> Components like exterior walls and roofs were designed to have as simple shapes as possible (no complex hips or wall jogs), and
This is a traditional and eminently sensible approach that has been lost in the "McMansion" era.
Simpler roof shapes are not only cheaper to build, but also are far easier to deal and insulate, and therefore more energy efficient.
Instead, simple energy efficient design is today mostly used in some high end custom homes while production homes are often overly complex and inefficient, relying on oversized mechanical equipment to make up for poor design choices.
> rooms were arranged so that plumbing lines could be placed near each other to simplify pipe routing.
There's a simple method to quantify this known as the "hot water rectangle". On the house's overhead view, draw the smallest rectangle that includes all the hot water faucets and the water heater.
The size of the rectangle affects build cost, efficiency, and hot water delivery performance. In many large houses there is no consideration for this at the design stage, so they end up using (wasteful) hot water recirculation pumps.
> Simpler roof shapes are not only cheaper to build, but also are far easier to deal and insulate, and therefore more energy efficient.
And most importantly probably deals with water the best: fewer valleys mean fewer places where water is concentrated. Also, generally speaking, the more that overhangs jut out the better.
That makes sense unless you are in an area with hurricanes. In places with a high probability of a hurricane hit they have started doing framing with the zip sheathing so it looks like a monopoly house, then they add overhangs that can break off in severe wind rather than taking the roof with it.
It's a shame more houses don't get built with ICF, including the roof. Living in an area that gets hurricanes at least every other year I would happily take a smaller house to get something that could stand up to category 4-5 hurricane.
There is a lot of overhead when it comes to building out a factory supply chain for scalable parts, because factories are large sunk capex costs, particularly for large items. And manufactured housing often does not make sense because if you manufacture whole rooms, unless you get special vehicles and delivery permits you are limited to the dimensions of a container, and there's a nonzero chance you show up to the site and you have to do some fiddling anyways to get it to actually fit. Plus people are not actually looking for identical room sizes.
Probably the closest we'll ever get is to standardization of parts like the 2x4 or some of the insulation panels that exist nowadays, since you can flatpack those into a truck and make adjustments on the fly.
> Plus people are not actually looking for identical room sizes.
Times are changing.
Gen Z will happily take it. What they're looking for is just any housing they can afford at all. If cheap effeciency can make a small detached bungalow with a real yard and a parking space affordable, they'll be happy to put up with minor taste quibbles like that. The alternative is roommate packed apartments, mom's basement, or homes far from any jobs to pay for the homes with.
Eh yes and no. The fad of container homes was a quick flash in the pan as it turned out they were actually a terrible size to actually live in; not quite large enough to put furniture in and still have walking space.
Because factories for rooms are actually specialized for the actual room, it's not cheap once you consider the startup cost of a factory. All the components of a room are increasingly panelized and mass manufactured anyways, making building large portions of buildings similar to building out of Legos or IKEA flatpack, which is good enough for labor reduction.
> And manufactured housing often does not make sense because if you manufacture whole rooms, unless you get special vehicles and delivery permits you are limited to the dimensions of a container […]
See perhaps this student housing project in Norway:
Entire bathroom shipped as one unit. The rest is panelized.
> Probably the closest we'll ever get is to standardization of parts like the 2x4 or some of the insulation panels that exist nowadays, since you can flatpack those into a truck and make adjustments on the fly.
NS Builders have a couple of videos on panelized buildings:
There are prefab firms that make a 2 or 3 story structural column with the fusebox, water heater, vertical plumbing and wiring conduits, drains, sink toilet and shower hookups, and spools of wiring to be pulled through walls. Almost no electrical and plumbing work needs to be done onsite.
Is there a reason for the rectangle, or is that the idea just for simplicity? Like, "smallest convex polygon" might be slightly better. I don't see any reason why the borders would need to be rectangular. Also for any shape there's no reason it would need to be axis-aligned with the exterior perimeter (which itself might be far from rectangular.)
It's a very simple rule of thumb that someone can check out in drafting software (or even paper blueprints). It's applicable in one-story domiciles (apartments, bungalows) and multi-story homes.
Gary Klein, the fellow who thought of it, has been consulting on (hot) water issues for a few decades now, and so has tried to whittle down his advice to the simplest thing that (a) people will understand, (b) be actually implementable. That's generally is: make all the hot faucets as close to the hot water source as possible. The rule is a metric for that.
Hah, this reminded me of a submission from a couple of years back [0] about efficient hot water piping, and lo and behold, the URL is for Gary Klein Associates [1].
Doesn't seem like this production method was particularly advantageous:
> But even at its early-50s heyday, while Levitt was an efficient builder, he wasn’t unrivaled. Levitt and Sons sold its early Levittown homes for around $10 per square foot, but many other builders (none of whom operated at Levitt’s scale) sold their homes at similar prices.
As property prices have increased, I doubt that the cost of building the house is even the major cost factor - it's probably mostly property value for the lot.
Edit: It also strikes me that we have something even better today - pre-fab or "mobile" homes that can be delivered by truck to a suitable plot of land. These haven't solved the housing crisis either.
> I doubt that the cost of building the house is even the major cost factor - it's probably mostly property value for the lot.
This is certainly the case here in the UK - but I suspect it depends on your local laws.
I looked into building my own house and essentially when you found a plot of land where you could legally construct a house - if a high quality house in that location would be worth £400k and cost £150k to construct, then the landowner would want £250k.
I do sometimes wonder if it could be politically advantageous to separate out the business of physically constructing houses from the business of capital management, land investment, risk management and house price speculation.
If a council knew they could construct 20 families worth of good quality social housing for £100k per house, with no risk of cost over-runs or late delivery, and they just had to provide the land? That could give them the motivation to find the land.
I wouldn't discourage speculation on the price of the physical dwelling (i.e. the house). But land speculation is corrosive to society, and the way to fix that is with a land value tax.
> separate out the business of physically constructing houses from the business of capital management, land investment, risk management and house price speculation.
That is how it mostly works in the US. The developer buys a large plot of land and puts in roads, utilities then sells the lots to several home builders who build houses on it. The home builders contract out the foundation, framing, plumbing... to separate companies. while it is common to be in more than one part of this, only the smallest developments are all one builder (and even then plumbing is contracted out).
home prices also dont scale linearly across their subcomponents. the most expensive part of a home is often the kitchen and bathroom. once youre on the hook for those costs, the tendency is to increase square footage overall in order to justify the price at all to the market. the nadier of homebuilding during the bush era was the McMansion at around 5000-6000 sqft, with a triple garage. not that you had three cars, just that the Hummer H2 took most of that real estate. most of these either got demolished after 2008 or sit in a capital management firms investment portfolio, about as attractive as a barrel of radioactive waste.
the other issue is a lot of municipalities (United States in particular) mandate and encourage large single family homes with outmoded energy and environmental requirements. suburbs work by siphoning resources from larger cities, sort of like a parasite. in turn they produce and encourage among the worst trends in US homes. acres of irrigated lawns and uninsulated attics and windows arent a concern but a feature of their housing code malaise as the cities subsidize this largesse.
> suburbs work by siphoning resources from larger cities, sort of like a parasite. in turn they produce and encourage among the worst trends in US homes. acres of irrigated lawns and uninsulated attics and windows arent a concern but a feature of their housing code malaise as the cities subsidize this largesse.
That is the narrative, but it doesn't stand up. Suburbs have existed for over 100 years now, and those older ones have managed to tear out the streetcars (on hindsight a mistake), put in sewer, water, phone, electric, cable tv - most of the above list has been replaced several times. They seem like they must be siphoning from the larger city until you realize that they are not replacing all of that every 20 years and so depreciation is not a clue as to the real long term costs.
There are exurbs where you get acres of land, those are generally surrounded by farms (at least for the first 30 years until the suburbs expand out that far - but then a developer will buy those acres and divide it for more houses) In the suburbs you are looking at more like 10 houses per acre - which is not very dense, but still much denser.
The US has good building codes. There is no place where you can get by with an uninsulated attic - except in the bad parts of big cities where houses from 1880 are still around and not upgraded.
> ... managed to tear out the streetcars (on hindsight a mistake)
Having lived in places with OK (SF) or good streetcar service (Berlin, which is a nice A/B test case with East/West Berlin) I am a huge fan of streetcars.
But my understanding is that in general the streetcars never made money in suburban developments. What I remember reading (on HN first!) was that they were deployed in early (post WWII) suburbs to entice urban people to move to a suburbs, but were operated at a loss. When the town eventually had to take them over they shut them down.
Does the economics really work out when you don't have urban density?
> they were deployed in early (post WWII) suburbs to entice urban people to move to a suburbs
No, the streetcar suburbs were ALL pre-war. Pre-WWI, mostly. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb ) And the streetcar companies were generally private companies that operated at a profit -- until they had to compete with cars for both riders and space. And this is key, nobody loved the streetcar companies, because they had a history of gouging commuters. So when those companies got in trouble, there was no political will for any kind of bailout.
roads often were until the Eisenhower administration pushed for free national highways, since he was part of a military test convoy that only made it across the country after 62 days on poor, or nonexistent roads. https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/online-documents/...
The highways that are present from before that time in the US are tolled, like the turnpikes found in the Northeast.
To be fair, I think a lot of the benefits of public transit go to people who aren't even using it. When you make it easier to go somewhere, more people will go there which is good for business at that somewhere. There are also the benefits of reduced traffic for those who do end up driving.
Yes. Although my argument would be slightly different. Subsidizing public transit in many cases is cheaper than upgrading roads. There is also social element. Elders & kids, disabled, DUI crowd… Public transit helps a lot to engage them.
Rail gives you more capacity. Of course if you don't need that capacity then the value proposition is questionable: perhaps better to start with a BRT and try to get things to grow.
BRT would be a good (and cheap) upgrade for a lot of the absurdly wide stroads covering US cities. Bonus points if you can get the intersections on those roads converted to roundabouts. The whole reason why those stroads got so comically wide is so that all the cars have somewhere to park while they're waiting for the next light. Roundabouts are continuous flow and can handle a lot more traffic than a signaled intersection, so you can take out the center lanes in favor of dedicated bus infrastructure.
The reason why most buses suck to take is because they can never keep to a schedule when they're sharing the same lanes that private cars take, have to wait at the same lights as them, etc.
Besides the sibling replies, it can also be powered better, from direct connection to the electrical grid. More efficient than lossy conversions from battery storage or combustion fuel, and also saves the weight and complexity of those components.
Except it usually also has a dedicated lane. Businesses and people also know that the bus line is fixed, so it makes all development along it significantly more attractive. A bus route can come and go per financial quarter.
I admittedly don't tour a lot of homes, but I'm pretty sure insulating between the attic space and the living space is close to universal in my area. Maybe if you live in Southern California or Hawaii and your home doesn't have A/C you could get away without it. Especially if you have a whole house fan that vents into the attic. But even then it is so cheap to blow in insulation that it seems foolish to not do it.
Yep, it's pretty universal in the US. You insulate the attic floor (ceiling of your rooms). This also means that you need to keep your attic cold. You do that by letting air in from your soffit vents to either ridge or gable vent. Ridge vent is arguably better because it runs along the right of your roof allowing the air to travel between the trusses that holds your roof up.
why would you be able to "get away with it" specifically without A/C? Seems to me having A/C would make a house with an uninsulated attic at least somewhat less miserable.
there is no insulation between the ceiling. Having the attic not part of the conditioned space is normal in the us. I wonder if that is what OP meant, if so it is a stupid requirement to add.
I've seen some convincing arguments (e.g. from Matt Risinger on YouTube) that the attic should be inside the conditioned space, even though this isn't the normal standard. Particularly if you have a slab foundation and your HVAC and ducting in the attic. Main reason is that if your HVAC ducts are up there, your attic is going to get really hot during the summer so you lose a lot of energy efficiency in your AC.
> suburbs work by siphoning resources from larger cities, sort of like a parasite. in turn they produce and encourage among the worst trends in US homes. acres of irrigated lawns and uninsulated attics and windows arent a concern but a feature of their housing code malaise as the cities subsidize this largesse.
There’s a reason that this narrative, the Strong Towns narrative, comes from an organization with “Towns” in the name. It was originally noticed in small rural American cities (county seats in the rural US and the like), and applies fairly well there, since the trend is to build suburbs in unincorporated land surrounding the main city to avoid city taxes. Suburbs surrounding large American cities tend to be incorporated cities of their own, so they raise their own taxes and don’t steal from the main city.
One major advantage cities used to have in the US but no longer do is that it used to be necessary to be annexed to a city to get access to things like their water system. That was a major driver of cities growing pre-WWII. However, as the US got richer and governmental structures became more sophisticated, things like water districts not coterminous with a city became common. Now there was little reason to become annexed to the city in most cases, unless your city or county ran into budget troubles, in which case the central city probably doesn’t want to pay for you either. Lots of suburbs remain separate specifically to avoid being subject to the city school system as well.
While this might be true on the technical level you mention, I don't know the details, I think the general pattern holds true even for larger cities. Think of NYC, where many suburbanite "bridge and tunnel folks" choose to live in Jersey, Long Island, etc. to avoid the higher city taxes but have no problem availing of all the city-funded infrastructure. They even caused the state governor to backtrack on congestion pricing so they could keep driving their vehicles in at the expense of NYC residents.
Ah, but NYC benefits from suburbanites and other outsiders visiting the city for work, deliveries, government services, culture and everything else. Sure, they have to build infrastructure (very much including trains) to service them, but the return is that NYC gets to accrue a larger metro area and the associated wealth. Also, it’s easy to forget that much of NYC’s infrastructure needs to live in suburban areas due to NYC’s density. All the warehouses needed to keep NYC fed and supplied can’t fit inside the city, to name one prominent example. Even to bring all the residential housing in the metro area into the city itself would make the city have to spend an ungodly amount on infrastructure to support them inside the city limits. The city actually benefits by having other jurisdictions be responsible for housing much of the metro area population.
although there the financial argument does apply. Nassau County has eye-wateringly high property taxes and the highest median income of any county in NY state, and has been under state fiscal supervision since the year 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassau_Interim_Finance_Authori...
Huh, shows what I know. Although the financial troubles don’t seem especially related to inefficient suburban infrastructure, but rather mismanagement that could occur anywhere.
If you work in NYC, you pay tax in NYC, regardless of where you live. New York has agreements with most states such that you get a tax credit in your home state for what you pay NYC, but the big Apple gets first crack at your paycheck.
New Jersey has pretty much resigned itself to this situation and gets funding via property tax.
NY state works the same way too. If you work remotely you're still required to pay NYS income tax on your wages, even though basically no payroll company knows to check for this scenario unless you bug them about it. The technical term for this is the "convenience of the employer" rule, and in the specific case of NYS you are liable for taxes on nonresident income unless your work specifically requires you to be out of state[0] or you work from an employer-run office in another state. Remote employees like me get to pay quarterly estimated tax and then claim refunds from my resident state, which is a pain in the ass.
Aside from New York, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Delaware, and Nebraska have the same rule. If you work for a company headquartered in any of those states you probably should be paying nonresident income taxes there just in case. My personal opinion is that "convenience of the employer" should only apply to people who regularly travel to and from the state for work, but last time I looked this up, some guy in Connecticut sued NYS and lost over that exact issue.
For the record, the tax credit isn't part of the agreement, it's a constitutional mandate. SCOTUS prohibits two states taxing the same income, they have to divide it up, so every state has a "taxes paid to another state" credit. Though, funnily enough, that credit is taxable, ASK ME HOW I KNOW.
If you wanna see some real double-tax bullshit, wait until you hear about how Americans have to pay both American and Japanese income tax if they live and work in Tokyo...
[0] i.e. it's not at the convenience of the employer
> the most expensive part of a home is often the kitchen and bathroom
Absolutely this.
Back in 2018, mum got dementia and her old home was not one the rest of us could really move back into due to commutes, so we sold it and bought a new one in a better location. The new one wasn't quite big enough, so we converted the existing garage into a granny annex with its own mini-kitchen and shower.
That took about 6 months.
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I've also recently had one kitchen installed (4m^2 for an apartment I let out), and ordered a second (6 m^2, for a house I'm about to move into), and despite both being tiny and already having the water and electrical connections, they were both in the £€ 10k range.
Plumbing, cabinets, countertops, appliances, and even the flooring. Everything adds up, and quickly.
To be fair there are lots of ways to save money when doing a kitchen or bath remodel, but if you're doing the remodel in the first place you aren't opting for the linoleum floors, plastic countertops, and "builder grade" appliances.
Linoleum floors are amazingly durable and water resistant (some were recovered intact from the Titanic), made from a renewable source (linseed oil), and quite attractive these days.
Perhaps you are thinking of vinyl flooring, which is petroleum derived, and the among cheapest types of flooring.
> Kitchen remodels that I've seen pretty much always opt for some form of tile, which adds considerably to the cost.
Not sure what you are answering on my comment. My point is that linoleum isn't a cheap, builder grade material, whether in tile or sheet form. So I think we agree?
> As property prices have increased, I doubt that the cost of building the house is even the major cost factor - it's probably mostly property value for the lot.
I'm not so sure. Looking at my property tax assessment my 1/5th my 1400 sq ft house + 400 sq ft detached garage has an accessed value of about 3.5 times that of my 1/5th acre lot.
Accessed values here are based on market values and are reasonably close to what I see when I compare to recent sales on Redfin or Zillow, so it looks like the total is close. And the accessed value of the building is reasonably close to what my insurance company says it would cost to rebuild them.
Checking Zillow for lots for sale, it looks like my assessed value is reasonable.
I'm in a relatively low density area though. As a check I looked at a nearby significant city, Seattle. Comparing lots for sale there to nearby similar lots that have houses on them it looks like it is similar to where I am in some places and very different in others.
It looks like if the lot is zoned for commercial use or for tall buildings the price if very high. I saw one that was something like 0.38 acres for nearly $7 million. But for lots in single family house areas it looked pretty similar to what I'm seeing at my place. The lot is around 1/4th or 1/5th the value of the property.
Counter example in coastal California (in basically the West Coast version of levitt Town),my tax and insurance assessment has my physical house only representing a third of the total value. So the lot is with double the structure.
But I'm guessing that is not a common situation across the country.
Is there anything especially attractive about your location? Lots with a good view for example can go for a lot more than similar lots in the same general area that lack a view.
In my market (Portland, OR), the cost for new construction seems to be in the range of $250-350/square foot. A buildable lot in a decent neighborhood costs $300k-ish (if you can find one).
Assuming you’re building a family sized building of 2k+ square feet, building costs definitely exceed land costs.
Anecdotally, all the new construction in my neighborhood is top of market - builders are selling large houses at $1.3M+ when a typical existing house sells for more like $700k. Smaller homes would sell faster, but the economics seem to only pencil out for larger/higher end.
Why would you sell for less than the market price? If I can sell something at $10/sq ft and my costs to produce it are $5 and my competitors are $9 then there is no reason to cut prices. We will both profit, I will just make larger profits.
Because if you cut prices, you'll get a larger share of the market. So even if you make less profit per unit, you make a larger profit overall. Also, as you scale, some costs stay fixed, so your costs per unit might go down as well.
The catch is that if you charge less than a small difference to your next closest competitor people will think something is wrong with it. Saw it happen many times working at an antique store for years. It was amazing how often raising prices made things sell that had been sitting there for months, or longer. You rarely want to make something too inexpensive, along with never using the word "cheap". There's also issues with trying to give something away for free. Generally people value something more depending on what they paid for it. Upscale brands like Coach and Channel exploit that aspect of consumer psychology.
Pre fab and mobile could solve the crisis but they are mired in all kinds of stupid rules. A living space for a human being doesn't need to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
>As property prices have increased, I doubt that the cost of building the house is even the major cost factor - it's probably mostly property value for the lot.
More like 10-20% depending on a lot of different factors like location, cost of house, and size of lot.
Yeah home prices are mainly based on location and sqare footage. Condition, age, and amenities factor in but pretty much all the houses in a neighborhood sell for similar prices. It's definitely possible to over-improve a house and find yourself upside down in it at least for a while, which is OK if you want to live there and enjoy it but can backfire if you're planning to sell soon.
Keep in mind this is not true in the Northeast. It’s very common to have multi million dollar homes within spitting distance of dilapidated buildings worth only land value.
My parent’s house, while nothing special, sold for a couple hundred thousand when they sold in 2019. A few months before hand our neighbor sold theirs for over 2 million.
Not sure whether the original contention is untrue in the Northeast or just much more rapidly-varying in space.
Where I live (Baltimore) your second sentence is certainly true. There are boundaries across which the vacancy rate is basically discontinuous. In connected regions surrounded by such boundaries I think the original contention pretty much holds, though. There are a couple variables (nbeds, nbaths, sqft, parking space) that pretty much determine the value of the home and going HAM on any improvements they don't capture is probably negative ROI.
tl;dr: For new developments, land is only about 20% of the total sale price of the home, and this share has been dropping since 2005.
However, he also notes an important selection bias to this stat: new homes do not get constructed in areas where land is expensive, unless it's a custom build for a specific wealthy buyer, because developers cannot make a profit building SFHs if they spend a majority of the purchase price just buying the land. He notes that in wealthy areas like eg. Silicon Valley, 80% of the purchase price is land value, but developers are not building homes there, which is part of why the purchase price is so high.
And sure enough, if you go out to Mountain House or Discovery Bay, prices are like 25% of what they are in Silicon Valley. But then you have to commute from Mountain House. America's housing problem is as much a commuting or job distribution problem as housing, but those problems are even harder to fix than housing.
> Edit: It also strikes me that we have something even better today - pre-fab or "mobile" homes that can be delivered by truck to a suitable plot of land.
“ Supporters praised Levitt for giving thousands of Americans the chance to own a home, while others criticized the cookie-cutter Levittown homes as a further intrusion of a hollow consumerist culture and lifestyle.”
NIMBYs have always existed it seems, but we don’t have the lax land use laws that result in screwing over young families less than we do now.
Seriously, we picked our house based on price, school district, and condition. We actually wanted less aesthetically appealing houses more but were outbid, so had to go with our third choice.
Anyone bitching about home aesthetics is at or near the top of Maslow's hierarchy and really needs to shut up.
> Economies of scale. It’s cheaper to build lots of identical things.
It is important to note what parts the identical is important and what you can vary. You can buy cars in many colors because it turns out black is no longer an advantage, manufactures can change paint quickly. (the reason you only get about 6 choices is sales wants to keep each color in stock so you can drive it home, there is no savings in manufacturing to have 6 colors choices as opposed to 60,000)
In the case of houses the identical thing is 8 or 9 foot tall walls with mostly 90 degree angles. You have a lot of options to make walls longer or shorter as you desire and so houses get great scale factors despite not being very identical.
No it isn't - while you could make a jig for a specific wall, even if all houses used that same size wall, transport fees would more than the cost of building the wall manually as we do now.
The above is why pre-fab never took off. Sure you can build a house in a factory, but transport costs are much harder than bringing the materials and factory to the house site. The wall height matters because most of the boards in the wall are pre-cut in a factory already and that is something your factory built house cannot improve on (unless you want a weird wall height)
It's all about small changes. Getting a whole prefabbed house is a thing, but not the nicest. But pre-fabbed roof trusses are very common now. It's more work to ship those than the pieces, but on-site labor savings and consistency make it valuable. Pre-hung doors with doorframes are also the norm.
I'm not in the industry, but I could imagine there's some possibility for pre-fabbed wall panels, but I don't know how much that really saves, because I wouldn't think you want to pre-hang the drywall, it'll get damaged in shipping. Maybe you could prehang exterior sheathing. But it's a big increasing in shipping volume to save only a little bit of time and have a much less flexible layout.
> while you could make a jig for a specific wall, even if all houses used that same size wall, transport fees would more than the cost of building the wall manually as we do now
But one is still cheaper!
> why pre-fab never took off
Same reason we have more car colors. It’s more expensive. But we value variety more than that marginal cost. That doesn’t change that producing one costs more than the other.
(There is also a massive difference between consolidating fabrication and consolidating construction. Developments work because you have one team doing a similar set of tasks at the same location repeatedly.)
> there is no savings in manufacturing to have 6 colors choices as opposed to 60,000
This isn't really true. At the peak of car customizability an OEM had an astronomic number (something like 10^180) of possible configuration combinations for a single model, with very few cars having actually identical configurations and like 80% being unique configurations. Adds a huge amount of complexity to the supply chain and shop floor management. There's a reason why OEMs have been greatly reducing the number of individual options since then.
The reason is mostly that sales wants to someone who walks in the door the first time to walk out. If someone wants to custom order a car the 10^180 possible combinations isn't that big a deal, but there is no way to have that many cars on every lot and so sales demands it.
Yes less different models does save a little but of cost, but it isn't that much overall.
In my country, almost anyone producing lots of very similar homes builds chooses a reasonably attractive design for the simple reason that attractive buildings can command higher prices.
Of course, as they want to be attractive to as many potential buyers as possible, the results do turn out kinda neutral.
More than that, most of what makes a design attractive doesn't cost any more than unattractive and so there is no cost. Often attractive is cheaper because a factory knowing attractive features are in demand will setup jigs/machine to automatically cut the profile into a board while if you wanted a something plane it has to be cut but hand.
My neighborhood is cookie-cutter houses, but with ~8 different plans, and all of them varying in color of siding, roof, and color/type of facade. The result is that it doesn't look like it's cookie-cutter.
I've spent the last couple of years researching and building my own timber frame structures and I have come to be of the opinion that aesthetics exist for a reason. A functionally sound structure will have pleasing aesthetics.
Understanding more about home-building now, when I look at what's available in new builds and renovations these days I see a lot of suspect aesthetics and they are usually accompanied by (if not directly representing) poor design decisions.
Declining birth rates are often blamed on many things, but the negative birth rates in the western world are probably most caused by housing policy. Housing affects everything. Have to have two incomes to buy a home for kids. Probably 50+ hour week jobs, so no time to care for kids. But child care is too expensive… because rent is so high it’s driven labor cost up. Have to own two cars because the sort of family friendly density to live car free is illegal in most places. That’s another 10-30% of a families income. People who didn’t buy an home when interest rates were low and homes cheap own homes are essentially locked out; both of home ownership and having families.
We know the richest Americans and (Swedes according to a recent study) are more fertile than the middle class. So maybe it’s not a filter for the earth, but it probably will ultimately destroy the western world as we know it. Ultimately, the childless middle of the fertility U will disappear with immigration being used to replace the gaps in the workforce. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just the outcome of generations of people voting (at the municipal level) in their best interests without care for future generations.
Unfortunately this isn't the case. Places that have good housing policy, like Texas or Japan, still have below-replacement TFR.
There might be a correlation with urbanization in general rather than housing policy specifically. Ever since antiquity, cities have been demographic black holes while most population growth occurred in rural areas.
I’m sorry you’ve been priced out of one specific neighborhood, but that’s not a fair reflection on the state as a whole, which builds housing faster than just about anywhere and, as a result, is starting to see housing prices drop (if not outright “crash”) in places like Austin.
Subsidizing demand is the last thing you want to do when it comes to affordability, and the Texas cities are building massive amounts of multifamily housing.
> NIMBYs have always existed it seems, but we don’t have the lax land use laws that result in screwing over young families less than we do now.
I mean that's just America. Every group trying to fuck over the group below them for an extra step up the proverbial ladder, usually without even knowing it.
It's fuck or be fucked around here. And the poorer you are, the more people you've got in line to fuck you.
> “arduous, long, and expensive process” of approvals, as well as being forced to meet higher (and more expensive) standards for things like sidewalks,
I now live in a neighborhood with about 200 homes all built right after WWII, all 3 bed/1 bath 1,200 sq. ft. with minor variations[0]. No sidewalks! Pedestrian-friendly access is not cheap.
[0]by now, many have been modified to add a bath/bedroom
Having moved from an area _without_ sidewalks to one _with_ them, I would vote for them to be pretty much everywhere of medium population density. It's a lot safer for everyone that way.
You actually don't need sidewalks to be pedestrian-friendly. You need some combination of vehicle control measures (slow cars down), low density (fewer cars) or high density (shorter walk times), and something to walk to (a corner store, a transit stop/station, a park). Voila, people walk.
Is it common to mention why certain codes and policies were implemented (documentation, essentially)? Because that would make it a lot easier to understand if planning dogma was reasonable ("When we didn't have this, people died a lot") or not ("We now have mitigation strategies for the reasons people died a lot that allow us to step back rigor in this area.").
One side effect of not having sidewalks and not being connected to public transit is it segregates the neighborhood from the poor and especially the homeless. People were fleeing cities and were putting up walls around their neighborhoods via zoning and car centric design.
Not everything is a conspiracy, sidewalks cost a lot of money to build and maintain, they cause problems with water runoff from roads often necessitating storm drains which cost even more money. Car centric design is an obvious necessity of being a bedroom community built on inexpensive rural land some distance outside of city boundaries.
This is true even without somewhere to walk to. Most hilly neighborhoods in california lack sidewalks, and tons of people are out walking. Dog still needs walked. Its a nice day practically every day in california. People get out of the house and walk plenty, and the drivers assume there's probably going to be something to slow them down around every blind turn and act accordingly. People won't be inclined to walk if its raining often, snowing, or too humid, moreso than the quality of the built environment outside their door I imagine.
While the slow strangulation of Levitt's mass production formula for building large volumes of homes that were affordable for people who otherwise couldn't afford housing was the saddest part, in 1994 Levitt died in poverty close to the well over 20,000 affordable homes he had built in Long Island.
OTOH, with even larger volumes of affordable [single-family] homes, the US would have even more suburban sprawl than it has now, which I think most people agree is not actually a good thing...
I look at the restrictive covenant that forbid my family from living in the house we lived in when I was younger (after such covenants were deemed unenforceable, but not struck entirely from the house's deed), and play my tiniest violin.
> Crews would go to a house, perform their required task (using material that had been pre-delivered), then move on to the next house. Within the crew, work was further specialized: on the washing machine installation crew, William Levitt noted that “one man did nothing but fix bolts into the floor, another followed to attach the machine,” and so on. By breaking down the process into repetitive, well-defined steps, workers didn’t have to spend time figuring out what they should do
Having worked over the years on multiple tract-home projects doing labor, framing, stacking (installing the prefab truss packages), and layout (snapping lines on slabs marking out where everything goes) I can affirm that this IS how its done with variance per-project and usually with several floorplans to scratch that "novelty" itch for buyers. The homes go up fast with each crew sweeping through a few units at a time doing their respective parts. It's efficient that way.
> keeping construction on track meant a steady, uninterrupted stream of material that arrived at the jobsite exactly when needed.
A lot of the materials (especially lumber) are queued up ahead of each project starting to ensure that daily flow happens. On jobs I worked on as labor my job was to hand deliver any lumber resupply requests that were below some efficiency threshold for using the heavy off road forklift -- if memory serves me correctly, 20 pieces.
The windows and trusses were all pre-fabricated and delivered in bundled packages for each floorplan.
This is in contrast to a "spec" (speculation) home where a smaller builder buys land themselves and builds a (single?) house and then sells it after (no buyer is lined up before hand).
Someone could also go with a "custom" home, where the eventual resident themselves have some land and hire someone (general contract (GC)) to build it (or they act a GC themselves and hire all the subs (sub-contractors) themselves).
A "production builder" is probably the closest thing to 'factory line' assembly/construction. Generally this is what is happening when a sub-division is built up; usually a certain percentage of the units have a signed purchased agreement and a deposit.
> Generally this is what is happening when a sub-division is built up; usually a certain percentage of the units have a signed purchased agreement and a deposit.
95% (every developer is different, but this is a good number for discussion) of the lots are sold by the developer to a builder. They will have a dozen builders and know what each wants and so 95% of the lots they know who will buy the lot before they can legally talk to the builder who will buy it (if the builder is on vacation that week they will wait for them to come back). The last 5% is for the few people who think they want a custom house with their own builder. The builders will sell the majority of houses on their lots as one of their designs (often all, but they will custom build on their lot if you ask - it costs only a little more), most houses are sold before they are completed, but often they are started before they have a purchase agreement.
We have a small 4-story condo going into a lot behind us now (and for the past 4 months). It's remarkabke how stop and go visible progress is, even though the there's people on the site 5 or 6 days a week.
Two weeks of earth moving. Then prep. Do the foundation in a week. Then prep. Framing in a week and a half. Now endless jobs of plumbing, electrical, windows, this and that, on and on for weeks.
For factory built homes to really be a win, then need a very high level of integration. An easy to snap together frame doesn't actually save much time or effort. But if there's really finished walls with utilities built-in (and also accessible for future maintenance) then I can see the effort being potentially useful.
There is an area where "mass production of housing" became widespread, which the article completely overlooks: multi-storey apartment buildings. These are arguably better for a city than suburban sprawl, but (due to being affordable) got a bad rep too, so the building of these larger buildings also shifted back to more artisanal processes.
A lot of buyers want a single-family home though. It kind of sucks to have neighbors on the other side of the walls and ceiling, especially if the construction didn't include really good soundproofing.
This is especially true in the US where fire code make it practically impossible to build a 4 bedroom unit which families will want. (it is legal, but if you try to design one you discover the code forces a lot of space that you can't do anything useful with and so it isn't possible)
I've been wondering why we don't see many 4-bedroom, house-sized (~2000sqft+) apartment units. It seems to me that many who balk at attached units do so because of space concerns more than proximity. Can you give more details on this?
There have to be two stairways in every apartment buileing. That in turn forces a hall down the middle. Every bedroom needs to have a window. Both of the above are written in the blood of those who died in fires.
the result of the above is four bedroom apartments have too much space with no purpose. Try to draw any apartment and you will quickly see.
> There have to be two stairways in every apartment buileing.
Since you're talking about this you probably know this already, but Europe largely does not follow this rule, and doesn't really suffer from horrible fires.
Oh, okay. I thought it would be something more esoteric. Youtuber About Here has done a few videos mentioning the two-stairway rule, but he explains it as being mostly a barrier to multi-story multi-family buildings being built on SFH-sized lots. In any case, he posits that fire mitigation strategies developed since the code came into effect (mandated sprinkler systems, fire breaks, etc.) make it unnecessary. There's also the notion that fire escape infrastructure doesn't need to be a whole other stairwell. It's one thing I hope to see change in the future.
Townhouses can be as good as detached or even significantly better (due to no windows in between) if built "correctly" (good thick brick/concrete party wall in between both houses or can be awful just as you fear if they were built shoddily all at once with nothing but thin framed drywall. Buyers who only insist on detached due to noise would be well served to carefully consider rowhouses, but inspecting them closely for this.
Rowhouses are a really, really good sweet spot for affordable yet private as long as they have the good noise eliminating party wall, so I would support the government just mandating them being built this way (it doesn't cost that much more, but over time by driving out bad rowhouses, it would improve their reputation).
Rowhouses enable a density similar to apartment buildings while allowing privacy quiet, ownership of a yard and roof deck, the ability to tear down and build any way you like, and pretty much all the accoutrements of suburban living but just a little smaller. It's great to own the land under your feet and have no one below or above you.
Will note that while not an issue as much today, any 'old timer' might remember that you generally couldn't 'blast the stereo' (when mom and dad left the house) unless you were in a single family home.
The question is, can we, as a country, afford "a lot of buyers" wanting a single-family home, as far as construction costs, infrastructure costs, replacements costs, transportation costs, etc. go? A lot (most?) of suburban sprawl was financed. A lot (most?) of it reaches varying degrees of insolvency over time. Maybe it's a luxury we can only afford if we cut back in other areas. Maybe a lot of the deficiencies we see in society are caused in part by how much money we shovel into the expensive version of this basic need that was chose.
The fact is, they did revolutionize homebuilding because they made people realize that homes were something the mass market could afford - if it was done correctly.
Many time the realization of the idea the important thing. Apple didn't win the personal computer market, but its ideas defined the personal computer. Levitt may not have become a billionaire, but his idea that houses were for everyone won.
I was also surprised, but the author clearly had US in mind. It's not just former Soviet countries, prefabs for large apartment blocks are used all over the world.
Yes banlieues in France are also similar or Plattenbau in Western and Eastern Germany. Typical American mindset and the fact that OP gets down voted, tell everything.
I think there are many nerd-simplification-projects that seem elegant in theory, but are either hard to bring to fruition, or nobody wants to buy something simple.
I'm reminded of the next computer, which had a very expensive factory that just failed. The IDEA of highly-automated assembly of a computer is just so compelling, but getting it from automated to highly-automated wrecks the economics of things.
The other thing I think about is tesla - they have been working very hard to remove complexity from each generation of their cars. But they keep going and don't know where to stop, removing the dashboard, buttons, sensors (radar and sonar) and control stalks. In the end, the car might have marched right past "elegant minimalism" to "cheap dangerous nobody wants"
seems odd that you didn't include the next sentence:
"The FHA, upon authorizing loans for the construction of Levittown, included racial covenants in each deed, making each Levittown a segregated community."
That is, the FHA included the covenants, not Levitt.
Levitt was absolutely a racist, the FHA eventually found the covenants to be illegal discrimination and Levitt sued the government and attempted to maintain them all the way to the US Supreme Court. Defending William Levitt in 2024 is a real choice.
This is a traditional and eminently sensible approach that has been lost in the "McMansion" era.
Simpler roof shapes are not only cheaper to build, but also are far easier to deal and insulate, and therefore more energy efficient.
Instead, simple energy efficient design is today mostly used in some high end custom homes while production homes are often overly complex and inefficient, relying on oversized mechanical equipment to make up for poor design choices.
> rooms were arranged so that plumbing lines could be placed near each other to simplify pipe routing.
There's a simple method to quantify this known as the "hot water rectangle". On the house's overhead view, draw the smallest rectangle that includes all the hot water faucets and the water heater.
The size of the rectangle affects build cost, efficiency, and hot water delivery performance. In many large houses there is no consideration for this at the design stage, so they end up using (wasteful) hot water recirculation pumps.
1. https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/the-hot-water-r...
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