[leashless]

There's a long path-not-taken on housing. Most things in our society have gotten a lot cheaper per unit service in the past hundred years or so, including many entirely new categories of services. Housing has stubbornly resisted change, with the result that an ever-larger portion of our culture's capital is tied up in providing housing. And housing hasn't gotten any more useful, either.

http://hexayurt.com gives some notion of how radical that shift could be when it arises. Industrial panels (of whatever kind) directly into owner-build housing. Free Hardware. You may laugh, but half the world lives in cinderblock-and-tin-roof shacks and worse.

Nobody said the innovation had to start here, or look like what we do now.

[sjm-lbm]

Indeed, it actually seems like we've gone the other way. During the first half of the twentieth century, buying and living in Ikea-esque "Kit Houses" was actually not entirely unheard of. The Wikipeida page for Sears Catalog Homes [1] actually lists the price range as between "$12,590 and $55,390 in 2008 dollars," which certainly seems like it could be price competitive with other methods of new home construction, even taking into account costs like land, etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home

[VLM]

My grandfather did that in the 50s with my dad helping a little. You need to scale for sq footage, the average American house has increased from 1000 sq ft to something unaffordable recently. By sq foot its probably not so much of a deal.

Apparently it takes only a couple weeks for one man to build a house, but the labor involved in general contracting to get the subcontractors to do their thing exceeds the time spent swinging a hammer. He sub'd out to dig and pour the foundation, some electrical, gas, some plumbing...

For those of a certain generation it was how you proved to the employer that you could complete long complicated projects, basically the equivalent of completing your college degree (which was hard to complete during WWII)

This is still done on a regular-ish basis for large garden sheds and garages. Home Depot and others will dump a pile of wood at your location with some plans and bulk pack of nails and other hardware and a weekend or two later you'll have a garden shed.

The permitting and inspection process is more about revenue generation than safety.

[justin66]

> http://hexayurt.com gives some notion of how radical that shift could be when it arises.

That's interesting stuff, but all we really need to get the ball rolling is to remove the financial and regulatory speed bumps that prevent people from buying prefab homes. It's not like it is some kind of mystery how to reduce the cost of building a home...

EDIT: I was thinking more in terms of the way lending and building ordinances very strongly favor building a house on site vs. trucking it in, as opposed to the really... insightful... stuff you guys have mentioned.

[sliverstorm]

It's not like it is some kind of mystery how to reduce the cost of building a home...

Agreed! Just remove all those pesky restrictions about fire safety, earthquake safety, tornado safety, electrical safety, and you can put that house up for real cheap :)

[lostlogin]

Don't forget leaky buildings made with bad materials, poor design and with no one liable. New Zealand followed Canada off that cliff.

[sliverstorm]

Why do you seem bitter? They were cheap! :)

[lostlogin]

I'm not particularly bitter - I didn't like them when they were new, disliked them once the birds nibbled the rendered polystyrene off the exterior, and avoided them like the plague once we came to buying houses. What I am bitter at is the way the manufacturers of the systems that have failed have seemly got off completely freely from the disaster they have created.

[sliverstorm]

Hold them accountable for what? They just gave their customers what they asked for, inexpensive housing. :)

[justin66]

You might as well name names: what manufacturers are you talking about?

[platypii]

Something like this, where they put up a 30-story building in 15 days in China. Super impressive timelapse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY

[lsc]

>There's a long path-not-taken on housing. Most things in our society have gotten a lot cheaper per unit service in the past hundred years or so, including many entirely new categories of services. Housing has stubbornly resisted change, with the result that an ever-larger portion of our culture's capital is tied up in providing housing. And housing hasn't gotten any more useful, either.

Yeah... but a lot of that is we don't /want/ housing to get cheaper. Most voters will vote to keep housing more expensive.

[coolsunglasses]

Housing has gotten cheaper for the actual cost of constructing the house, but other things have eaten up what could've otherwise been consumer surplus.

[rwmj]

Hardly? I'm still paying hundreds of pounds to get plumbers and electricians and roofers to fix things in my house.

Compare the £3500 I paid to have a new boiler fitted[1][2] to what £3500 would buy you in technology these days.

[1] Can't DIY it: I'm legally required to have a Gas Safe fitter to touch anything related to the gas supply.

[2] Replacement of open vented system with combi. Replacing like-for-like would be much cheaper, I know.

[coolsunglasses]

Using cost of labor is cheating.

[rwmj]

Why? When I buy a tablet computer, I don't have to employ someone to install it.

[coolsunglasses]

Manufactured homes reduce the labor component considerably.

[lostlogin]

It's odd that its like that - assembly line production doesn't have to equate to poor quality, and with the things I own its usually quite the opposite. Done right you can have good materials made into complicated things cheaply. However I'm yet to see (in the flesh) a prefab building that I like. Grand Designs, the UK show, has shown a few great ones featured but its a shame there aren't more to be seen as making a house on a production line would solve many of the things home owners grapple with. In the last month alone I have replaced a shonky toilet, a leaking pipe from bad install, bad fuse box case, several bad roof tiles, weird sink plumbing and 3 cheap crappy doors. If production line assembly can make these jobs easier and more standardised (how many different diameter pipes can one toilet use!) without resorting to cheap junk that whilst creating houses that look nice, I'll be happy.

[lostlogin]

This is a great thread. What happens when there is a problem with a manufactured home? I'd bin the iPad, do you build a new house?! Working with proprietary systems is hard and expensive.