[throwaway44773]

Not to mention that construction has seen little gains in productivity over the past few decades resulting in the Baumol effect in the industry. There's little reason that constructing new housing cannot be automated to the degree that car construction is automated, but a variety of regulatory hurdles and little foreign competition makes building construction prices rise steadily. We need a well-funded startup to pull an Uber and indiscriminately sidestep regulation to disrupt the real estate market.

[romafirst3]

So if we are happy with criminality to “sidestep regulation” how would you feel about squatting vacant homes?

Netherlands had this problem in the 60s and the solution came in the form of a squatting movement.

I feel in the US people are ok with corporations committing crimes but not humans. Weird seeing as the humans are the ones without a home and the corporations are just trying to get rich.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting_in_the_Netherlands

[seanmcdirmid]

> So if we are happy with criminality to “sidestep regulation” how would you feel about squatting vacant homes?

That already happens in the states. Sometimes, you just need to go on vacation for a couple of weeks and come back to find your home squatted with a fake lease drawn up in crayon to throw you into a civil legal process. You can find tutorials online.

[romafirst3]

So would you endorse it legally? It was the solution to the crisis in Netherlands. You used to tell the local police station that you were occupying the house.

Empty units stopped being a thing.

[seanmcdirmid]

It does happen without legal recourse. Since the USA doesn't have a registered lease system (no registration, police don't care), anyone can take property and claim it is theirs, and live there while the courts sort it out. This includes just going on vacation for a couple of weeks.

It isn't a solution to anyone's problems except maybe as a way to live free while doing lots of drugs.

[romafirst3]

It’s not protected at all though, we both know that.

[seanmcdirmid]

I'm not sure what you mean by protected. A squatters life is to find one squat, wait until the courts/police kick them out, and then find the next one...wash rinse and repeat. It isn't a great life, but people do it, which sucks if they happen to choose your house.

[pksebben]

> We need a well-funded startup to pull an Uber and indiscriminately sidestep regulation to disrupt the real estate market.

Whether or not this would be to the public benefit in terms of automation, this is exactly what's happening here but with pricing. The law forbids price fixing, but courts are tech-dumb and so long as you pass your price fixing through an algorithm you've got decent shruggability on any claims made.

[throwaway44773]

They are only able to do this price fixing because of the scarcity of housing right now. If much more housing is built, prices will drop.

[pksebben]

I don't think this is true - for one, housing in the US isn't all that scarce (~14M vacant units) [1], and housing doesn't behave like most markets vis a vis supply / demand - there are too many confounding factors and it's not exactly a liquid market.

This would also make sense given that this algorithmic pricing platform is used by so many clients. If just enough real estate firms can maximize their profits in this way, they can afford to buy out anyone who might compete on price.

1 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EVACANTUSQ176N

[throwaway44773]

I'd be curious to see where these 14 million vacant units are located. It's quite likely that the majority of them would be located in places where people do not want to live.

[pksebben]

Right, but that's part of the problem - just being able to build more houses isn't going to solve problems for, say, NY or LA where it's not an issue of how many units but an issue of pricing

[lotsofpulp]

> There's little reason that constructing new housing cannot be automated to the degree that car construction is automated

What experience do you have that you would be able to make a lofty claim like this?

Are the people working at DR Horton and Lennar and the like missing something obvious? I figure businesses that construct and sell tens of thousands of homes in a year are at the bleeding edge of figuring out how to most efficiently construct a house.

[WalterBright]

People like custom built homes.

There's an old housing development nearby, perhaps constructed in the 1940s. There were two basic plans, along with mirror images of the plans. You have to look closely to see this, because over the decades the houses have been extensively remodeled and improved with things like garages, extensions, etc.

[aworks]

I live in a neighborhood like this. Our house was built in 1947 and the other original houses are either the same or a simple variation. Of course, most of the original houses on the street have been torn down for large, mostly unique houses.

[margalabargala]

One can observe the increase in quality and variety of prefab and manufactured homes, which fully take advantage of new manufacturing efficiency advances, while also observing assorted regulations that make building such housing infeasible in many parts of the US.

What's you're special experience that makes you so confident this is not the case? Seems like a pretty extraordinary claim.

[lotsofpulp]

>What's you're special experience that makes you so confident this is not the case? Seems like a pretty extraordinary claim.

The comment I responded to was edited to include the component about regulations being the problem. Obviously, the parameters within which to construct a house includes regulations, so my experience that automating home construction is not cost efficient yet is the fact that the largest and most successful home builders do not use those techniques. Aka reality.

Whether or not regulations are appropriate or not is a separate discussion, but in my experience, most are good other than the ones that forbid the type of housing being built (such as higher density), or excessive setbacks that waste land.

Edit: never mind, the comment I replied to was not edited, I just didn’t read it thoroughly. My bad!

[margalabargala]

I replied to you before the parent was edited.

I think we are pretty on the same page regarding regulations. Safety is important. But forbidding density via setbacks, parking minimums, and certain types of housing is what bites us. And there are some regulations enacted in the name of.safety, which create nonstandard requirements where a prefab home factory must either special case that one state/locality, or forbid selling there.

As an example, any factory-manufactured home sold in California must have a sprinkler system. Sprinkler systems are expensive, and while they're very valuable in large shared buildings, I question whether they are necessary to mandate in single family homes.

Of course this isn't targeted at manufactured homes; California mandates this in every new house.

But this fragments the manufacturing of homes and causes issues with getting the efficiencies you would expect from a factory. Multiple SKUs need to be built.

[SkyPuncher]

> There's little reason that constructing new housing cannot be automated to the degree that car construction is automated

I strongly disagree with this. I watch several general contractors on Youtube. They come across as smart, educated individuals. They frequently talk about the things they do to save time or optimize. Yet, it's obvious that huge portions of their job still involve on the fly decision making.

You might be able to automate this, but it'd come with incredible upfront costs to de-risk and plan every detail. Factory based manufacturing largely doesn't have to deal with this since the environment is so highly controlled. Further, automated manufacturing puts significant time ahead of production building draft parts.

[heavyset_go]

Maybe I need more coffee, but I can't tell if this is satire or not.

[throwaway44773]

A comment doesn't conform to my worldview, so it has to be satire, right? Your solution is what? More government?