[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.