page, they don't list "cheaper"
anywhere). Two major exceptions to this are parking garages and HUD homes, which (among other reasons) are heavily optimized for a particular form factor.
Regarding Bone Structure, it's an interesting system, and I love seeing people tackle this problem space. But I rate the chances of a custom fabricated steel structure ever being less expensive than conventional wood framing as "very near zero". This seems limited to the high end custom home market, and their marketing material seems to indicate that as well.
Only to somehow confirm anecdotally what you said but in another area of constructions.
I have been working in and around the construction industry for the last 35+ years in Italy and in the '90's the firm I was working for had a department for pre-fabricated (concrete) buildings (more like condos or office buildings than "single" homes), which was led by an engineer that was - really - a technical genius and - besides him - we did have exceptionally good staff, both the technicians and the workers.
In the arc of more than ten years we tried everything and the contrary of it and after several , generally successful or mostly successful, built projects (with only a few minor issues in a few of them) we came to these conclusions:
1)you can make cheaper pre-fabricated buildings only if the level of finiture and overall result is cheaper or feels cheaper or looks cheaper
2) you can make pre-fabricated buildings that are as beautiful, functional and what not as "built-on-site" but that will cost the same (or more) as the corresponding built-on-site ones
3) the one and only difference was time, with pre-fab buildings we could build in 6-8 months time buildings that would have otherwise taken 18 months or more (this worked very well for rebuilding after an earthquake)
In the years since I was involved in several more similar to the US timber based projects for single homes or anyway one/two storeys structures, and "components" (like pre-fabricated bathrooms "cells" for industrial buildings and hotels) and my experience did not change the overall opinion much.
For anything that is "modular" or very, very "standard" (i.e. homes from catalog) there may be some space for fair competition (slightly lower cost for same or similar "quality" of end results), but when you start to include in it:
1) the local building codes (and possible needed deviations from the "standard")
2) the customers' changes/preferences
3) the architects/designers (with all due respect for the category) "whims"
It invariably ends up costing the same or more (money) and almost the same (time).
Sounds like an American problem with an American 'solution' (solve the wrong 'problem') and then everyone is surprised that nothing got better.
Certain type of prefab help, i.e. things that would normally stall a project, or things that are generally the same. For example, a new house I just bought uses some prefab concrete plates where the amount of variation is limited. On-site, some minor changes were made and it sped up a lot of the foundation, walls and floors.
Other elements, like entire frames with windows and doors etc. are 'prefab' as well when you think about it. We have had those for years, but it didn't always be modular like that.
The real 'custom' stuff so far is the roof, which is a well-known pattern and construction method, but the final size and shape depends on the house. Same goes for details in your walls like where the doors and windows go.
If you optimise 'too much' for some of the construction elements you stand to lose more than you gain (i.e. now you have to keep a larger stock of prefab stuff due to the amount of variations -- or people might end up with a choice biased towards something that is easy rather than what they actually want). It's also easy to think that a complete module could be prefab and the design re-used over and over, but that only makes sense if all houses are the same and all land is the same (Which is not the case). Then you end up with prefab stuff that doesn't fit and you have to either live in a crappy not-really-fitting-well house or do a lot of (more expensive) local changes at installation time.
Having some re-usable modules is the way to go if you want to optimise; especially when you think about things that are similar in a lot of cases (be it by choice or by building laws). We're already doing a lot of that, and optimising it further (be it selection or scale) would probably gain you more:
You can design with ready to use components where applicable, you can build with known-good components, methods and time scales where applicable and as the one buying the house you still get to make whatever choices you want without the risk of simply getting a 'badly modified prefab'.
I found this prefab house approach shown on This Old House feels much better. Still made of wood but made in modular pieces in the factory that can be quickly installed in the field.
I have one of these houses. Just built it and moved in. Save time and increase quality. Dried in with insulated walls / windows in 4 days!
Price is still an issue.
Part of the reason is that we pay no penalty for crappy energy hog homes. You can build with prefab panels and get airtight really quickly. So all the extra $$$ goes into better build and overhead for the factory.
> Part of the reason is that we pay no penalty for crappy energy hog homes.
You pay higher heating and cooling costs over the lifetime of the building. It's just the penalty is a 'death of a thousand cuts' that may be less noticeable than a proverbial broadsword to the face of paying for some extra insulation and proper house wrap upfront.
Just improving airtightness and mandating blower door tests in building codes would probably go a long way towards more efficient homes. Once you're more airtight you then of course have to ventilate right: HRV/ERV for refreshing of the air and stand alone dehumidification units.
It has, but not for residential.[1] Much of rural America is built from Butler prefab metal buildings. The classic ones are boring but useful. They have some new products which look like kits for building strip malls.
I saw that wikipedia listed them as prefab, but I think it is incorrect.
Kit home: Everything you need to build a house is in this box. Just add labor. Sort of like buying a lego kit that you know has all the pieces to build a Millenium Falcon out of.
Pre-fab: Important/time-consuming elements are constructed off-site and transported in a (nearly) ready to assemble state to the site. Sort of like having the Lego factory assemble the 7 major parts of the Millenium Falcon, and sending those to you so you can just connect them to each other to have the final product.
As I understand it, the Sears homes were kit homes by those definitions, not prefab. E.g. you would receive a bunch of 2x4s in a railroad car, not a ready-built wall you could just raise into place. Kit homes can also be pre-fab homes, but I don't think the terms are interchangeable and not all kit homes are pre-fab.
But I appreciate the distinction you are trying to make.
Sears homes did include extensive, hand-made details such as hand-made stained glass, cabinetry etc. So it may be a grey area and not perfectly match up with the vocabulary of today.
I really like the concept and would take that any day over the California homes built with toothpicks and cart board by a random crew (I'm sitting on one right now and there aren't two straight lines).
The bone system even looks like something I might be able to put together myself (besides stuff like foundation, pluming, and electrical).
I know it is in to make fun of "toothpick and card board" construction, but modern engineering has found them very strong when used correctly. What you intuitively think is better often isn't.
I assume anyone making fun of 2x4 and drywall construction has no experience in construction or land development. The complaints all have to do with cheap materials, and/or shoddy construction if walls aren't straight. But done right with good insulation and quality materials, I would take it over any other type.
It's nice and easy to modify and repair also. Unfortunately most of the money people use to buy goes into the price of the land, leaving little extra for a quality build.
The complaints all have to do with cheap materials, and/or shoddy construction if walls aren't straight.
That's right. The parent was complaining about homes built from sticks and cardboard, and indeed, one can actually use foil-faced cardboard for sheathing the shear walls (one product name is ThermoPly, there are others). You attach these to walls you build 24" O, slap 3/8" drywall inside, put vinyl siding, make absolutely no effort whatsoever to air-seal anything, save on gluing subfloor to joists (nobody will mind the squeaking), and the list can go on and on. House built like that will be utter garbage, will be expensive and uncomfortable to live in, and if it doesn't collapse due to water-damage induced rot, it's only because of high robustness of wood-frame construction.
However, you don't have to build this way! You can build a solid, sturdy, well-insulated, well-ventilated, soundproof, rigid and long-lasting house using wood-frame construction. It will just cost more. The great thing about wood-frame construction is that you can actually make these kind of decisions, and you can pick and choose parts which you care about, and the ones the quality of which you can give up on. Moreover, it's pretty easy to upgrade things later on, easy to fix if something breaks, and easy to build additions to.
I grew up in a country where lumber was too expensive to use it for construction, so everything was made from concrete (typically using CMUs). I used to think that this is a way to go, but over time I really became converted to American-style wood frame construction.
The articles intro seems weird to me: if you go out to tender for a job like building a house, why wouldn't the quotes that come back varry that much? I've gotten software vendor quotes with highest figure way more than 2x lowest figure. The same for quotes for a new boiler for my residence. Did no one tell the subject of the article this or is the founding story really just bs for people who've never gotten quotes for things!?
Not sure that is the right question - because they have.
Sites like nytimes.com etc. are essentially prefab websites where all of the work is on the system to automate the building and distribution articles - the articles themselves are not bespoke HTML / CSS.
I see your point, but the NYT has a whole team ("interactives") whose job is to do bespoke HTML / CSS for articles that they want to make a bigger splash.
Close, but how about “Why didn’t CMS make web development cheaper in the 2000s?” I’d say we’re out of the prototype stages, but we’re still working out the kinks and business models with prefab construction. It’s just very early days for it actually being a business because anything physical evolves at least 10x slower than software.
All of the pictures are of very modern houses. I'd be fine with that, but my wife wouldn't. She prefers more of the Victorian/Queen Anne style of architecture. I wonder if there is a way they could design this system so that the innards are all the same but then you can put different shells around the innards so the home could look modern, craftsman, victorian, etc. Sort of like how you could have 10 cakes that are identical on the inside, but dramatically different on the outside from the frosting.
I've often compared HTML, CSS, JS to a house. HTML is the foundation, studs, joists, rafters, sheeting, subflooring, etc. JS is the wiring, plumbing, HVAC, etc. CSS is the paint, tiling, carpet, millwork, and other decorative elements. Maybe the prefab system can be the HTML and JS and then decorative elements can be layered on top to make it look like very different designs.
Architect here. This gets much more difficult if you dive into the deeper problems that architecture attempts to address. Victorian/Queen Anne homes are based around smaller, more numerous, and more specific rooms. The exterior appearance flows from the way that people lived in that time, with the HVAC and construction materials and methods available to them. Ornate hand detailing on the high-quality surviving examples looks right because of the scale and use of the spaces within, as well as the market of hand carpenters. Applying a kit of modern materials to diverse spatial problems won't really yield good designs.
There's a reason that modern architecture developed around the international style when concrete, steel, glass, and mechanical HVAC all developed and became cost effective at the same time as open-floor plan living and the decreasing number of household staff. All of these factors go hand in hand and a robust solution would have to touch on these deeper considerations. Not to say it's impossible, but trying to put out there that architectural design is more than skin deep.
To use your analogy, you can use React to build what used to be a mid-90s static styled HTML site, but you probably wouldn't.
Sorry the late/long answer. Took a couple of stabs to get this brain download for you.
I've been wrapped in that very question. I'm trying my first spec home right now and residential construction is a total mess, as the article makes clear. Small, informally organized contractors are a real problem at this scale, and the labor + material cost is already so high that it's a real struggle to compete with existing buildings in my market. I'm expecting to break even or perhaps net $50k for about 1.5 years of work, but part of that is tuition for the learning process.
At the high end - commercial buildings, complicated skyscrapers and so on - construction work is becoming vastly more streamlined, controlled, and predictable. It's now possible to have daily laser scans of your construction progress, automated inventory management of pieces scanned on site, detailed digital models that everyone can access and comment on, and all of that is becoming the norm. Check out Leica laser scanning, ProCore, and Trimble Connect for examples. From the design side, the push is heavily into generative design with some progress being made with machine learning informed generative design. These processes are mostly about enabling new, more complex designs or more fully optimizing specific parameters, not about automating what is already tedious like updating drawing sets and checking that code compliance (especially ADA clearances) is kept after changes (a big opportunity for disruptive software to take on incumbents, I think). At residential scale and cost, generative design is generally a very high-end luxury. I worked at a high end firm in New York City that had some details that were done in Grasshopper, but we're talking about $5,000 interior doors fabricated from aluminum - well beyond what a typical residential customer would want.
The best tool for small scale and cutting edge design is Rhino with their included Grasshopper plugin. There's no building intelligence in that tool so all the work is very manual, modeling each component in 3D from scratch. But that's the gold standard. The generative tools are visual programming interfaces, but there are many ways to delve into Python and C# if you're more comfortable there. You can write Python in Grasshopper and you can write C# and Python (with some limitations) plugins in Rhino. Revit is the standard tool for design (at every scale other than residential) in the US and they include a generative tool call Dynamo, which also supports Python and C#. Revit is a BIM tool so it includes components that can adapt to geometries, contain wall assemblies, nest objects like windows and doors on walls, and ties in to energy simulation more fluidly. For pure geometry development and home design, SketchUp is still widely used. I don't have a concise thing in mind about those but at least that is a starting point for you.
Something that will continue to become more important is environmental impact. Net-Zero and Passivhaus certifications will become more mainstream eventually. We're getting to a place where LEED is important but pretty watered down compared to more effective programs. Energy modeling (another software opportunity - better integrated and always-active energy modeling) will become the best way to control comfort and energy use.
In terms of best practice, the lesson I keep learning is that it's about interfacing with the industry. Contractors expect certain inputs like 2x6 stud walls made with Doug Fir No. 2 @16" on center. If you try to get them to use screw-together metal framing, true steel framing or concrete to get those expansive enormous windows, or even heavy timber, they will take longer and the product may be worse unless you find the right person. If you want to go down the cutting edge route, working closely with your fabricators is very important. What metals can they source, what tolerances can they run their particular laser cutter / CNC / water jet systems at, what software stack do they use etc.
For books... Form, Space, and Order by Francis Ching is a great first purchase.
For something light and very accessible, I enjoyed Bill Bryson's At Home, which investigates how the modern home came to be. Really fun. Doesn't really address what we're talking about directly but gives some insight into why you might choose different forms to express different cultural norms and ways of living.
I'm not an architectural historian and I don't know a lot about the theory of detailing before modern architecture. But I do know that a lot of it boils down to thinking and especially proportional thinking from Ancient Greece and Rome. There is a strain of critical architectural history that even contemporary architects learn. Vitrivius - the Ten Books of Architecture, Alberti - On The Art of Building, Palladio - Four Books on Architecture, Semper - The Four Elements of Architecture, Le Corbusier - Towards a new Architecture. Sprinkle in some Laugier - an Essay on Architecture, Rasmussen - Experiencing Architecture, Wittkower - Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, Giedion - Space, Time, and Architecture, (along with a couple others I'm forgetting) and you have a good start on architectural theory. Those books comprised about 1/3 of my theory training. The rest was history textbooks. As a side note, architecture is interesting in that rigorous study can take place with pictures, so don't write off just getting photo books of buildings that interest you.
In terms of building technologies, Francis Ching is widely respected and very accessible. I haven't read his Introduction to Architecture but he's fantastic so give that a shot. What I have on my desk always are Building Construction Illustrated and Building Codes Illustrated. If you intend to take on a building project and be involved, I would consider those essential.
I just got The New Net Zero by Maclay and it is so far a really accessible and pretty comprehensive look at approaching zero energy buildings.
Modern Architecture Since 1900 bur William Curtis is my favorite textbook on the development of modern architecture (which is most of the important bit for contemporary work). Kenneth Frampton is an excellent architectural historian and his book Modern Architecture: A Critical History is great but more opinionated. His book Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture is not as accessible but is probably the best look at the topic we started out on - the relationship between space and technologies. Le Corbusier's Toward an Architecture is much more accessible and makes the case but just for the introduction of International Style.
In terms of getting at what architecture can be when it's truly executing as art, I can recommend three books very highly. Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, Pallasmaa's The Eyes of the Skin, and Peter Zumthor's Atmospheres. I really strongly recommend reading those as the primary way to understand what building art is or can be.
The other thing I would suggest is that if you're interested in developing your own designs, architects are incredibly cheap comparatively. If you want a recently licensed recent graduate to help you with the process, even suggesting books or just sort of meeting with you and critiquing your thinking, you could probably find that for $20-$50/hour. Even some very experienced good architects would do it for $120-150/hour. It's like the movie industry - as long as you're not booking the top A-listers you can get a lot of value.
The innards have to be different for styles from different eras unless you're really making only a token attempt at styling, because the proportions used in different eras were different.
I’ve been to two Bone Structure presentations. And visited two build project sites.
This technology is indeed cutting edge and promising. I do dream of owning a BS home one day. It’s an engineering marvel.
But the reason it hasn’t taken over is simply because it’s still more expensive than traditional builds. At least in Canada where wood is cheap and buildings don’t need such high earthquake protections.
When I grew up (1970s) I had 2 friends had very very similar houses in a town outside boston. They were similar to my dentist too, who had his office attached to his house. They all lived miles apart.
They were a 60's prefab house called a "deck" house. My dad ended up buying one later with a large addition once my parents split. They were pretty good, except the roofs which weren't great for snow (pitch) and lacked insulation. I helped replace one of those roofs and the lack of pitch made it easier to work on. (friends father was a civil engineer).
Pretty well made, considering, and the open layouts were pretty great.
prefab is around, just a niche.
A check of google, "deck" company still exist as a branch of a larger prefab house company:
I live in Japan, prefab homes here are extremely common [1] - there's an Asahi Kasei prefab 3-story apartment building going up next door to where I live, and from the old house's demolition to the new building's completion, the notification I received in the mail says it'll be about 6 months from start to finish.
> I live in Japan, prefab homes here are extremely common [1]
Could that have anything to do with how the Japanese dislike "old" homes, and tend to demolish an existing home when buying a lot in order to build a new one for the new owner?
I'd expect that's a big part of it! The particular article I linked to points out that (creating the need for a lot more houses to get built). Also there's a shortage of skilled craftsmen in part due to the aging population, coupled with a mature robotics industry. Other costs like permitting is way way cheaper and quicker in Japan than the USA (like other posters have mentioned, building in a city like SF can take decades and millions just to get past that hurdle, and people can stop your project by saying that they don't like how it looks - which is an invalid complaint here), so the overall cost of building a home shifts toward the actual cost of the home and land, not legal fees.
"There was no standard building approach, and the ultimate cost to build his house would depend primarily on however his builder chose to embark on the project. "
But there is also the 2nd world, you know? Say, here's an example from Czechia: [0]. Here is an example from (East) Germany: [1]. And from the USSR, too: [2], [3]. Not the prettiest, not the roomiest, but... cheap, somewhat cheap, and therefore, pretty abundant.
But what about the grey energy of these buildings? This claim of zero net energy homes seems dubious when one does not factor in the embedded energy of the building with all this metal. You can go a long way of heating your wooden house till this building will break even in terms of total energy consumed including building materials and shipping.
Location location location. When a large fraction of total cost is for the plot, major savings in the construction process aren't very appealing. Particularly when it's on a mortgage and the numbers are an order of magnitude beyond all other purchases with our without the construction compromise.
Prefab construction dominates certain areas where many identical concrete houses are built in big series (i.e. cheap Soviet and Russian development projects).
There's not much benefit in doing custom wood framing in a factory, a nailgun is a nailgun.
Well, so far? Not enough cost savings and lack ability to buy it in a reasonable manner. If you are a pre-fab shop, target some of the more rural reservations in the US. The housing situation generally sucks.
Urbanization. It might change with a switch to mobile homes and neo-nomadic lifestyles, flexible villages driven by your friends and preferences list. Everybody thinks that megacities are the future, but maybe they're not.
It took months for the factory to do their pre-build engineering, and that's after they started the process using plans from my architect. The companies building these modules tend to sell mostly from their own catalog of floorplans and modules, so they don't have a strong incentive to hire skilled architects for the relatively small amount of custom work that comes in (I fell into this category). I'm led to believe that they hire draftsmen instead of architects.
They built one of the modules a foot too long, so it hangs over the edge of the foundation. They also messed up the roof line, so some guttering and geometry had to be changed for the garage that was stick-built onsite. They did all of the drywall wraps around the windows incorrectly. Every single door was hung incorrectly, some with chunks taken out from bad routing. The vinyl plank flooring has bubbles because they didn't float it correctly. They omitted electrical features that were on their own drawings. They ordered a few wrong windows, so they charged me anyway and just laid them on the floor when they shipped the module.
It'll all be fine at the end of the day, but the parts that were built onsite are all so much better. No cheaper, mind you, but faster and with much less drama. Maybe there are some parts of the industry that do a lot better, but I kind of wish I'd listened to my dad when he said "the pioneers take the arrows".