| Productivity in construction is actually trending downwards, not up. The big advancements in tech happened in the mid-20th century with suburban developments that made construction into something of a factory, on site. In recent years, there have been a few startups trying to make a factories for multi family housing. The idea is to construct modules in a remote factory where you can drive economies of scale, and workers have consistent schedules with steady employment. Then ship modules to the site and stack the blocks in a tiny amount of time to minimize disruption. Traditional construction management is some absolutely hellish logistics, involving all sorts of waiting for just the right contractor, and everybody carrying risk in weird ways. It's amazing that anything even gets built. And then the planning stage is even more hellish, especially in places with high cost of construction like California. Only single-family-home builds have any sort of guarantee that if you meet code and zoning, you will be allowed to build. For any thing that is more affordable, like townhomes or apartments, the political process takes priority over the planning department. California cities are also completely cash strapped because of insane unfair property tax breaks for old wealth, meaning that impact and permit fees can easily eat of 10%-25% of the entire project cost. And that's after huge expense of re-planning many times according to community and politician whim, and it only takes a tiny number of housing opponents to force builders into a game of multi-year delays to try to stop all development, by running out the clock on financing that was secured to begin the whole process. All this is to say is that our housing problems are, at the moment, a political problem much akin the US's healthcare problems. Intractable conflicts between entrenched interests prevent common sense wins for everybody. Technology can seem like a solution (e.g. EHRs) but seldom have any impact, either positive or negative. |