I'm remodeling my place right now. You're totally right, the building codes are a lot more complex and there is more 'work' to do as a result. No more just hiding electrical boxes in the walls. Heh.
That said, the products being used have improved a lot. Things like PEX tubing for plumbing (instead of copper) and glue on walls for showers (over doing tile work), make some aspects go a lot faster.
Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention vinyl plank flooring... omg, so easy and the results look and function great.
The big builders like DR Horton and Lennar target build times of 100 days per home that meets minimum code requirements, which is pretty good productivity. A community of 100 homes can be up and running in 2 years.
And that 100 days target is mainly for achieving optimal efficiency. If you want to optimize for time it's totally possible to go from an empty lot to a finished house in under a week, provided that all the workers, inspectors, and materials are available.
Requires a ton of overhead at the planning / pre-construction phases. That’s only amortized out if you built a ton of volume which these do. It’s also why you may only have a choice of 8 floor plans even though it’s a neighborhood of 500 homes.
I live in an area where the plumbing is soldered copper and the wiring is all in steel conduit. PEX, ProPress, Sharkbites, Romex... it's all just a little scary to me.
Friendly, super knowledgable, takes the fear out of the DIY.
For electrical, I do a lot myself, but when it came to running a 50amp line + breaker panel inside my place (which also required outdoor ladder work) to replace the steel conduit indoors, I just hired a professional even though it was very expensive.
It's not the DIY aspect^, it's the idea of ProPress joint sitting pressurized behind a wall for a decade.
^ I'm knowledgeable enough to do my own wiring and plumbing, but pay for licensed/bonded contractors instead. I sleep better at night and my insurance company probably does as well.
Up to you, but it honestly really isn't that much of an issue and I'd trust a simple properly crimped joint (which is easily visually inspected with a simple tool) a heck of a lot more than a welded one that is impossible to see what the inside looks like... um, did I put the right amount of flux on? did I know to use the 1/2 of solder to 1/2 of pipe trick?
As far as insurance companies... I bought an old place... I'm finding all sorts of stuff that isn't up to code (hidden electrical boxes, in the floor!, with wire nuts and not even twisted together wire and not even grounded properly)... I'm bringing it up to code, with modern products... in a court of law, it is going to be hard for them to argue against me.
Depends on what you're doing. I've done quite a bit of DIY, and much of it is probably better than if I hired someone for the simple fact I care, and I'm not trying to do it as fast as possible.
If the walls are open, they shouldn’t. They should be using the minimum number of connections/joins because that’s always going to be a higher point of failure. However, When you/they need to patch something and don’t want to open up the whole room/house, then that’s the correct use case for these devices.
I should have been more clear. I wouldn't use a sharkbite for a permanent fix, but being able to patch something until you can either do a permanent fix or get a plumber out is a big win. I even keep PVC glue and some collars/caps for the same reason.
Shark bite is awesome for capping a broken pipe until you can get around to a proper fix. Love those shark-bite caps. IMO every home owner should have pipe cutters for the pipes in their house (whatever materials those may be), and a set of those caps ready to apply for every size of pipe they've got. Ought to be as common as having a screwdriver and hammer. They're absolute life-savers when a leak or pipe burst happens at odd hours and you just want to get the leak stopped and the water back on and go back to bed or get back to work or whatever. Cut the pipe, steel wool the end clean, slap the shark bite cap on, get on with life until you have the time to properly fix it. Turns something very inconvenient into something merely a little inconvenient. Beats the hell out of having to break out the solder or pipe glue at 2AM.
If you've got a significant leak in a supply pipe, there should be a valve on the branch that will allow you to shut off just that branch rather than the whole house. You might need to shut off the whole house first while you figure out where that valve is, but you probably won't have to do ad-hoc plumbing to get most of the house back on.
But yes, in general I'm always for people becoming familiar with tools and DIY.
Owned a half-dozen US houses built between 1907 and 2015 and have never actually seen such a thing. If you're lucky someone's done some work on a branch at some point and was courteous enough to install a shut-off, though usually off somewhere weird where there was already damage or whatever, not where you'd normally look for it.
[EDIT] Actually, my parents' very-new house has that... but because it's all-PEX, so it's super-easy to install it that way, with a central panel full of shut-offs for various parts.
Hah. I hadn't realized I was taking that for granted (over multiple houses myself), and just figured they were required by code (even though it makes the chrome sink shutoffs kind of redundant). Score 1 for DIYers doing more maintainable work than professionals.
FWIW a SharkBite valve or NPT adapter into a valve would seem to be a handier thing to have around than a pure cap. For example, you can attach a valve without shutting the water off.
Hell, maybe it is required by code in some places. I've only really looked at the plumbing of houses in a three-state cluster in the Midwest, maybe elsewhere more-conveniently-designed plumbing is normal.
I had the main irrigation feed burst over Christmas and it's just a branch off the main line into the house with no valve! Had to turn the water off at the street, and couldn't fix it until the day after Christmas.
Maybe they're not in an area where it freezes, so the main shutoff doesn't need to be inside the house, and there's no need to shut off and drain the silcock in the winter?
Let's assume all that is true. Still, shit breaks, and all branches off the main have to be valved separately. With the current setup, contamination (e.g. by sewage) of a branch couldn't be isolated from the house. That is not acceptable.
I was the one who started the thread thinking that shutoffs on branches were the norm, and apparently that's just not the case everywhere.
Also I don't know what you mean about sewage contamination? Sewage contamination of potable water lines would indicate a hugely weird problem.
AFAIK backflow preventers (fancy check valves), which prevent water in the house from going back into the municipal distribution, are standard on new installs. But I think that requirement is recent as of the past few decades, so most houses aren't going to have them.
I suppose that depends on the typical age of houses in your area? Just as supply lines inside houses might get contaminated, supply lines outside houses might get contaminated. Perhaps from sewage, perhaps from runoff, or whatever. Outside lines are more likely to be broken by sloppy excavation, for example. Simple isolation valves are sensible even in situations that don't require backflow preventers, such as on a private well.
I still don't really understand what you're saying.
Yes, I agree isolation valves are good. But as far as what code requires? It seems that if isolation valves aren't required on branches, then the only isolation valve that is required is the main house valve that can isolate it from the street water main.
So I can't figure out what else you think would have been required to pass inspection in the comment you originally responded to.
My place has no master valves in the bathroom branch for the cold water feed. I can shut off the hot water though since that comes from an on demand unit that I installed. I have to shut off the entire condo building (14 units) to do any work in there. You can be sure that I'm going to add a master valve to that branch...
As I mentioned above, I should have been more clear about using it for emergency repairs and not necessarily permanent fixes. I also keep pvc pipe glue and some collars/caps around for the same reason.
PEX is very very not-great. It's constantly leeching carcinogens and endocrine disruptors into your sitting water. Your modern home's recirculation system is making that even worse, cycling hot water and concentrating leeched petrochemical products in your hot water line. Some of them even boil before water which means they'll make it through a distiller.
Plumbers like it because it's easy/saves them time, and they'll love charging you big $$$ to rip it out in 20 years when it's banned.
Copper is superior. I specifically went out of my way to find a house with large swaths of the plumbing done with copper. Pretty neat to have anti-microbial properties built in.
My pipes are all copper, and the hot water contains a non trivial amount of lead (from the solder used to join the pipes). I had it tested - around 20 ppb.
We don't drink or cook with the hot water, but in theory if the plumbing was PEX we could.
Lead flux went away like 45 years ago. But sometimes galvanized pipe has some amount of lead in the zinc coating, and a mixed cooper/galvanized installation can accelerate corrosion.
Post-Flint, lead is the new asbestos. Because the standard is zero tolerance, there’s alot of noise on the topic.
PEX is great, but I’d personally always go for cooper if I could afford it. We tend to learn new things about plastic and risks over time.
For new construction the ideal is solderless copper. You use pure copper pipes + ProPress. It's fast and the cleanest you can get outside of exotic glass plumbing.
Better keep that copper out of exterior walls. It doesn't stretch and rebound like PEX when the water freezes. Those who care about homeopathy can run their drinking water through a loop of copper.
For sure; better design would move most supply lines to interior walls. However, most owners of standalone homes want to be able to look out a window situated above their kitchen sink. It's possible to have supply lines sticking out of the floor, but that complicates inspection and cabinet installation and also it sucks to have to search for one's undersink supplies behind those pipes.
Another factor, in concrete slab construction, is that we want drain lines to be as short as possible, because even though it's possible to get those correct before the pour it doesn't always happen. Concentrating fixtures in one corner of the house tends to force supply lines into exterior walls.
Maybe I should hire better plumbers, and maybe I should live where it doesn't get cold, but until then maybe I should just use PEX.
AFAIK the effect is also significant enough that using copper on public high-touch surfaces (doorknobs or push plates, hand rails) can meaningfully decrease disease transmission rates.
Well I hope you plan to move/sell, in my opinion PEX will be banned in 20 years and you'll have a hard time selling without remediation. PEX is absolutely loaded with carcinogenic compounds and endocrine disruptors that actively leech into your water, especially if you have a hot water recirculation system (standard/code on new homes)
>After the tenth pin hole leak and lots of shark bite fixes, I am not fond of copper.
It's my understanding that the vast majority of pinhole copper leaks are caused by poor solder jobs. Solder gets inside the pipe and causes a vortex that can eat through the copper.
The solution to this is to use solderless copper ProPress fittings for everything. Not only is this much more clean and faster to install, but the inside of the pipe is flush/smooth with the fitting.
> Phthalate exposure from drinking water via cPVC or PEX is low when compared to other dietary sources. Nonetheless, a shift from cPVC to PEX pipes in households would decrease potential exposure to phthalates.[1]
Almost everything I drink out of is lined with plastic. Milk or juice containers, water bottles, and most reusable on the go cups are made of plastics or have a plastic liner.
food packaging plastics are short lived (time from packaging to consumption is <2 years) and they are not exposed to sun nor heat. They are safe.
But long-term plastics in tubing are exposed continuously to heat (hot water) and will start falling apart and leech chemicals, because they are exposed over long-term
Those glue on walls seemed to be priced at “we know how much tiling costs”. £36m2 (cheapest I could find on a site similar to Home Depot) for some composite plastic seems crazy. They have some double that price too.
> Definitely a product that is ripe for disruption. There aren't even many manufacturers.
These two statements may be related. It’s not worth deploying capital to compete if the additional competition drives profits margins to zero. Better to deploy that capital somewhere it gets better expected returns.
This anti-competitive logic seems very widespread these days with such centralized global supply chains and consolidated retail chains.
Not a lot of room for me to deploy a small amount of capital to create a small-medium sized manufacturing facility of this stuff to chip away at 10-50% of the demand around the edges of the marginal profits. Mainly because it would be difficult to get my products into Home Depot and Lowe’s if I can’t supply their whole national chain.
And that’s assuming Home Depot and Lowe’s haven’t agreed to any exclusivity with the current manufacturers which I’d need private equity money to beat.
Of course adding those items would cost even more, so it is a bit of a race to zero. That said, if you can get a following by homebuilders and into every single new housing project, it might be worth it. I'm sure having some sort of inside track advantage there would be necessary too. None of which I personally have, but as an end user of this stuff, I'd be more than happy to support and provide feedback on.
The great thing about PEX is that they made an expensive* tool that makes joining pipes like 90% less skill-intensive.
I'd love to see something similar done for electric wiring. I'm picturing something like an electrical box that you can directly connect Romex that's been stripped with a special tool, and then a circuit-breaker-style snap-in for the actual receptacle. The parts/tools would cost more but might dramatically speed up the installation.
*relatively expensive, especially in the early days.
Neat but the speed up here just doesn't seem that extreme, I guess maybe if you're installing 10k of these a day. I feel like the time it takes to put the wires into the harness is just as much time as putting them straight into the receptacle and tightening the nut.
I did start using wago's though... those are handy for sure.
PEX is terrible, pretty much every commercial brand has been shown to leech petrochemicals into your water. This varies a lot based on your municipal water supply's characteristics. Unfortunately cleaner water leeches more.
PEX saves megabuilders $$$ and plumbers time, but it's not good for you.
I have no idea how much it affects the data used to make that calculation, nor how much is its relevance in the US, but here (EU, Italy) besides the building code improvements there has been a very noticeable increase in amount/complexity of electric and hydraulic/heating/conditioning installments.
Pretty sure this is the right answer and calling this "worker productivity" seems a bit harsh. A "Pretty Good House" (book that was on the front page last week) includes insulation above and below the foundation slab, vapour barriers, double studs to break thermal bridges, complex window installation (again thermal bridges), air exchangers and heat pumps with ducts (or mini-splits).
New constructions (for cold zone), need to be air tight and that certainly comes at a cost in time as it is work to apply all the layers, run the conduits and whatnot.
I have no data to back this observation up, but everyone (especially in the media, but also in corporate life) is attacking "worker productivity" lately. Everyone's got a reason, but when you dig into them they all stink.
From the mouth of CEOs it's clear they're trying to wrestle back low wages and unpaid overtime using shame. Especially out of touch when they bad mouth their own subordinates and think it doesn't reflect poorly on themselves.
My fear is that the driver behind this is widespread WFH due to COVID-19.
Assessing "worker productivity" is hard for all but the most simple jobs, but the desire to do so, I reckon, is buried deep within each mind of the pointy-haired.
The unfortunate reality of the situation is that so-called "bullshit jobs" form the basis for the only system approximating UBI in the US, so movement in this space will further erode what remains of the American middle class…
>but everyone (especially in the media, but also in corporate life) is attacking "worker productivity" lately
I don't need bar graphs or anything, but can you provide some recent examples you saw? I certainly don't remember seeing articles to that effect recently.
Book may have been on the front page last week but I assure you very very few people in the US have insulation above and below their foundations or incredibly air tight houses.
You can pay the greenie winnie tax and go full passive house and be completely off grid sitting pretty in an airtight optimally efficient home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhbLjEKKLVM
It would also triple the construction cost of the house. Reasons. But hey, $0 energy bill.
Most builders don't do any of that stuff, like at all. Just the bare minimum required. They aren't incentivized. Most consumers would - and do - opt for single pane windows over dual, and dual over triple, 'etc. Even when the windows would "pay for themselves" over their lifetime.
The bare minimum is a lot more than it used to be. My parents' house was built with zero attic insulation, and I believe no wall insulation either. Just framed, drywalled insided and stucco outside. I can't imagine there's any fire blocks between studs either.
Upping the codes to require new construction to have those things, while not razing your parents' house, shows it's all about the pyramid scheme and not about actual safety. If it were about actual safety and such things are considered unsafe then unsafe houses like your parents home should be bulldozed for the good of the people.
I think it shows that there's at least a basic cost-benefit analysis taking place, where things that we've learned provide a safety benefit that can be added at minimal cost during construction are required, but bulldozing a house because it will burn down 15 minutes faster doesn't pencil out.
And yet if I built a new house against code they would still make me go back and fix it, even though I could make the exact argument you made about the old house not penciling out to go back and make them fix it.
In theory, building inspections at each stage of construction should find omissions and other non conformance while it's economic to fix them. I do acknowledge that building inspections have a lot of issues, one of which is different inspector, different rules, and a later stage inspector may have you redo something the earlier stage inspector said was fine (sometimes, even with the same inspector!), but the idea is there. I've heard that locally, a lot of inspections are done by video conference now, and contractors find that goes a lot faster and more direct. Not sure if that'll stay post-covid.
It's also difficult to know what's on the inside of built houses (which is why inspection is supposed to happy during construction, not after). Commercial buildings often have both plans and as-built drawings; but residential buildings don't, and when you get on-site and the plan doesn't match the house, you really don't know what's in the walls. Some sort of government driven new code compliance inspection for existing housing stock seems really expensive. Even public use buildings take a long time to get code compliance updates, such as retrofits on unreinforced masonry buildings in many places, and there's both more risk and more enforcement power for public use buildings.
The old house was up-to-code, and considered safe for habitation, when it was built. Your new house was not.
Very importantly, if you renovate an old house, regulations may require you to update the house to modern building code standards for plumbing, electricity, etc.
No, houses are held up to the code that applied when they were built, because those codes were generally accepted as safe at the time.
Old houses are held up to the new code when they are renovated, because updating old houses to the new code frequently requires rebuilding substantial portions of the house to comply with new requirements. It's not about "fuck everyone else." It's about recognizing that the extensive work that would be required to comply with substantially safer modern codes is best done when substantial construction work is already planned to be performed.
Commercial buildings are held to up to new codes whenever ownership, or tenancy, changes hands.
>because updating old houses to the new code frequently requires rebuilding substantial portions of the house to comply with new requirements
OK but if I build a new house to the old code then I also will need substantial work to rebuild it to bring it into compliance. So I could use the same logic I shouldn't have to. Safe enough for them, safe enough for me.
>No, houses are held up to the code that applied when they were built,
Again, that's the scam. I'll build my house to one code and then vote to make the code harsher for the next guy to up my property value. If it's impossible to build a new house as economically as mine, mine's now worth more than it would have been.
Let's go and tear down houses when code is updated and see how quick we can make everyone homeless.
It's not reasonable to build with GFCI outlets in the bathrooms in 1956. It's not reasonable to build without them in 2023.
Most places have a very limited enforcement appetite for existing construction. If it was safe and current when built, it's fine enough. Exceptions include adding smoke and carbon monoxide detectors --- but they're not that expensive to buy or install; and sometimes you can't get a home insured if it had certain electrical panels with poor safety records, and knob and tube wiring is sometimes frowned upon (but really, it's not that bad if it hasn't been altered; just a lot of houses where they added too much load on the existing knob and tube and overloaded wiring is never good). That doesn't mean you should build that way today. Somethings that were standard aren't even available anymore; nobody makes orangeburg pipe since the 1970s, so you've got to use something better.
The building inspector can't see all the people you're making homeless right now by creating ever more expensive building codes. The permitting office doesn't see the good food people can't buy their children because they're spending more on their mortgage. The code enforcement officer doesn't see the person who ended up missing finding cancer early because their gas tank was empty and they couldn't book a doctor's appointment after increased inspecting and architectural requirements. People just see "bad thing happened in house because bad codes, spend more money that gets ripped away from other things that make us safe."
And that's part of the trickery involved here. People say "look that one guy died in that house so we need to require stricter code here." They're not noticing the freezing homeless people that died because housing become $X dollars more expensive and they lost the musical chairs game. Sure the homeless guy wasn't going to buy a brand new house, but through the substitution effect across a wide swath of society eventually down the chain it does filter down to everyone ultimately affecting their access to housing. And hey, added bonus, current homeowners property is also worth more when building becomes more expensive so why not juice that one housing related death for all you got even if you know saving that one in a million rich person's life ends with 2 more dead homeless people or whatever.
The ability for voters, already homed, to just change up the codes on everyone while not having their own homes subjected creates a cruel moral hazard and socially bifurcating effect. The guy that gets in early comes in and gets his, then says fuck you, you have to play by different rules.
I'm not saying the houses should be torn down. I'm saying any updates should put situation where homeowner voters are subject to their own medicine. I don't think they'll choose to tear down the houses. No they might decide after all "hey good enough for me, good enough for you."
As for "can't build with X thing they did/didn't have before." Well you can update the codes to allow both the old and new method for something. That would satisfy conditions for both standing and new construction without uniform enforcement causing old houses to be demolished.
It's honestly kind of insane I've had a couple people basically suggest that if the rules be applied evenly, they're going with the "go and tear down houses when code is updated and see how quick we can make everyone homeless" option to pick up their toys and go home rather than give others the same chance they had by allowing the old ways in the code. That's the only way I can make out you would seriously think people would end up homeless.
Well, yeah, isn't that just enforcing the codes? If you didn't have to go back and fix it, you could build as many sloppy houses as you want and the codes would be meaningless.
I would only apply such standard if it passes the symmetry principle with currently legal houses which is the context in which above mentioned about the not being worth bulldozing/fixing if they met the old codes. I.e. if the problem was legal for the construction of a currently inhabited house then the same logic about not being worth it to start over applies to the new house as the old house. Therefore it couldn't possibly devolve into codes being meaningless but rather worst case devolve into creating a baseline of allowing older codes which apparently are safe enough we haven't kicked their owners out. In effect it would create equality in home ownership rather than a standard where you can build a house and then vote to make it harder for the next guy to artificially raise your property values. If something is truly too unsafe to exist the rules should be applied uniformly rather than giving privileged immunities to early entrants.
Your argument collapses to "forget improvement, let me externalize", and we as a society have strong reasons to provide a glide path towards reducing those externalities for old construction (which we do through updates during renovations, rebates, etc.) while disallowing them for new.
By your logic every single house in Florida (and those along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts that are in the path of possible hurricanes) that was built prior to 2002 (the year the building codes were changed in direct response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992) needs to be razed. I'm not sure that's really politically feasible...
My logic is the entitled fucks that vote for this policy should be made to eat their own medicine. Either it's OK to have a house without the safety criteria in the code, or it isn't.
Forcing them to eat their own medicine would allow the youth to also have the chance to build a house, even if it's not perfectly safe, closer to the cost their parents had to spend. Rather than changing the game and screwing over new entrants while old entrants enjoy immunity to the same rules.
By the same logic, all the houses built in the earthquake zones of San Francisco and LA should also be raised.
I've noticed that there has been mass hysteria in some California-centric websites that flood insurance must be provided by the Federal government in Florida, but not that earthquake insurance must be provided by the Federal government in California.
Botton line, the private sector doesn't handle this type of correlated risk well, and somehow picking on Florida when California does the same thing is pretty weird. We know there will be a big earthquake that will level a lot of property in California just we know there will be a big flood in Florida. Yet "entitled fucks" keep choosing to live in these states. Life goes on.
My point was that if voters had to eat their own medicine they wouldn't encumber new entrants to rules they themselves are immune to. I didn't seriously think they would vote to raze their own (previously immune) houses.
> I've noticed that there has been mass hysteria in some California-centric websites that flood insurance must be provided by the Federal government in Florida, but not that earthquake insurance must be provided by the Federal government in California.
Earthquake insurance availability is mandated within the state. Why would we need a Federal mandate when we have an effective state mandate. It's not attractively priced, but Federal flood insurance often isn't attractively priced when they've updated maps recently either.
Last time I was in the housing market in San Francisco, earthquake insurance was not mandated. Can you point me to the law mandating it now? Perhaps you mean it's mandated by your bank when taking out a mortgage? That's a private sector decision that depends on your bank and your loan.
Anyways, you are confusing the issue of whether insurance is mandated with the fact that no private insurer will cover it, and so the risk is socialized and the only providers are government.
That's what people are complaining about -- that private insurers walked away from covering flood/earthquakes in regions prone to the same, and so the government has to step in to insure the correlated risk. This causes no end of outrage for Florida but is somehow just fine in California. And my only point was to point out this hypocrisy and argue that there are good reasons for government to cover correlated risks and that there is nothing wrong with either state or those who choose to build in either state. They can accept risk or they can purchase government insurance.
1989 was, what, 34 years ago? This is a 5-10X generation event to you, I guess. I can't even begin to unwind all the innumerate assumptions, but motivated reasoning is powerful I guess.
There are fewer places where it is more reckless to build housing than coastal California.
So are we as a society not supposed to take advantage of learning from past mistakes? 100 years ago we flushed raw sewage into rivers and streams. Then we learned that sewage wrecks our water supply and also our health so we started to treat the sewage. I'm struggling to understand your angry and bitter tone. I guess if we lived in a true libertarian society then we should/could let anyone build whatever they want along the coastline because society wouldn't be tasked with shouldering the cost of poor individual planning. But that's not the reality we live in.
State Farm won’t insure any Florida residential property built earlier than 2002, and directs you to the state’s high risk pool (Citizen’s). So while bulldozers aren’t running around yet, the insurance market clearly has priced in older code structure costs.
What happens when insurers won’t insure older properties? Those without insurance will make due until a catastrophic event or sell to someone for cash, and those with a mortgage will suffer exceedingly high premiums until the mortgage is paid off and they can go without insurance (or they’re of sufficient means they can afford the premiums, currently running roughly $4k-$12k/annually).
No, but it's safe to say that has time goes by, more and more people are building houses that way. Which would show up in time to build metrics. I don't know the build code in the US, but in Canada (Quebec) most new constructions are air tight because of government subsidies.
I'd be surprised if Maine, Vermont, New York and the other North-Eastern states don't have something similar.
In Southern California I guess you don’t need heat at all, right? Apparently it only gets down to 42F over there so the pipes won’t even get hurt, let alone the people, who have built in thermoregulation.
We definitely have heat, and this year it's been especially cold. For the last 8 years I've lived here, most winters we only use it a single month, and even then it's rare.
More build steps, more safety steps, less undocumented overtime, ballooning costs of benefits. And I would be surprised if logistics don't play a role as well. Used to be more buffer in our distribution systems for materials. In a scenario where warehouses have surplus goods sitting around, I expect it's easier to call in a favor and get an extra shipment of materials for the partially finished garage that didn't make it into the estimates.
Don't forget all the roofline complexity for "aesthetics". Or higher pitches because they look nice too.
It'd be interesting to see these stats broken out by trade, with an appropriate unit (/sqft might make sense for roofing, but it doesn't for wall sheathing).
I'd think a good chunk of this is due to safety expectations as well. It's a lot easier to walk around a roof if you aren't concerned with fall protection.
Yeah, all these fugly pop-outs that are typical in the "McMansion" style have to take a lot more time than just making a normal, more-or-less rectangular-footprint house. More measuring, more cutting, more separate pieces to apply, for every layer that goes on. More ridges and valleys to deal with when roofing.
They do make the house look bigger (on the outside) than a same-square-footage house with a more traditional floor plan, though, so... I guess that makes it worth it, to someone?
You may enjoy the "McMansion Hell" blog, it explores all the little details that cause us to be repulsed by this type of house. They have a "McMansions 101" post which is a nice place to get started - https://mcmansionhell.com/post/148605513816/mcmansions-101-w...
As someone who works in construction, I have to say that rolling a few sheets of barrier or framing a couple extra walls really doesn't take that long or cost too much. It's on the order of $5k or less and a couple days work, for both materials and labor.
What does cost time and money is getting permits, planning approval, inspection, etc. Not that those are unimportant, but any delays are certainly not on the construction crew's behalf.
Isn’t the real headline then that building construction technology hasn’t improved at the same rate as other manufacturing tech?
For example, cars today are orders of magnitude more complicated than 50 years ago, but due to more efficient manufacturing technology, the auto industry has far higher productivity per employee than it did 50 years ago.
I believe this is why we're seeing some of the industry starting to experiment with pre-fabbed homes that are modular but can be constructed using the automation we see in car manufacturing.
The weak link in creating ever more complex homes, with ever more stringent building codes, at faster rates, is to remove the "humans with nail guns and drills" from the construction process.
At some point, us meat sacks are the weak link in optimizing an industry. Humans can only go so fast. That's why (as you've said) we've seen massive gains in productivity for other manufacturing industries.
> I believe this is why we're seeing some of the industry starting to experiment with pre-fabbed homes that are modular but can be constructed using the automation we see in car manufacturing.
Are they doing anything different than what was available in a Sears catalog 50 years ago?
Yes, the manufacturing methods used in the factories are different today. For example, you can now have all the boards nailed together by robots. Other things are still the same. Electric wiring, for instance, is still a largely manual process.
Manufactured homes have been a thing for decades now. The problem with them is that their efficiency gains don't scale. It's relatively cost effective to produce a single-wide trailer, but not so much when producing cookie cutter two story homes with basements.
For American-style suburban homes, it's most efficient to build most of the home on site, and only manufacture off-site a handful items like roof trusses. People might not realize this, but a small crew can frame several houses in a single (very, very long) day.
Agreed, that’s why I said “experimenting”… cause as you’ve stated, it’s still not scalable. I think in time though, someone is going to disrupt this market. That’s just my opinion though.
Back in 2003-2007, I worked for a home builder who vertically integrated and went for maximized modularity. In '05 we expanded our truss yard to 2 large presses and 4 automated saws, and added a wall-framing yard what worked the same way as the truss yard. Add in that they bought a concrete company to do the slabs, and a 2-story house could go from pour to sheeting in 35 days. Plumbing, electrical, and finishing jobs could take as little as an additional 30.
Since the parent company dissolved them in '08, I haven't seen any of the other subsidiaries using the same techniques or scheduling, and it's always rather surprised me. They invested literally 10s of millions of dollars into us figuring out how to make it all work, then trashed the knowledge.
The builder of the new neighborhood going up near me uses these techniques for all rooflines. They still frame on site for flooring and walls, but they crane on pre built trusses for the roofs, built nearby.
I think the lack of vertical integration could be a part of it. For example the framers don't have much incentive to make things easier for the plumbers or electricians.
There was a recent HN post on a shortage of electricians that got me to thinking why studs, which already come pre-cut to exactly 92 5/8", don't also come pre-drilled for wiring at outlet and switch height (at least I've never seen that in wood studs).
Site prep and site adaptation is a big challenge in construction. Every plot is a little different, and the pre-fab thing you want to install will need some adjustment, tweak or change that reduces the savings over just building it on-site bespoke.
I would imagine that automation plays a role. And maybe car manufacturers can exercise more control over assembly lines, and don't have to worry about unforeseen environmental factors. Of course, that is just a guess, I don't know enough about construction or car manufacturing to really say.
Building construction technology _has_ improved, but, particularly for residential stuff, people do not care for some of the improvements. You could build Soviet-style modular apartments, but, well, no-one really wants that.
> Nail guns can't make up for building code and higher finish work demands. It's not uncommon to see 6 or 7 layers in sheathing today.
Yeah pretty much this I suspect. The paper doesn't propose that more regulations and complex code is why it's harder to build things today. And that's not a bad thing - code is a great thing since it sets a standard.
Houses from 100 years ago, a carpenter could just make game time decisions regarding things that are highly scrutinized today like staircase run/rise, doorway height, etc. If you gut an old house it's amazing how simple they are.
The old saying "they don't build them like they used to" applies here. We don't because we can't and when they did they overbuilt them because they were simple and it wasn't documented what the build had to be.
Also everything that is built needs regular inspection while in progress.
When the frame is put up it is typically inspected to ensure it meets code and that correct fasteners and brackets are used. Until the inspection is done you don't see roofing and electrical finished up. Then you have the electrical and plumbing on top the foundation. And when that is in its inspected again. Also heating cooling piping. Then fiber insulation is put in walls, then you have your drywall installed. Then you have the different finish teams come in. Finish plumbing, cabinetry, tiling, floors. And then another round of builder inspection. Then you get to the city and bank inspections.
Any one of the inspections or the specilaty teams running slow can push the whole project back. If your AC ducts aren't in you can't drywall for example.
> Also everything that is built needs regular inspection while in progress
And this is a very good thing indeed. One thing I really love about the system here is we have detailed code and objective inspections based on it. Creates safe structures that can be planned and priced and immune to bribery.
Ah, thanks for the response. My confusion is that in American building, the term sheathing usually just refers to the outer layer of plywood that nails to the studs.
Edit to add: this really hasn't changed all that much in the past 100 years. Our house is over 100 years old, and is built very similarly to a modern stick framed house, with the exception of not having insulation (when built), and with the sheathing being planks instead of plywood. Also, the lath&plaster interior walls were a lot more involved in making than modern drywall finishing.
Homes are architecturally more complicated than the ranches and bungalows of the past as well. This increases the time spent on each job significantly.
There's the theory that building codes are used similarly (and complimentarily) to zoning laws to limit the supply of new housing (and therefore raise property values).
A great example being fire walls and mandatory self-latching doors between garages and living spaces - definitely a logical thing (cars and their gas are flammable, so let's isolate them from the house).
When you look at the data [0], garage fires are 2% of residential fires because cars don't really catch on fire in garages (fires happen in garages, but usually because of intentionally set fires getting out of control)
So now, in the midst of a housing affordability crisis (or a the end of a great run for real estate, depending on your outlook), we have construction workers using special fire-resistant drywall (that must be cut specially and cannot have holes in it), placing solid steel doors, and generally spending a lot of hours and materials building spaces that people don't even live in, when really, adding smoke detectors in garages solves the problem.
This even extends to stuff added to builds that are mandated by law and have little reasonable justification. For example, a city might demand all new apartment units need to have a balcony, and all new apartment buildings might need to have some open courtyard space. Now you've increased the cost per unit by a huge amount by mandating these balconies and also the unrentable voidspace.
And this is part due to the fact that real estate has to (at least in part) be valued on hypothetical replacement cost.
Can’t have apartment buildings reading hands for $100mn when a new one costs $20mn (or have the land sell for $80mn when you only allow 2 stories to be built on it).
The 2% is a bit misleading because the fire severity depends on how well it's contained. ~50% of fires are "confined" to an object, mostly cooking fires inside pots. Garages are 5% of non-confined fires, which is similar to living rooms (6%) and attics (5%) [0]. The numbers also go slightly up when apartment buildings are excluded[1], taking garage fires to 6% of non-confined residential fires.
The root cause is that homes are in part appraised (for mortgage purposes) on hypothetical rebuild costs, so this is a way to make those rebuild costs higher (and justify why you’re paying $500k for something that cost $40k in 1980).
If it weren’t car garages, it would be kitchens.
Cars are a separate problem, as evidenced by the extreme housing prices in some of America’s least car reliant cities (NYC, SF, Boston, DC, etc.).
This is absurd. Houses are so much more complex than in the 1970s, and so much larger. In 1972 central AC was not common, now it's basically required. Square footage is way higher. Number of electrical outlets and switches per room. Moulding and trim are expected in many houses. Porches, decks, patios are much more ornate. Today's average house ia closer to the house of a millionaire in the 1970s than the average house from that time.
Eh, not 100% sure if it's a good comparison or not. Mid century homes with central hvac were typically poorly designed from my experience leading to over/under heated rooms. Modern systems typically have a much better designed return air system (hence more piping) rather than a single return at the unit.
I'm not sure I would say much of anything is more ornate today compared to prior. Especially if you actually look at the details of the craftsmanship, anything of "standard" quality of times past are high-end details now.
> And second, the authors describe the curious fact that producers located in more-productive areas do not grow at expected rates. Indeed, rather than construction inputs flowing to areas where they are more productive, the activity share of these areas either stagnates or even falls. The authors suggest that this problem with allocative efficiency may accentuate the aggregate productivity problem for the industry.
This is clearly accurate - people are not buying the cheapest housing in the middle of nowhere. Instead, the most money is spent in cities which are already built up and are more difficult to develop further.
Corruption was a massive problem in USA industry as well as slowdowns due to legal red tape.
My guess is incompetent government is at the root of the problem.
The more you scale red tape, the harder it is to do anything. Look at the California high speed rail.
Corrupt governments make far more money by slowing down a project and using it as a washing machine to extract rents.
Getting large public projects to misspend their funds on red tape, lawyers and other while delaying building is way more profitable than just letting any construction project simply get the job done fast.
The corruption of the government itself and hybrid with larger construction companies very likely incentivized slow and never complete construction.
Why would you want the work done fast when drawing it out and slowing it down is far more profitable, to milk it forever:
Red tape in many cases is simply an excuse for more corruption or stronger interest groups IMHO. It puts a legal stamp on a lot of things so that ordinary people cannot argue that.
That also makes me think that SWE should either break all those red tapes or put up their own. Nowadays they are simply being milked by everyone else who is behind a red tape or a stamp or a certification or something similar.
>It puts a legal stamp on a lot of things so that ordinary people cannot argue that.
Ordinary people can argue it. They'll just get argued back at and mired by the other 50% of people who will knee jerk defend the government and the government and the interest groups will laugh all the way to the bank.
With respect to incompetent government, I like to share this opinion whenever possible: The US government and US state governments are incompetent due to constant gridlock. Incentives of politicians within our governments are similarly to draw out all processes since employment is not based on performance or promises kept, but is instead guaranteed for a fixed amount of time. Politicians can continually base their re-election on the fact that "the system is broken", while they themselves are doing nothing to fix it or are not able to do anything to fix it.
Having separately elected house, senate, and president is a primary source of gridlock. Each body can reject a legislative change, while none can effectively create change. The only way laws can be passed in this system is under a very rare set of conditions. When those conditions are present (government shutdown imminent, filibuster eliminated, plurality requirements reduced) you see large omnibus bills pushed through as fast as possible, without time to adequately vet the details.
From an engineering perspective, this would be like pushing a few massive commits every few years rather than making regular bug fixes as needed. As such, our laws are buggy and unmaintained. Unfortunately, this leads many to believe that regulations generally are ineffective rather than the
poor implementations of such being ineffective.
Poorly written legislation puts more pressure on the judicial system to litigate between the lines. This is an externality that is extremely expensive for every individual and company to have to deal with.
I advocate for a more parliamentary style system where politicians continued careers are based on their effectiveness and continued approval rather than fixed terms. There are plenty of ways to ensure proper checks and balances without stopping government dead in it's tracks.
Please don't ignore that most of these regulations exist because builders will do whatever they can to profit as much as possible, generally to the disadvantage of the buyer that is typically ignorant of the risks of a home.
How much of the red tape is needed vs. unnecessary? I'm glad lead isn't being used anymore and wheelchair access is required, among other things, but I can see things getting nitpicky and senseless real quick. My mom's antique-style shop had to close due to some really strict fire regulations she couldn't do anything about (another store setup a thin wall between their store and hers' and she had been operating for over a year). Fire marshall just walked in one day and said "you're shut down," like something out of Seinfeld[1].
Feel-good rallying cries like this make for cheap virtue points but are completely meaningless in a reality where pretty much nothing is a binary choice with a low number of variables.
For example, it's easy to sit in an air-conditioned office and say "thou shalt not overload the trucks" but when you actually drag your ass to somewhere you can observe the conditions in which the per-load work is being done it becomes clear that much analysis must be done to figure out if more trucks at 80k is in fact safer than fewer trucks at 120k.
Being that braking distance will increase around 250ft at 65mph I would say it makes a pretty massive difference. That is unless you want to limit the 120k LB truck to 55mph which causes its own issues.
Houses were much simpler 50 years ago. The building codes have changed a lot since then and modern houses have added construction complexity with better waterproofing, air sealing, fire proofing, bracing, and more advanced mechanical systems.
However many modern homes use inferior material for the job comparing to the older homes in the same area. Probably to cut cost. I'm not sure if it was also the case for older homes built in the 50s/60s though.
- Vinyl windows compared to old growth wood windows from 100 years ago.
- Vinyl siding compared to cedar shakes.
- Extremely poor wood quality in the lower end 2x4 and 2x6 lumber.
- Sheathing that's essentially cardboard in really cheap builds.
- Flooring is sad today in cheap to moderate homes.
Thing is there were really badly built homes 100 years ago and they just aren't standing any longer. We do get a but of selection bias when we compare old homes. The ones that are still standing were probably built well and of quality materials and have been taken care of.
You can build an awesome home today out of excellent materials like engineered wood, high quality OSB/ply/ZipSystem, and of course whatever you want to spend on flooring, siding, windows, etc.
> You can build an awesome home today out of excellent materials like engineered wood, high quality OSB/ply/ZipSystem, and of course whatever you want to spend on flooring, siding, windows, etc.
Of course, there will always be different quality materials available at different prices.
But I would bet the lowest quality house with the lowest quality materials and build quality 100 years ago is much worse than the same today.
> Flooring is sad today in cheap to moderate homes.
I never understood this lament. It has never made a lick of difference to my quality of life if the hard flooring under me was tile/real wood/granite/LVT. Whether or not it is a heated floor is the only thing that has increased the utility I get from the floor.
Otherwise, the LVT I can buy at Costco gives me better utility than some fancy real wood floor. I can not give a shit about it, not spend a dime or second maintaining it, and fix it in 15 minutes. And you can change the whole look for much cheaper, and get it in whatever design/color you want.
Why stop there? Get particle board cabinets, molded composite doors, vinyl windows, laminate counters, etc. Yeah it's all going to look awful in about 2 years but you can just replace it with more cheap junk.
I get it, everyone has different tastes and budgets, and values. to me, wood floors feel nice, they look nice, and they sound nice when walked on. Laminate flooring clicks and areas that get walked on just a bit more begin to wear out and begin to lose their printed finish.
Yes, why stop there? If a material exists that better meets your requisite utility to price ratio, then go for it.
> Yeah it's all going to look awful in about 2 years but you can just replace it with more cheap junk.
That is the difference, it does not. The higher quality (and even decent quality) LVT performs very well, and for a long time. Even hotels use it, and in my experience, for normal wear and tear around a house, anything Costco quality and up will not noticeably degrade. I am regularly in many tract built houses from 5 to 7 years ago, and the flooring does not look worn at all.
There probably is super low quality cheap LVT that does not have sufficient longevity, but my point is just because something is composite instead of “real”, or lightweight instead of heavy, does not mean it cannot do the job.
Vinyl windows/sealed windows are 400% better. Old windows suck.
Cedar shakes are a fire hazard, and most people use cement board rather than vinyl.
You can't have everyone use virgin forest wood. And with that said especially in non load bearing walls why use your best wood, it's just a waste. You get far more strength by use of modern fastners and straps.
Most of the contractors who like to talk about the good old days are simply spreading FUD. New homes will hold up better a hundred years from now, and have a much lower chance of catching on fire, collapsing in an earthquake, and are less harmful to the planet since they use a fraction of the energy.
- Old windows from 100 years ago were single pane. I grew up with them. My bedroom was freezing cold in the winter and roasting in the summer. And they couldn't seal so they leaked water which rotted out the window frame. Not exactly a great example of old homes lasting longer.
- Cedar shake is a fire hazard. Yeah, we don't build houses like that because a century ago entire towns would light up like a match. It was a regular occurrence.
- New constructions (At least mine was) built with 2x6, so it has a higher R rating and better soundproofing. My energy bills are a fraction of those for an older house.
- New homes are better sealed, and contain air tight vapor barriers. Water can't get in and rot the wood like with old homes. Yes, it's not old growth wood, but it will last longer. Better sealing, air filtration and HVAC will reduce your chance of getting lung cancer from air pollution.
- Modern high end LVP flooring is substantially more robust than hardwood. Dogs can't scratch it, you can drop a cast iron pan on it, it's waterproof. If you want to instead spend money on hardwood there's nothing stopping you, but LVP looks great and is easy to replace.
> Old windows from 100 years ago were single pane.
Yes but you can (and should) weatherstrip them. Fully integrated weather stripping and storm windows will solve the problems you're addressing. Yes still lower R-value but old homes are leaky and putting in modern windows won't save you much in these instances.
> New homes will hold up better a hundred years from now
Most won't. My home is over 100 years old and I'm 100% positive it will outlast 90% of modern construction put up today 100 years from now. I've seen my house gutted in many places and it's pristine. I've seen many 20 year old homes that are full of mold and rot.
> Cedar shake is a fire hazard.
Depends where you live. It looks great and there are millions of homes with it. At least where I live where there is a lot of spacing between homes and we don't have forest fires like out West.
> - New constructions (At least mine was) built with 2x6, so it has a higher R rating and better soundproofing. My energy bills are a fraction of those for an older house.
That's how I'd do a new build. But what does it have to do with sound proofing? I can use 5/8 drywall and use rock-wool or w/e between rooms if I want. It's what I've done when I remove plaster and lath walls. Agree about energy.
> New homes are better sealed, and contain air tight vapor barriers. Water can't get in and rot the wood like with old homes. Yes, it's not old growth wood, but it will last longer. Better sealing, air filtration and HVAC will reduce your chance of getting lung cancer from air pollution.
Might be. Hope the guy installing it cared enough not to install some flashing wrong or didn't forget to seal something. There's so much bad workmanship and a lot of today's better materials demand it's done very precisely. Saying that, a good contractor will inspect and test, but most won't. Old homes are still standing because water was/is kept away with larger eves (ever notice homes after water barriers came out stopped having large eves or any?) and by virtue of not having great insulation. They literally dry themselves out. God, the number of windows I've seen where the vapor barrier is installed/folded wrong or the flashing is wrong; or ZipSystem walls where the taped seals aren't quite right because of a weird angle.
> Better sealing, air filtration and HVAC will reduce your chance of getting lung cancer from air pollution
You can install HVAC with whatever filters you want in an old house. I've done it.
> Modern high end LVP flooring is substantially more robust than hardwood
I think it's appropriate in a basement room but I'd never consider having it in the rest of my home.
An old house in disrepair or what hasn't bene renovated is probably a pretty bad thing that isn't going to last long. But if you've put the money into it and renovated you have a home that's setup for another 100 years and simply has gobs of character and charm you'll never get in a new home. But that's all a value call.
> Most won't. My home is over 100 years old and I'm 100% positive it will outlast 90% of modern construction put up today 100 years from now. I've seen my house gutted in many places and it's pristine. I've seen many 20 year old homes that are full of mold and rot.
One of the main problems with modern houses is that they go to shit very quickly if they're ever unoccupied for a while. They need heating and cooling (especially the dehumidifying effect of AC) or they'll require extensive repairs and renovation within a year or two. Saw tons of these when looking at houses after the '08 bust—some of the bigger banks let houses sit for a couple years without even trying to sell them, and they inevitably had major visible mold problems, and probably a lot more going on inside the walls.
It's the sealing differences that do it. Modern houses are built to be super-tightly-sealed, but that means they have (at least seasonal) moisture problems without an active HVAC system. Older houses were built to breathe. Modern materials also aren't built or installed with major seasonal temp swings in mind, so you'll get things like badly-cracking drywall seams, buckling trim, buckling floors, fucked-up doorframes, and so on, due to thermal expansion and contraction. Even intricate, tight woodwork in very-old houses was crafted to survive that kind of thing (it had to be).
Not that older houses don't get into trouble without maintenance, but it takes longer and serious problems pretty much require a roof or wall breach. Modern houses will fall apart while the roof and exterior walls are totally fine.
Vinyl/plastic windows and siding might be used because they are superior basically in every way? They don't rot, don't require almost any maintenance (exterior painting, etc.), windows fit much better and are better insulated, siding is much harder to damage and easier to clean (and also doesn't need paint).
Frankly wooden windows are a personal pet peeve of mine. I have old (many decades) wooden windows in my house, and also new-ish wooden windows and plastic windows that were installed at the same time by the same company during a single renovation by the previous owner, so I can compare either old-new or new-new. If aliens landed and asked me "hey, we need to identify a few idiots among your species, can you give us the most reliable way to find one? Doesn't have to be broadly applicable, but does have to be a sure bet." I'd say "Look for people ordering wooden windows." I just utterly cannot comprehend why anyone would do it.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. Vinyl windows get destroyed by the sun in 5 years or less. They also warp a lot and that nice seal you have is gone in a couple years tops. They are such a bad product with the only redeeming feature being they are cheap.
Wood windows that are clad in aluminum or fiberglass will last 50 years and perform.
Same for siding. Vinyl siding fades from the sun and warps and stops doing its job after a few years and now water is getting in.
There’s a reason only the cheapest construction uses these materials.
The new-ish plastic windows I have are actually ~15 years old and they have none of these issues (they are new-ish compared to the older wooden windows). They are in a condition that could be described as "looks new" and keep in warmth better as confirmed with an IR thermometer around them.
The wooden windows of the same age and roughly the same dimensions installed by the same company are all kinds of wonky; they slide poorly because of I guess gradual shape change and wear of the wood, and don't seal well. Also a minor installation defect caused the top of one of the windows to rot. Not a problem with plastic, if there's a defect just fix it, window is good as new. When the window guys told me I need to replace the window I just said while you're at it do you want to rip out all the other ones too an replace with plastic? :)
You must have bought the magical, physics defying model.
Vinyl warps more than twice as much as wood and 7 times glass and is very weak to resistance. On an extremely hot or cold day the temperature outside and inside are hugely different. This matters more in regions that see more extreme temperatures throughout the year.
Now it might be you live in a climate where the weather barely changes and it might be your windows are quite small. Smaller windows don’t suffer as much as larger windows like a 36x52. So I’ll grant environment matters. Even which direction they face will matter.
And yes there are different qualities of vinyl windows. But I’d put a lower quality aluminum/fiberglass clad wood window against the best vinyl every day.
And while there’s no accounting for taste, vinyl windows look awful.
I do live in Seattle, but where I've previously lived the temperature routinely goes to -30F in winter and 95F in the summer, and for the reasons of previous lack of availability plastic windows were one of the first things people installed, including on e.g. 5-6ft square panels. Never heard of the problems with them, and never had problems with whichever ones I used. However in many places I lived (including with mild climate like SF) wooden windows never failed to have some wonkiness to them, and in one apartment when you closed the sliding windows too fast there'd be fresh wood shavings coming out :)
Also just googling "vinyl window wrap" or deformation (I assume vinyl is what people typically call cheaper plastic?) I cannot find much of anything. On the other hand if you google for wooden windows or siding moisture/deformation/rot, you find plenty of advice and complaints alike. These physics seem to be reality defying, or they apply in some extreme conditions when comparing with the best possible wooden window...
And I tried to avoid bringing up taste, even though I wanted to, but I guess I have to bite now. That actually gives me additional disdain for wooden-window-buying - yep, they are still popular because a significant fraction of the population still thinks that e.g. craftsman houses with "nooks" and 4-to-7ft sloping ceiling on the 2nd floor are "timeless" and modern functional ones are "soulless boxes". I can only chalk it to misplaced nostalgia... I'm sorry, the Neolithic called, they want their mud huts back :P
Once a contractor told me my apartment building, which was built in 1939, has very good load bearing walls that "they don't do nowadays". I do think that it could be more of "nowadays we can use lighter material to do the same job" angle.
I also vosited quite a few apartments where they used thinner material and sound proofing is not exactly great.
Couldn’t this just be survivorship bias? We already locked down all the cheap crap from the 60s. It’s only the rare, well-built buildings that are still around.
We’re building more cheap crap, sure, but also a few rare, well-built buildings.
Here's a more real example that is not just one "feeling". In Portland Oregon there are TONS of hundred year old houses that all look fairly similar because they were all built "cheap" back then from mail order catalogs.
Looking from the basement up through to the framing, or from the second story down to the flooring, EVERYTHING was built from really thick timber. If you've walked around a modern unfinished project you can see nearly everything wood is made from fast growing wood or particles of wood just glued together. And that holds true even for "high-end" home projects (aka homes sold as high end because they have fancy kitchen appliances, not solid construction).
Some finish materials are much worse. Small (by modern standards) ordinary middle-class homes in, say, the 1950s, had the kind of interior and exterior doors, and baseboards/molding, that'd be considered luxury-tier today. Even big expensive McMansions usually don't have doors and molding that nice, now. The higher end might get the luxury-tier front door... maybe. But any back or side doors won't be that nice, and usually not the interior doors, either. Totally normal houses were still getting solid-wood molding and baseboards as a matter of course into the early 90s, while now it's almost unheard of unless you pay a huge premium for a custom job during construction.
Very nice wood floors used to be more common, too. Very nice by modern standards, anyway—normal, then. "Very nice" back then would have been ultra-luxe now, like fancy patterns or parquet or something.
Basically, decent wood has become incredibly expensive. Almost all our lumber sucks now, unless you pay crazy-high prices. So things like nice solid-wood doors are impractically expensive unless you salvage them (and then you have the problem of sizing and constructing framing for them, rather than for standard frame-included modern doors)
Much nicer-feeling, more durable & don't look as bad after light wear, more repairable, more modifiable without replacement. Far less need for various glues and solvents that are probably not great things to have out-gassing in your house.
[EDIT] Oh and the solid doors sure seemed to do a much better job of sound-proofing than modern ones do.
Could this be survivor bias at work? All the nice 1950 stuff you see are only around because they're nice enough to keep around. If they're junk they'd be replaced in a reno or something.
Nah, it's pretty normal even in small-fairly-poor-town ~900 sqft houses that were absolutely not anything special at the time. You'll see whole neighborhoods built like that. Decent-or-better wood was just cheaper back then, and the labor to finish it was (relatively) way cheaper, too. All the houses would have these heavy, thick, solid wood doors that you don't see in new-build neighborhoods unless someone customized it or it's a very high-end neighborhood.
Growing up, basically all trim & baseboards in early-90s-or-earlier houses was solid wood, even in poorer neighborhoods, though by then solid wood front and interior doors were on the way out as features of middle-class houses. These days, you might see solid wood in one or two public rooms as a kind of highlight feature in upper-end McMansions, but almost no-one finishes e.g. extra bedrooms with solid wood baseboards anymore. They used to be standard for the whole house—you almost never saw anything else.
It really depends by what you mean by inferior though. Yes, old homes (pre-WW2) were built using old growth wood that is rot and insect resistant. And they overbuilt the structures in many ways. Of course we have some selection bias as the old homes that were not built well (of which there are many) are simply not standing any longer. So the old homes we see today were probably built very well with the materials of the time.
Saying that, those materials (old growth wood) aren't around anymore. I think the industry went through a bad patch from the 1950s through the early 90s where A LOT of construction was bad and we didn't really know what we were doing with the sudden change to engineered materials. We didn't really understand vapor barriers because old homes didn't have them and didn't need them. They dried themselves out because they were so drafty and the old wood wouldn't rot easily. So when we moved to rapidly grown pine and engineered wood and insulation we didn't account for moisture very well and those homes have rot issues. Then we came up with water barriers but didn't account for water vapor and moisture would slowly get trapped over time and begin to rot the structures.
However, today we have an excellent understanding of what make for a quality dwelling. We understand insulation extremely well - where to put it, what type to use where, how to keep it dry), we understand vapor barriers very well and they are made to block liquid water but allow water vapor to pass outside, etc. Windows have excellent R-values today compared to old homes as well.
But yes, you can build cheap homes today that are crap. Code does reel you in a bit but I've heard of code in some areas being so bad it would allow you to sheath a house in cardboard essentially. Insane.
I find both your parent and your comment to be the obvious answers for why "productivity" has dropped. People are probably just as, if not more, productive. It just takes more work to complete a single house/office/job due to both worker safety and building safety.
Having some experience in the field, the idea that migrant/undocumented/illegal/etc workers are spoiling the workforce is pretty absurd (as is suggested in a few other comments). There were plenty of terrible workers that I knew to be or suspected to be in that category but the rate that they were bad was no different than anyone else.
Agreed. Although it's very surprising to me that the efficiencies of mass production haven't gone to housing. They are often still created by manual labor instead of assembling prefabricated modules. I think it should be possible to build panels that are well insulated and have all the needed wiring and everything else already built in.
I do not see why it “should” be more cost effective. Moving big, costly things requires big, costly equipment and expertise. And losses can be higher in the event of a failure.
Housing is a mass customization market more than a mass production one. Most people don’t want to live in a modern Levittown. They want some space, but they don’t want the exact same set choices in their house as 1000+ other people have made.
In older areas it's also that the plots are not identical. The land cost is so high that it makes sense to spend extra on building customization to better utilize the land rather than plonk down a cookie cutter house that doesn't make good use of the views/sun/space/etc
Structural Integrated Panels (SIPs) and Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) are two examples. SIPs are made from compressed foam with pressed wood on either side and are precut in the factory to fit together at the job site. ICFs are basically giant foam legos that you assemble together and then fill with concrete.
> And second, the authors describe the curious fact that producers located in more-productive areas do not grow at expected rates. Indeed, rather than construction inputs flowing to areas where they are more productive, the activity share of these areas either stagnates or even falls. The authors suggest that this problem with allocative efficiency may accentuate the aggregate productivity problem for the industry.
So... basically high-rises and mobile homes?
It's hard not to see this as a direct result of city councils universally loathing oversized housing blocks.
people in this website have a hard time with factual data, everything that goes against their narrative is downvoted, it's funny, reality check incoming soon enough
It's not worth trying to explain to you why two data points illustrating an effect that has been true for all of human history is not evidence that "society does not value hard work anymore", so you get downvoted instead. Did the robber barons of the 1800s pay their rail workers well? Did Medieval European feudal lords pay their serfs well? I'm not saying the current situation is ideal, I'm saying "society doesn't value hard work anymore" is 100% bullshit.
What is my narrative, exactly? You seem to think you know. I'd love to hear what it is.
Even better, we could base hiring on solving word search puzzles containing workplace words to select the best of the best construction workers, and maybe some trivia tests.
I mean word puzzles and trivia tests won't select the best construction workers necessarily, but it'll help us select for the dedicated and smart ones, who really put the gumption into grinding LeetBrick.
It doesn't seem like an uncorrelated observation that "construction worker" is one of the most undesirable occupations, alongside "janitor" and "line cook". If it's a terrible career, only the people lacking options will choose it.
Housing, healthcare and education are the three sectors infamously outpacing inflation in the modern economy. In the latter two, workers usually have at least a decent, if not good, career prospect. Construction, meanwhile, is considered a gig for noncitizens who can't be hired in the regular economy — notwithstanding the special subsets like electricians and plumbers.
Part of this likely has to do with the incredible amount of unemployment risk faced by a construction worker; construction volumes may plummet in any region at any time, forcing workers to move hundreds of kilometers away or change jobs entirely. Worse, these fluctuations are often correlated among regions, practically guaranteeing that many builders will be out of a job in downturns. Education and healthcare, at least, suffer almost none of this, despite other stressors.
One mitigation may be a sort of "Keynesian public housing" apparatus: while the populist thing to do is to call for public housing when prices are at their highest, this just puts more strain on a squeezed construction market. But if the state picks up the slack during downturns by specifically building small, affordable-type (if not explicitly subsidized) units, it may maintain employment volumes and (long-run) prevent lower-class pain during housing booms, while the units built will not directly compete with the sort of large & luxurious housing built by the private sector.
> And second, the authors describe the curious fact that producers located in more-productive areas do not grow at expected rates. Indeed, rather than construction inputs flowing to areas where they are more productive, the activity share of these areas either stagnates or even falls. The authors suggest that this problem with allocative efficiency may accentuate the aggregate productivity problem for the industry.
This is a nice way to say "NIMBYs have made sure building anything in areas where there are jobs is a herculean task"
In this time-period there has been a large-scale introduction of undocumented workers into the construction labor force. They are a quarter of some construction labor categories. Perhaps using undocumented subcontractors may play a role in lower productivity growth (cheap, unstable, and relatively unskilled labor) or maybe just distorting the statistics.
I've seen some pretty dumb arguments linked here but that one takes the cake. The EPI graph isn’t measuring productivity vs. pay, even for "typical workers"; it’s measuring wage inequality. Umm yes it is a problem that wages for the vast majority of workers have stagnated; the possibility that some CEOs have done well doesn't counteract that. Also if they don't like the particular figures that "EPI" used, maybe they would prefer the Fed's research that shows exactly the same phenomenon using different data sources? [0]
Then there is some reference to Mankiw making some assumption about labor supply and demand being infinitely differentiable and continuous, as well as violating "Rule V" in the adjacent sidebar. Meanwhile the newly-constructed local Taco Bell has two employees, a closed dining room, and the drive-in queue starts on the road before the entrance to the parking lot. This is my shocked face, at Mankiw doing something dumb.
Essentially, we should not see 40 year runs of compensation lagging productivity due to some outsized returns to shareholders. That would likely reveal a structural problem in the labor market, at least by my understanding. "This would be a bad thing and our system is perfect so this accusation of badness must be wrong!" OK, Pollyanna. It would be inconvenient if the increased market concentration we see in every industry has given the remaining firms greater pricing power both as buyers of labor and inputs and sellers of products, so let's assume that didn't happen even though this graph clearly shows it.
Truth in advertising for this subreddit, it seems. Psychological commitment to the status quo yields unconvincing arguments plainly contradicted by public experience.
Do "real wages" include exec bonuses in the maths?
What about waste on MBAs?
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I have MILLIONS of square feet of FAANG builds under my belt (including healthcare, which is never included in FAANG (but now that one of the hospitals I was designer of was purchased under the Zuck's name...)) should be included.
> Affordable housing is just a zoning issue. The cost of construction is a tiny fraction of the cost of a new house in major metros.
No it is not. Construction costs (material, labor) are sky high even if property costs are as well. Building high-end housing has always been more profitable than otherwise, low-end housing is simply high-end housing 20 or 30 years in the future.
low-end housing is simply high-end housing 20 or 30 years in the future
That was maybe true in the past, but todays exurban sheetrock palaces are impossible to be turned into low-income/entry-level housing. It starts with the zoning requirements - are you really going to divide a 2500 sqft McMansion into a duplex without an epic zoning fight? And then there's the transportation/parking issue.
The real problem is that 1200 sqft entry level housing like it was built in the decade after WW2 isn't made any longer but is urgently needed.
The new 1200sf entry level house is 2000sf. I've built quite a few of them.
It is my understanding that builders are responding to the demand from home buyers, and people that can afford a (starter) home want 2000sf at minimum.
Also the costs of a house dont scale linearly[1]. A small home costs almost as much as a 2000sf home.
> are you really going to divide a 2500 sqft McMansion into a duplex without an epic zoning fight? And then there's the transportation/parking issue.
Even in cities with little zoning requirements (like Houston, and heck, even Tokyo), you still see McMansions being built rather than low income housing. Low income housing is still old housing from the 80s/70s, and the problem you are referring to (that housing built today is not very convertible) is one for a sadder future.
> The real problem is that 1200 sqft entry level housing like it was built in the decade after WW2 isn't made any longer but is urgently needed.
Having shopped for homes in the last few years, there were plenty of 1200 SQFT options in the places I looked at, they were just $700-$800k rather than $900k-$1.1m. Condos are the more realistic options in that case (I saw one I liked for $700k with a reasonable HOA, my wife wasn't having it, however). She preferred a 900 SQF SFH over that, for reasons I couldn't figure out. All were still considered luxury however since they were almost brand new.
Note that yes, I live in an expensive area, but usually when we talk about affordable housing, we are talking about places where people want to live (vs. say Detroit).
I did say "in major metros" - new construction in SF is about $440/sqft average vs a median listing price of almost $1000/sqft (average $964).
This is the highest in the world. [1, 2]
That's got nothing on San Mateo's $1264 average sale price and $160-350 per square foot in construction costs. [2]
Outside of major metros zoning rules make houses massive, twice as big as in the 70s. While the inflation-adjusted per square foot cost has remained roughly constant since the 70s, the much bigger size makes each house far less affordable.
> new construction in SF is about $440/sqft average vs a median listing price of almost $1000/sqft (average $964).
Isn't much of the listing price related to land costs (and then of course profit)? To say that construction costs are only 50% of the sold to cost doesn't tell me much, how much did they pay for the land on a SQFT basis?
That's not even remotely true. Cost of construction is typically 60 to 80% of the cost. In high cost of living areas land is more expensive but so are construction costs.
You are wrong. For instance in Southern California the cost to build new house is around $350 per sqft. Building 2000 sqft house is around $700K. House like that may sell for around 1 million. So that would be 70% construction and 30% land.
Valid point. I looked up average materials cost for a 2000 sq ft house and it was estimated at $120k. Materials costs vary much less across the country than land and labor.
For 580k I could hire 2 skilled men and 3 undocumented immigrants for a year.
There's a lot wrong but a lot of it is in your assumptions. For starters there's more than 2 skilled trades that go into a house for starters. Then by hiring them yourself either you or one of those people are going to be playing project manager to make sure they don't run out of materials which is a job in and of itself if you're not familiar with it.
Hey you can play fuck fuck games all day about how 5 person years of labor, almost half of that highly skilled (I'm accounting ~150k+ all in compensation) is not enough for a cookie cutter 2000 sq ft house. I'm calling bullshit; if it really is taking that much for a McClone basic bitch house then someone is taking the piss somewhere.
It's not just manual labor. You need an architect, structural engineer. Getting all permits, environmental analysis. A lot of expensive "knowledge workers" involved. Then there are materials, rental of construction equipment, insurance. Developers who build large number of row houses at the same time can get costs down through economies of scale.
In the county next to me you can self certify and pretty promise you did all that "knowledge worker" shit. No one will ever check, the self certification just promises you did the stuff and the government promises they won't investigate. Somehow not everyone is dying in city-wide house fires.
Sounds like southern california done fucked themselves with over-regulating that stuff.
It's because its used as a vehicle for bribery. See Jose Huizar the former LA city councilmember who pleaded guilty for bribery a few days ago. If its easy to get things built then no one would be paying you in paper bags of cash to get things built.
Our buildings are built to withstand earthquakes that could level other cities, because we have frequent earthquakes, and building codes were dramatically strengthened following the 1994 Northridge Quake.
A single Ritcher 5.8 quake in Virginia in 2011 caused $300 million in damage and disrupted utilities for days in 12 states. A series of earthquakes in 2019 (6.4, 5.4, and 7.1) in California caused so little damage that it's hard to find a tally. Power was knocked in some cities and restored within hours.
Yes, CA construction is more expensive. But it's also stronger and more resilient than the cheap crap in the county next to you.
Plus the developers need to be able to make a profit after accounting for operational expenses, closing costs, etc. If there's no financial incentive, nobody is going to build houses.
This myth of zoning being the only factor is maddening. It's almost like the California folks think their housing market is the only one. Plenty of jurisdictions have loose zoning laws and we still see skyrocketing property values. There's interest rates and inflation to consider.
The cold hard truth is: when a bunch of people all want to live in the same areas, housing is going to be expensive. There's no way around it.
I was getting quotes in that range in Denver until recently, but now I've been getting quotes for around half that. I think they were trying to keep prices up after the supply chain issues have slowly been fixed and pocket the difference, but the market is slowly becoming more sane.
I expect it to drop to below $200k here once they finish rebuilding the thousand or so homes one of our recent wildfires took out.
I said "in major metros" - as I shared in a peer comment in SF (the highest construction costs in the world) it's about 40% and in San Mateo it's like 15-30% depending on finish.
Outside of major metros, zoning makes houses much bigger, twice as big on average as the 70s.
And building code too. There are plenty of cost-efficient designs built in Europe that can't be built here because we effectively require e.g. doubly-loaded corridors through stairwell requirements. The Europeans can put up more housing units on a smaller plot of land than we can, and for a cheaper price, because of these requirements.
Immigrant labor does not carry their own housing on their backs. It competes in the housing market for homes built by past generations of the native born.
Very true. That said, to be fair, the average poor undocumented immigrant demands far less space (simply because that's what they can get under the circumstances). Living multiple unrelated people to a room is not unusual, ie, even more cramped than college students, NYC 20 something year olds, etc.
If I am an unprincipled landlord then it may be in my best interest to change from renting to families to renting to sharers. Four working adults may be able to pay more in total than two parents supporting two children can.
Exactly. This is how immigration has totally screwed family formation and depressed birth rates for Americans. Young couples cant afford to buy or rent a home in their own city and have to either delay marriage to live with their parents or abandon their families and lifelong friends to move somewhere with lower cost of living. All so employers can go 40 years with giving workers a raise.
I had to read these comments twice, because I had assumed the "families" were the immigrants and the "four working adults" were yuppies, both in line with my own experience. It's not immigration that has screwed over family formation - it's the housing racket itself, backed up by oppressive monetary policy that sucks real wealth into the financial industry. Making home ownership into a (guaranteed) investment combined with the individualist ideal of everyone needing their own house has done the equivalent of making everyone start off life with significant debt, and the time to pay it off becomes ever longer.
It's both, at different market segments. Four yuppies (who are sometimes skilled visa-holders) sharing a higher end place, or four less well-off sharers (who are sometimes illegal migrants).
Sure, but it's a bit odd to direct focus at immigrants when it's many different market segments. If anything, immigrants are generally more willing to live poorer with traditional gender roles, having children in spite of the extractive economic conditions. It's the native born who put it off waiting for the right time.
The purpose of a state is not to bring in foreigners to replace the native population. It even rises to a low level UN definition of genocide when the native population is not allowed to express its disapproval of that policy.
The "genocide" you speak of is due the general economic policies across the board, which have nothing to do with immigration. Shoehorning the overall problem into a myopic complaint about immigration doesn't accomplish much besides neutralizing your own political stake.
birth is depressed in all developed nations, even those that experience net drain of population (aka negative immigration) for example Baltics and some Easter European countries.
Stop blaming everything on immigrants, pls. You have your own agency, dont play a victim and get your destiny in your own hands.
Immigrant labor is what keeps this country together, all those back breaking jobs that Americans consider themselves too good for and prefer sitting on the welfare/unemployment/etc - these jobs are done by immigrants while being paid peanuts.
Without immigrants the housing would be even more expensive and unaffordable, as well as all other services like plumbing, electricians, fast food/dining, hospitality, etc
>Without immigrants the housing would be even more expensive
And wages would be commensurately higher. The greatest real income increase in America happened between 1940 and 1970 when there was virtually ZERO immigration.
I suspect they're talking about how single family zoning results in only having more expensive places to live.
Even if you build a "cheap" single family house that's still going to be more expensive than some equally cheaply built townhomes, or apartments because of stuff like parking requirements and minimum setbacks.
In Manhattan or San Francisco? Probably not. But in most of the gigantic, sprawling USA, I suspect affordable housing absolutely has everything to do with cost of building a house.
If I had to guess it's not so much the actual cost of building the house as it is the profit margin of those who are building homes. Why build a $200,000 "starter home" when you can build a $478,000 home with gigantic margin on "luxury" trim like cheap granite countertops and "hardwood" floors for roughly the same cost? And then once you get the ugly design down you can just copy and paste it with few adjustments and save even more money.
Unfortunately we have bad incentives aligned here versus stated goals.
Manhattan and San Francisco are like Japan and Argentina in economics. They're just not the same market as most places. In Manhattan in particular the value really is the land.
Most of the places where houses are already so cheap that the price of actually building a house is a blocker for affordable housing typically have a large glut of unwanted property from population drained to other areas.
Cities still hold a large portion of the population of the US and a lot of jobs can't just be done remotely even if employers actually adopted remote work which many really really don't want to. Housing isn't just a problem in Manhattan and SF it's hitting cities and suburbs everywhere.
Go tour some unincorporated land in the Southwest and you'll see how cheaply homes can be built. The problem is that once you're spread out enough to be able to do that, the resources required for daily living have gone up significantly because they're no longer amortized over population density and time. And surburbs/ruralish areas are just in the middle of that gradient.
Building a bunch of housing in the middle of nowhere for unhoused people isn't going to work unless you also provide them heating, utilities, transportation, etc. The least expensive way of doing that is to make it dense like a city. At which point you're just building a planned city for indigent people, which is not particularly in the purview of the US on a few axes.
In my modestly sized city nowhere near California or New York the problem has nothing to do with building costs and predates the rising costs of building materials. It has everything to do with poor city planning and a lack of building permits for middle income housing. Plenty of over priced McMansions and plenty of half occupied apartments. Not enough normal houses. So the market became irrational. People buying houses site unseen even before COVID. And property values going way up.
Another contributor to the problem was outside speculators buying residential properties. Specifically Berkshire Hathaway and Zillow come to mind. But I'm sure others were doing it too. It should be illegal.
I am pretty sure it does. Lets assume an income of 32,000$ (~median US income) and 30% to pay for housing. That gives them 9,300$/year for a mortgage or 775$. with a 7% interest rate, that means the person would not be able to easily afford to buy a new home > 175,000$.
There are lots of levers that determine if a person can afford a home. income, interest rates, % income that goes towards housing, etc. But its obvious cost of building the home plays a factor.
In all high cost of living areas, the cost of land is the much more relevant factor. Even when people say, "oh no it's the cost of goods or the labor," they're talking about land.
Go compare the costs of identical pieces of plywood from the Home Depot on West 23rd Street in Manhattan and the Home Depot in Jersey City, directly across the river.
Manhattan: $76; Jersey City: $37
Is that the cost of shipping a piece of plywood an additional 3-10 miles? Is it taxes?
There is a lot of historical evidence, that deep knowledge and long tail expertise in specific industries is carried in groups of people with a close knit subculture.
Such knowledge can also be transmitted from one subculture to another, with varying degrees of success. In order to bring in new people, one must either bring in a few beginners into a majority competent population, or have one subculture highly motivated to absorb and replicate the success of another.
This is well covered in Migrations And Cultures: A World View by Thomas Sowell.
the language barrier would definitely slow things down as well, I've seen plenty of construction sites where there directions have to be translated to Spanish and things are frequently lost in translation. Plus it prevents general brainstorming between a large chunk of the construction team who only have a 1-2 people capable of translating between the groups
I think this is one of the major impacts. My experience (family in construction) is that day labor / undocumented workers often don't have construction skills, and so have to be trained on the job, and each crew has mostly new/unskilled folks with a few skilled folks to guide them and keep them on track.
Over time, these folks become skilled, and generally end up running crews. It's very commonplace to find the more experience undocumented workers being the ones running small subcontract crews under the table with day labor, because they speak fluent Spanish.
> I'm interested where the blind-eyes are built in.
The blind eyes are built in at every single layer. I mean, it only requires a master's license to pull a permit, but master's in trades almost are never hands on, it's all journeymen, apprentices, or day labor. You as a general contractor sub out a master and his crew, and as long as the permitting happens in a timely manner and the inspection passes, you really don't care about anything else. The city doesn't care, because the master is on-site for inspection, so as long as inspection passes, they're not going down the line and asking everyone for ID or anything.
There's SO MANY blind eyes, at every layer. It's pretty much a "don't ask, don't tell" policy because if we actually started enforcing the law, nothing would get done. There are significant industries in the US that are almost entirely reliant on day labor / undocumented immigrants, construction is one of them.
My experience (in the Bay Area) has been that regardless of country of origin, construction work is insanely inefficient. Lots of administrative bs, lots of made up rules, lack of communication between trades, tons of "not my job" attitude.
The value generated by software often scales up with organization size, while the costs and inefficiencies are unlikely to scale at the same rate.
Given that, very large successful organizations whose competitive edge is not software may still have terrifyingly low software production efficiencies.
Just speaking from my experience with a protracted remodel...
> and each crew has mostly new/unskilled folks with a few skilled folks to guide them and keep them on track.
In some cases the crew changes from day-to-day so any context a work has on a particular job isn't necessarily carried over form day-to-day. The day laborers are highly dependent on the crew chief for direction.
> It's very commonplace to find the more experience undocumented workers being the ones running small subcontract crews under the table with day labor, because they speak fluent Spanish.
This too introduces inefficiencies if that crew chief isn't present, late, or leaves the site for any reason. And often the crew chief will instruct works to do the wrong thing, or lacks the knowledge (e.g. electrical) to challenge something.
They hire the workers from poor countries, but hire the engineering/PM/construction mgmt talent from NL/UK and at times US... but those guys are making 6 figs while the workers are having their passports stolen.
I grew up in Southern California in the 1970s, and a non-trival percentage of the daily conversations I had with normal people had to be in Spanish, because their English was much worse than my Spanish, which was fair.
"Southern California" was/is a very, very big area. I grew up southeast of downtown.
Can you share where/when you grew up? Just curious.
As far as 'replacement': I can't dismiss such opinions out of hand, but for another anecdote: two of my great grandparents, who came from Germany in the late 19th century, lived in the US for many decades and never learned English that well.
Their children, my dad's father, of course spoke English fluently.
I guess I’m not sure I understand what’s so great about English anyway. Why not switch to Spanish, or at least adopt a more bilingual approach where it makes sense.
You think that the concept of unauthorized workers coming across the border has only existed since the year 2000?
I think you're confusing the term "undocumented" or "undocumented worker" with the underlying concept that's referenced by the terms. The concept has long been in in the public spotlight using different terms ("illegal" or "illegal alien").
Ironically modern tighter boarder controls contribute to more people moving here permanently/semi-permanently. When border crossings were easier and cheaper migrant workers could come work for a harvest or several and return to Mexico or beyond during the off season only living in the US for a short period while working. Now the crossing is more expensive and dangerous so the incentive is to move here full time.
The problem you're having here is that you think "border crossings = bad", but that's not really the issue, is it? If a person doesn't live in the US, and is instead allowed to commute to/from Mexico, you get the upsides of their labor without the "downsides" of supporting them (IMO a disgusting way of thinking about it but here we are).
Considering they pay income taxes, sales taxes, social security/medicaid, and don't make much use of US resources, it seems to me that you would want border crossings to increase dramatically, as long as they're accompanied by a corresponding crossing back home at the end of the day.
...which is exactly how it was, 20ish years ago, before 9/11.
It's more profitable to our lower classes to keep the Mexicans / Guatemalans / whatever locked up in their own country to suppress their wages and competition and then allow free trade of goods. That gets us lots of cheap shit without having to pay USA wages.
I'm in favor of open borders mostly on humanitarian grounds, and I offer our lower wage laborers as offerings on the pillar of sacrifice for that.
I don't really understand the argument for open borders as a net humanitarian good. For the individuals who come to the US, sure. But how will these countries in Middle America ever develop while their most ambitious, most hard-working, most risk-taking people are siphoned off to live (relatively) cushy lives in the USA?
Just look at what has happened to Puerto Rico. Everyone who can, leaves. What's left is grim. Easy access to the USA is a great deal for the minority who get out, but for most Puerto Ricans, it's hard to imagine that they're better off as a result.
> I'm in favor of open borders mostly on humanitarian grounds, and I offer our lower wage laborers as offerings on the pillar of sacrifice for that.
Half the country agrees with you, but they'd never admit it.
I hope those countries would adapt by competing and fixing the things that fuck up their business climate. Also worth noting if their labor flees the price of labor in their country would rise and hopefully make things better for the remainder.
Your comment would make sense if the primary goal of our border policy was to facilitate cross-border commuting for Mexicans without work visas. If the primary goal is having control of your border (i.e. choosing who gets to come into your country, which is a basic function of competent governments) then this activity would be either prevented, or regulated via special work visas.
Either way, the idea that "tight border controls" are a contributing factor to the large number of illegal immigrants in the united states is entirely divorced from reality.
I'm confused; why isn't the idea of making something more or less legal related to how many people illegally do that thing?
They wouldn't be illegal immigrants if we didn't have "tight border controls" by definition, so it feels related and not "divorced from reality"...
We lived through this, basically all of American history up until 9/11, where the Mexican border was "loose"(er, the US committed some pretty fucked up atrocities using that border a few times in its history); it seems to me that if we returned to that level of interaction with Mexico, the vast majority of concerns raised by anti-immigration folks would be quelled.
Yep. Only in my lifetime have we attempted to limit movement across that border. But because certain media outlets use the language of war and invasion to describe the peaceful migration of people from country to country, the followers of said outlets have decided that we are, in fact, at war with these people. When in fact they're the same people who mow our lawns and wash our dishes every time we eat out. smh
> But because certain media outlets use the language of war and invasion to describe the peaceful migration of people from country to country, the followers of said outlets have decided that we are, in fact, at war with these people.
I guess pretending the issue is just some kind of Fox News conspiracy theory is easier than actually understanding it?
People use the language of "invasion" for a reason. In Texas, non-hispanic whites make up ~30% of births[0], but accounted for only 5% of the population growth[1].
You'll write that off as "muh replacement conspiracy", of course--I can tell that you've been well programmed!
Can you elaborate on what's wrong with, "In Texas, non-hispanic whites make up ~30% of births[0], but accounted for only 5% of the population growth[1]?"
I think it'd be awesome if we all had to learn Spanish in some parts of the US. What a boon for cultural diversity that would be! The exchange of ideas would be so good for our shared society.
I have memories of illegal immigrant workers from longer than 22 years ago and the USA has had immigration laws for much longer than 22 years. Have I misunderstood your statement?
>undocumented workers [are responsible for the productivity drop]
I am confused by this assertion. If they are undocumented, wouldn't they be excluded in the stats? And if they aren't included in the stats, shouldn't we expect an artificial increase in worker productivity? If there is a 4:1 undocumented to documented ratio, then that 1 documented person will get "credit" for the work of 5 people! Even if 4 of those people are relatively unskilled, that's still a big boost.
My initial thought about this is that productivity declines because workers wait around a lot, and they wait around because of ballooning administrative overhead. This would also be consistent with what we know about state of the medical industry and academia during the same time period.
I'm inclined to take your side on this. By virtue of being undocumented, they should be boosting the perceived productivity, not dampening it.
If I was to steelman the idea, though; I would guess that removing incentives in the form of higher pay will lower the contributions of everyone involved?
I think I understand the question. The disagreement seems to be what "undocumented worker" here means.
If you think it means the worker is on the books, but is not a citizen, then you get to your question. It should be roughly the same.
If you think it means that the worker was off the books, regardless of citizenship, then you arrive at the other.
My consideration is if I am a cleaner and get my child to help out on a few jobs, my child will not be a documented worker and it will be a transparent boost to my productivity. Indeed, many subcontractors and migrant workers will use family as a cheap way to boost productivity so that they can take more jobs.
I grant that construction may land on the other interpretation. There are usually more rules for that kind of work. (Though, in rural areas? Not sure.)
Undocumented workers show up in many statistics. "Undocumented" doesn't literally mean that there is nothing recorded about this person, it means they do not have permission to work in the US.
"Undocumented" means they lack citizenship or a valid visa. It doesn't mean they aren't calculated in productivity statistics. Many undocumented workers even pay taxes to the IRS, are counted in censuses, and more.
Or, "illegal immigrant" is a sometimes-used dysphemism for "undocumented immigrant". I'm not aware of any other class of people who break a law who are called "illegal" as a result; it's a rather dehumanizing impulse.
The current legal immigration levels are way too low, hence people breaking the law trying to establish roots in the country (or fleeing persecution elsewhere). We used to call people foreign-born instead of illegal, and not care about their immigration status at all. Oh, wait - that's when the Europeans were immigrating: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/ann...
If many many people are breaking a law (i.e. jaywalking), one should consider whether the law is actually reasonable in the first place.
People refer to other people who break the law by the law they broke all the time.
Thieves, murders, fraudsters, etc
Illegal immigrant doesn't seem especially derogatory for someone who illegally immigrated.
I think it would be better to focus on the fact their felony crime rate is far below the native population than arguing over a pretty tame word used to describe them.
There have been plenty of people who have been in this country without appropriate paperwork historically - they were never called illegals (see above). In fact even now people make differentiations between "visa overstayers" and people who snuck across the border, even though both are technically illegal aliens.
I think you don't have to go far to see the implications.
> It's interesting to see how the language changed over time from "foreign born" to illegal immigrant depending on who was doing the immigrating:
1. you seem to be implying that during periods of "white" immigration, americans were fine but the public changed their tune when it became south american/asian. However, irish/italian immigrants also received pushback. Specifically, irish were hated because they were catholic, and itlians weren't considered white back then.
2. You can also flip this around to say that as a society, we've gotten more accurate with our wording. Rather than lumping all immigrants (legal and illegal) into one bucket, we take care to point out that we're only against the illegal type of immigration. That seems like a win to me.
Interestingly enough many (with no claims to majority/minority numbers) "illegal"/migrant workers do have "documents" from what I've seen working in agriculture. The documents are sufficient if you don't look too closely or are not the business owner - speaking from my own experience.
These may be cases where the workers are paying taxes etc.
Not sure what kind of documents you are referring to. The I-9 form is very clear about what documents are acceptable. It is not difficult to understand if someone is legally able to work or not.
“Illegal immigrant” is a euphemism for “Illegal alien”. In law these people are called aliens not immigrants. Illegal immigrant is actually an oxymoron
Not necessarily. Undocumented doesn’t mean “excluded from the stats”, it means “doesn’t have a valid work visa or social security number”.
I’m not sure if something similar happens in construction, but I’ve heard that in the landscaping business a supervisor will just pull up to a Home Depot with a pickup truck, and there’ll be a bunch of people waiting around, and they’ll go “Who wants $X for Y hours?” And then 4 or 5 guys get in the back of the truck and they head to the work site.
In a situation like that, you’re probably keeping track of how many people you employ each day so you can figure out how many you need for future projects, but you’re not gonna be able to produce a list of social security numbers if someone asked.
Just speculating, but the number of people who are here legally but do not have a work permit is probably not significant in the construction business. Getting a long term visa requires so much effort and money, that it’s likely not feasible for this group of workers.
> There are several plausible channels for labor measurement difficulties in construction, including a higher than average frequency of employees working irregular hours, contractor labor that may be misclassified by survey respondents, and, especially in more recent decades, labor supplied by undocumented workers.
It then goes on to talk about that in more detail, but I won't copy that in because every time I do, someone goes on with "but what about X?" where X is also in the very next paragraph.
Nothing wrong with coming up with the hypothesis, honestly. But the extraordinary number of responses to your comment that speculate on something that one can immediately find are just so typical of HN comments.
I sometimes see that in software engineering where some engineer will tell me about some library we're using that we have access to source code for: "yeah, I looked at the docs and it's not clear if it does A or B". But...the source code is right there. Why not just use that? At least then if the library is doing it wrong you'll know for sure.
You're going to get a lot replies nit picking this, but as a former construction PM gone software PM, I can tell you this: good skilled tradesmen are hard to find and their illegal immigrant fill ins (even the legal ones) are dangerous, do shoddy work, and will almost always delay a construction project.
Let me put it into HN terms:
It's like hiring a bunch of off shore junior devs to save money and then you wonder why the finished product is so shoddy or worse keeps failing QC. Then you have to bring in the $100/hr senior dev to clean up the mess.
Not a lot of differences between building software and well buildings.
The undocumented workers that I personally know are skilled, motivated, and diligent workers. Perhaps in part because they desperately need to hold on to this source of income. If anything, I think they would boost productivity metrics.
I don't think this is due to illegal aliens, without which our construction industry would be in even worse shape, but rather that there have been massive declines in the competence of domestic workers across the board, and this has been hidden by outsourcing, importing skilled workers, and technological growth (e.g. have machines do things that domestic workers cannot), so that you see productivity declines in those areas where you cannot outsource and you cannot pay extreme wage premiums to attract people with basic reasoning skills.
You can see this literally everywhere. Unless you are going to pay 200K+ you will have difficulties hiring reasonably intelligent, motivated, conscientious workers.
For general US construction, there are single-source cost-plus service contracts. Which incentivizes construction to do only the necessary and charge the max possible for it.
In contrast, a concrete milestone service contract with re-bid sections of the contract that miss their milestones can create a competitive construction landscape.
Things I am omitting. Red tape slowing down construction.
Changing the incentive structure can probably help boost efficiency on the provider side.
I thought Cost Plus incentivise people to do unnecessary work? Since getting x% of "plus" on top of a huge messily, error filled contract is more than a lean efficient one?
I think contract organization aside. If the government says it's a requirement the vendor will charge the max it can and accomplish it no matter what. So, in practice vendors have accountants on staff that will work a contract in such a way that logistically allows the vendor to charge the most it can for the contract.
They're measuring square feet completed per employee. Houses are twice as big now as they were 50 years ago. Anyone who's every done a remodel or new construction knows that 80% of the time is spent on the last 20% of finishing work, and with twice the square feet, that's twice as much finishing work.
Also, does this paper take into account increased regulations? Both the time spent complying with new building codes as well as the time spent waiting for inspectors?
If it's twice as much finishing work it's also twice as much "fast" work (the first 80%). The ratio of time spent between the easy stuff and the hard stuff shouldn't change, at least not just based on a square footage change.
Until you consider central heating, multiple bathrooms, far more electric outlets, and then multiple inspections of the above by different groups. Modern homes are far more complex.
>They're measuring square feet completed per employee. Houses are twice as big now as they were 50 years ago. Anyone who's every done a remodel or new construction knows that 80% of the time is spent on the last 20% of finishing work, and with twice the square feet, that's twice as much finishing work.
I don't see the point you're making. Houses are twice as big, so they require twice the amount of finishing work. If productivity was growing or staying the same, you shouldn't get less productivity as a result of that.
Wonder how much of it is related to contractors underbidding to win a contract and then saying they need more money which slows everything down. Or just throwing a bid out without really doing the due diligence required to understand what needs to be done. For example the New York tunnel project that's billions over cost and years behind. I see this every time I hire a contractor to do work on my house, every experience is terrible and over cost and behind schedule.
Currently looking to raise a sunken living room due to flood risk. I have a room that is connected to the sunken living room that is raised currently via a wooded frame. The dry wall is open so its clearly visible. There is clearly open space under the floor lift. Guy gives me a quote, I was very clear when I met him that I needed under the side room filled as well and that the goal was to prevent water seeping in due to the floor being lower than ground level. I have him come out again because I am ready to hire him but want one more walk through. I ask what the risk or complication is pouring concrete under the raised side room and the existing floor lift system. He acts surprised and says it was not part of the quote. I ask the complexity of pouring the concrete behind the fireplace because there is a gap behind it and the wall. He acts surprised and says its not included. All of this was clearly visible when he came out the first time and the stated goal was to raise the floor to prevent water seepage due to height discrepancy inside and outside. He says he would have to demo the giant fireplace...
My prior experience I had a contractor that I was working with who kept telling me that the crew was at the house working and I had to call and tell him over and over that no one was there. For months...
They do this nonsense every single time, they submit a BS quote just to get the job figuring once they are in they can just charge whatever and figure it out. I have yet to meet an honest or competent contractor.
If you have a contractor looking for jobs, at least recently, it's likely they are a terrible contractor. The good contractors tend to be booked out for months
Have you considered what you're asking for is not practical? Nobody is going to attempt to pour a slab under an existing structure through a hole behind a fireplace.
I have now after ensuring that he came back the second time and he said its not practical. I would have expected him to have told me the first time as that's his area of expertise. He only said its not practical after he came back out and I asked him to confirm that he was confident there would be no issue with the existed lifted floor. That's exactly what I mean, they say yes to anything to get the job and then only after the deposit is made do they start to hedge that there is a complication. We are now not going to fill the sunken living room but are going to attempt to seal the exterior of the house, add gutters and add a french drain system. Something completely different from what he originally pitched.
If I ask a contractor how to prevent water seeping into my sunken living room and surrounding areas, and he tells me filling it with concrete is the best approach and provides a quote to do so I expect that he has taken all existing facts into consideration.
Note that this is using a counterintuitive definition for "productivity". Most comments here are taking it to mean that construction projects get less stuff done (foundations dug, concrete poured, etc...), but it's actually measuring it as an economic value in units of "value added per full time worker".
That seems to be rather more related to the distribution of capital than work output. If the construction industry were getting more efficient, you'd actually expect its margins to be declining, right? I don't think this is measuring what people want it to measure.
A plumber can charge $15K to install a new sewer line, both in 2022 and in 1972 (inflation adjusted). However, an increasing fraction of money is likely being spent on lower margin lower productivity "construction". I'm sure faux paint finishes look nice, and they are expensive, but they're not "replace a sewer lateral" expensive. Thus its inevitable the overall market segment will become less productive if it expands.
The "mistake" in the linked article is assuming all construction work is equal and unchanging over those decades where CLEARLY there have been infinite real estate fads over the decades. There's just no way replacing countertops with granite can generate as much financial productivity as sewer work, and the fraction of the market spend on low-profit countertops is vastly higher now.
Having worked in a construction site in another country my observation would be that we used to have countless undeclared labor for tax reasons anf now we have countless divided by two...
Now working as an analyst it is important each time to have a ground knowledge and business expert to avoid obvious measurement biases. Especially when comparing different eras.
CRE guy here. A lot of this "productivity loss" is also due to government related staffing issues and bureaucracy. Most people are describing more complex building codes, so I'll add something new.
I had a project that was delayed by over a year during Covid because the city approved incorrect plans, came back and requested revisions, and then lost the physical plans (without us knowing until we checked in asking what the status was). This was almost a year delay and added cost overruns, etc. It also made the required rent higher to recoup those costs and try to be profitable (that deal will lose money). Remember, there's someone at the city working 9-5pm clocking in and out.. they are not impacted if the project is denied, delayed, etc... while the developer is incurring cost of capital of 7-10%.
Another example of bureaucracy: you have to go through a particular order of inspections when developing property. One of them includes elevator inspections. You have to have power before that, so that's another set of inspections.
IIRC, during Covid there were only something like half a dozen elevator inspections for the entire state of CA. The source below says there was 15 in 2019. If your elevator inspection is 2 months late... guess what, your project is going to be late.
Remember the modular startup Katerra that gobbled money from Softbank? I knew a developer who did one of their projects. He said Katerra would deliver the units on time, but the city's permitting process was so broken that they couldn't actually install or inspect these units. So they would have to find lots to store the material (+costs & +issues). Katerra's "value-add" was the speed of delivery would cut costs down, but in reality this was hard to achieve "on-site".
If, all along, you could have rented it out for more money ... why were you planning to rent it out for less money? I get that you wouldn't have to, but it appears that the "market rate rent" was higher than you initially anticipated.
As a corollary, assuming that you had initially planned on the highest rent that the market would bear...it seems that after a year of unexpected delays you'd most likely still choose to finish the project even at a loss. This is because all the loss would have already been sunk cost that you can't change anymore, and at the "original maximum rent the market would bear" you'd still make your IRR/ROI on the marginal future investment of finishing the construction.
So, assuming you couldn't raise the rent, you'd lose money either way, but you'd lose less money by finishing the construction vs. losing more money by abandoning the project entirely.
To be fair, GP has a point: unexpected expenses and delays in construction represent sunk costs, and don't matter with respect to maximising profits, as the landlord should pick the price which maximises profits with respect to whatever the operating costs of the apartment are, without considering the cost of construction.
However, as sibling comments to yours mentioned, there are flaws to this perspective:
- You can make the apartments 'better' and charge a premium on top of whatever the better appliances cost. So if that raises operating costs by $100/unit month, raise rent by $200/unit month.
- Real life doesn't always map perfectly onto microeconomic theory. In particular, discovering the profit-maximising price is tricky. However, I would still argue that the landlord would rationally still pick whatever they would assume the profit-maximising price would be.
- Since everyone else is probably facing delays and cost overruns, probably not as much construction is getting done as might have been assumed, therefore the landlord faces less competition than anticipated and can raise rent higher than expected without losing too many prospective tenants.
My point is that the GP's point isnt applicable, and critiquing a statement that was not made .
>If, all along, you could have rented it out for more money ... why were you planning to rent it out for less money?
... the original post never said they would rent it out for less money. Nor did it say they would rent it out for more money. They only said the rent required to break even went up.
This is clear in the original post, which says they could not achieve this higher rent required to break even.
> This was almost a year delay and added cost overruns, etc. It also made the required rent higher to recoup those costs and try to be profitable (that deal will lose money).
is the 'try to be profitable' that implies they did end up raising rent higher than otherwise planned, but you are right that this isn't necessarily true.
We did end up pursuing higher rents than what was "market", unsuccessfully. By setting a lower rent, it meant that a lender or potential buyer would underwrite that income, resulting in significantly lower valuations, making the magnitude of the economics worse. But holding out for higher rents pushes out the business plan and increases the risk of the deal (ie your loan matures and you had no leases in place)
If you can hit the same 10% return on 20% lower revenue... you can attract more capital and execute with a better measure of risk. My point was that the I of ROI increased substantially and we needed to try to hit the rate R of ROI.
When i read the article i expected something like that to be the reason. Some paper pusher writing down rule books to follow. Then someone else who hasn't gotten his hands dirty in his life writes a report the workers are to blame for bad productivity.
State and local governments are, as far as I can tell, simultaneously spending way too much money and are badly understaffed in certain areas. Sometimes even while appearing well-staffed, because there's some bottleneck elsewhere in the system (due to insufficient staffing there) preventing the efforts of an army of other frontline workers from being effective. Like the elevator inspector thing—you may have more than enough electrical inspectors but not enough elevator inspectors, so, the extra electrical inspectors can't improve the situation.
Of course the pay's shit, you're subject to all kinds of quality-of-work-life destroying whims of politicians at the top, the bureaucracy is as abusive and ineffective as stereotypes about bureaucracies would lead one to expect, and if you have an effective union shielding you from some of that, about half the politicians are constantly trying to weaken or eliminate that, plus trying to mess with your pension which is practically the only attractive thing about those jobs... so, no fucking wonder, really. Recent wage inflation has made all this stuff worse by making unresponsive government pay scales far less attractive than market-driven wages elsewhere, so systems and offices that were teetering before are now falling over.
They might also simply be exerting too much oversight. The other way to reduce these pressures is to reduce workloads by simply caring less. I'm doing a remodel and I got three pages of comments that were 90% about minor annotation issues that won't make any difference to anything on the ground ever. But it burned tens of hours of plan checker time.
>the politicians are constantly trying to weaken or eliminate that, plus trying to mess with your pension which is practically the only attractive thing about those jobs... so, no fucking wonder, really.
>Recent wage inflation has made all this stuff worse by making unresponsive government pay scales far less attractive than market-driven wages elsewhere, so systems and offices that were teetering before are now falling over.
These two are related. The pensions work for government workers because politicians get to advertise low taxes, voters get to enjoy lower taxes and punt the costs to future generations, and union bosses who are older, get to cash out before shit hits the fan (almost all governments have tiers of pensions, where older workers have more benefits than younger will ever have).
The solution is to get rid of ALL deferred compensation. Government pays employees the same as private does. No more muddying the waters with understated liability numbers and underfunding for deferred compensation. Then government can match wages in real time.
IIRC, during Covid there were only something like half a dozen elevator inspections for the entire state of CA. The source below says there was 15 in 2019. If your elevator inspection is 2 months late... guess what, your project is going to be late.
I couldn't believe this is true, so I actually read the article. Turns out, it's not true. It's multiple orders of magnitude off.
There were 15 inspectors for the city (not county) of LA when this article was written:
"In order to be up to code, each of the 20,974 elevators in the city of Los Angeles needs to be checked once a year.
But there are only 15 inspectors to do it."
Roughly half of the elevators were past due, which means they were inspecting 10k+ elevators per year just in the city of LA, let alone the entire state.
IIRC the City of LA actually has its own elevator inspectors, but if I'm not mistaken CA has inspectors that cover the rest of the state. An elevator inspector told me this directly to my face, but it was some time ago so I could be a bit off. But you get the general point I was trying to make.
>...also due to government related staffing issues and bureaucracy. Most people are describing more complex building codes, so I'll add something new.
The two are interrelated. There'd be a lot less opportunity for error if building codes were cut in half. For example where I live there is a fair bit oil heating & therefore underground oil tanks. Building code requires that upon switching to something else, like natural gas, the submitted plans must include information about the planned removal or decommissioning of the tank.
This wasn't always a requirement, but now that it is that means someone has to check the plans to make sure that requirement is met. So, bureaucracy and building codes go hand in hand.
Of course in the case of residential oil tanks remaining in the ground, or not being properly decommissioned, there it can cause a variety of problems. Water contamination for example, a major concern for abandoned tanks in any area where residential well water is common. (and for other reasons)
I'm not arguing that bureaucracy as it exists is at all a model of efficiency, but you can't examine or solve that problem without understanding how we got there.
When you say the deal will lose money, do you mean that (1) the project’s operating expenses exceed its income, (2) the building can’t be satisfactorily recapped after completion/stabilization, (3) the MOIC at exit will be less than 1.0x, (4) the investor won’t receive their full preferred return or (5) the sponsor won’t earn any promote?
I could see any of these as being a way to describe a deal that “loses money.”
I was modeling a 2-3% IRR on aggressive numbers when I last worked on it. It was acquired with a proforma 18% IRR. Whenever it's sold, it's going to return less than 1.0x. Not sure how bad the loss will be.
Even if it is recapped, the deal will require a significant cash-in refinance. If the business plan is saved and it takes you another 4 years to exit at a better number, that 4-yr now 8-yr deal results in say a low single digit IRR. Sponsor makes no money and the project sucks up even more resources & labor. But depends if your capital partner is willing to ride it out and if you can even recap where the numbers work
Sorry for the late reply (not sure if you’ll even see this) but thanks for the response. Oof, yeah, that’s a tough one. Definitely think calling that project a money loser is a fair characterization.
Sorry to hear about it, the CRE guys I know are all pretty damned smart and incredibly hard working and it’s nonetheless a tough business for them. Though if one has the chops, not a bad “get rich slowly” scheme, lol.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadAverage house size has probably doubled in the last 50 years.
Nail guns can't make up for building code and higher finish work demands. It's not uncommon to see 6 or 7 layers in sheathing today.
That said, the products being used have improved a lot. Things like PEX tubing for plumbing (instead of copper) and glue on walls for showers (over doing tile work), make some aspects go a lot faster.
Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention vinyl plank flooring... omg, so easy and the results look and function great.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnorhjQR4zJkT7AVNhu395Q/vid...
Friendly, super knowledgable, takes the fear out of the DIY.
For electrical, I do a lot myself, but when it came to running a 50amp line + breaker panel inside my place (which also required outdoor ladder work) to replace the steel conduit indoors, I just hired a professional even though it was very expensive.
^ I'm knowledgeable enough to do my own wiring and plumbing, but pay for licensed/bonded contractors instead. I sleep better at night and my insurance company probably does as well.
As far as insurance companies... I bought an old place... I'm finding all sorts of stuff that isn't up to code (hidden electrical boxes, in the floor!, with wire nuts and not even twisted together wire and not even grounded properly)... I'm bringing it up to code, with modern products... in a court of law, it is going to be hard for them to argue against me.
I've gone with ss crimps instead of copper rings too. Mostly cause I live near the ocean and the ss crimps just seem easier to use.
200' of blue/red sharkbite brand pex b tubing is only about $70 on amazon right now, amazing.
But yes, in general I'm always for people becoming familiar with tools and DIY.
Haha...should is doing a lot of work here. Shut off valves like you mention are great, but even newer houses often don't have them.
[EDIT] Actually, my parents' very-new house has that... but because it's all-PEX, so it's super-easy to install it that way, with a central panel full of shut-offs for various parts.
FWIW a SharkBite valve or NPT adapter into a valve would seem to be a handier thing to have around than a pure cap. For example, you can attach a valve without shutting the water off.
Also I don't know what you mean about sewage contamination? Sewage contamination of potable water lines would indicate a hugely weird problem.
AFAIK backflow preventers (fancy check valves), which prevent water in the house from going back into the municipal distribution, are standard on new installs. But I think that requirement is recent as of the past few decades, so most houses aren't going to have them.
Yes, I agree isolation valves are good. But as far as what code requires? It seems that if isolation valves aren't required on branches, then the only isolation valve that is required is the main house valve that can isolate it from the street water main.
So I can't figure out what else you think would have been required to pass inspection in the comment you originally responded to.
PEX is very very not-great. It's constantly leeching carcinogens and endocrine disruptors into your sitting water. Your modern home's recirculation system is making that even worse, cycling hot water and concentrating leeched petrochemical products in your hot water line. Some of them even boil before water which means they'll make it through a distiller.
Plumbers like it because it's easy/saves them time, and they'll love charging you big $$$ to rip it out in 20 years when it's banned.
We don't drink or cook with the hot water, but in theory if the plumbing was PEX we could.
Post-Flint, lead is the new asbestos. Because the standard is zero tolerance, there’s alot of noise on the topic.
PEX is great, but I’d personally always go for cooper if I could afford it. We tend to learn new things about plastic and risks over time.
In 1996, they banned plumbing that is not "lead free" from being sold.
In 2011, the "lead free" definition was strengthened to a weighted average of 0.25%.
Another factor, in concrete slab construction, is that we want drain lines to be as short as possible, because even though it's possible to get those correct before the pour it doesn't always happen. Concentrating fixtures in one corner of the house tends to force supply lines into exterior walls.
Maybe I should hire better plumbers, and maybe I should live where it doesn't get cold, but until then maybe I should just use PEX.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/The-Plumber-s-Choice-8-in-x-3-4-...
Apparently it also depends on the ph of the water...
https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/copper-pipe-types/
I would argue that a good plumber would recommend PEX over piping a house in Type M.
>After the tenth pin hole leak and lots of shark bite fixes, I am not fond of copper.
It's my understanding that the vast majority of pinhole copper leaks are caused by poor solder jobs. Solder gets inside the pipe and causes a vortex that can eat through the copper.
The solution to this is to use solderless copper ProPress fittings for everything. Not only is this much more clean and faster to install, but the inside of the pipe is flush/smooth with the fitting.
Almost everything I drink out of is lined with plastic. Milk or juice containers, water bottles, and most reusable on the go cups are made of plastics or have a plastic liner.
[1] https://hero.epa.gov/hero/index.cfm/reference/details/refere...
But long-term plastics in tubing are exposed continuously to heat (hot water) and will start falling apart and leech chemicals, because they are exposed over long-term
~$800usd vs. tile+labor.
Definitely a product that is ripe for disruption.
There aren't even many manufacturers.
These two statements may be related. It’s not worth deploying capital to compete if the additional competition drives profits margins to zero. Better to deploy that capital somewhere it gets better expected returns.
This anti-competitive logic seems very widespread these days with such centralized global supply chains and consolidated retail chains.
Not a lot of room for me to deploy a small amount of capital to create a small-medium sized manufacturing facility of this stuff to chip away at 10-50% of the demand around the edges of the marginal profits. Mainly because it would be difficult to get my products into Home Depot and Lowe’s if I can’t supply their whole national chain.
And that’s assuming Home Depot and Lowe’s haven’t agreed to any exclusivity with the current manufacturers which I’d need private equity money to beat.
$800+ for 3 sheets of plastic, and that is it, is absurd. They don't even interlock or have trim for the corners... example...
https://www.homedepot.com/p/WOODBRIDGE-Haydon-32-in-x-60-in-...
Of course adding those items would cost even more, so it is a bit of a race to zero. That said, if you can get a following by homebuilders and into every single new housing project, it might be worth it. I'm sure having some sort of inside track advantage there would be necessary too. None of which I personally have, but as an end user of this stuff, I'd be more than happy to support and provide feedback on.
I'd love to see something similar done for electric wiring. I'm picturing something like an electrical box that you can directly connect Romex that's been stripped with a special tool, and then a circuit-breaker-style snap-in for the actual receptacle. The parts/tools would cost more but might dramatically speed up the installation.
*relatively expensive, especially in the early days.
I did start using wago's though... those are handy for sure.
PEX is terrible, pretty much every commercial brand has been shown to leech petrochemicals into your water. This varies a lot based on your municipal water supply's characteristics. Unfortunately cleaner water leeches more.
PEX saves megabuilders $$$ and plumbers time, but it's not good for you.
New constructions (for cold zone), need to be air tight and that certainly comes at a cost in time as it is work to apply all the layers, run the conduits and whatnot.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/16/marc-benioff-says-newer-sale...
Assessing "worker productivity" is hard for all but the most simple jobs, but the desire to do so, I reckon, is buried deep within each mind of the pointy-haired.
The unfortunate reality of the situation is that so-called "bullshit jobs" form the basis for the only system approximating UBI in the US, so movement in this space will further erode what remains of the American middle class…
… and AI will grind it down to the nub.
I don't need bar graphs or anything, but can you provide some recent examples you saw? I certainly don't remember seeing articles to that effect recently.
It would also triple the construction cost of the house. Reasons. But hey, $0 energy bill.
Most builders don't do any of that stuff, like at all. Just the bare minimum required. They aren't incentivized. Most consumers would - and do - opt for single pane windows over dual, and dual over triple, 'etc. Even when the windows would "pay for themselves" over their lifetime.
It's also difficult to know what's on the inside of built houses (which is why inspection is supposed to happy during construction, not after). Commercial buildings often have both plans and as-built drawings; but residential buildings don't, and when you get on-site and the plan doesn't match the house, you really don't know what's in the walls. Some sort of government driven new code compliance inspection for existing housing stock seems really expensive. Even public use buildings take a long time to get code compliance updates, such as retrofits on unreinforced masonry buildings in many places, and there's both more risk and more enforcement power for public use buildings.
The old house was up-to-code, and considered safe for habitation, when it was built. Your new house was not.
Very importantly, if you renovate an old house, regulations may require you to update the house to modern building code standards for plumbing, electricity, etc.
Old houses are held up to the new code when they are renovated, because updating old houses to the new code frequently requires rebuilding substantial portions of the house to comply with new requirements. It's not about "fuck everyone else." It's about recognizing that the extensive work that would be required to comply with substantially safer modern codes is best done when substantial construction work is already planned to be performed.
Commercial buildings are held to up to new codes whenever ownership, or tenancy, changes hands.
OK but if I build a new house to the old code then I also will need substantial work to rebuild it to bring it into compliance. So I could use the same logic I shouldn't have to. Safe enough for them, safe enough for me.
>No, houses are held up to the code that applied when they were built,
Again, that's the scam. I'll build my house to one code and then vote to make the code harsher for the next guy to up my property value. If it's impossible to build a new house as economically as mine, mine's now worth more than it would have been.
It's not reasonable to build with GFCI outlets in the bathrooms in 1956. It's not reasonable to build without them in 2023.
Most places have a very limited enforcement appetite for existing construction. If it was safe and current when built, it's fine enough. Exceptions include adding smoke and carbon monoxide detectors --- but they're not that expensive to buy or install; and sometimes you can't get a home insured if it had certain electrical panels with poor safety records, and knob and tube wiring is sometimes frowned upon (but really, it's not that bad if it hasn't been altered; just a lot of houses where they added too much load on the existing knob and tube and overloaded wiring is never good). That doesn't mean you should build that way today. Somethings that were standard aren't even available anymore; nobody makes orangeburg pipe since the 1970s, so you've got to use something better.
And that's part of the trickery involved here. People say "look that one guy died in that house so we need to require stricter code here." They're not noticing the freezing homeless people that died because housing become $X dollars more expensive and they lost the musical chairs game. Sure the homeless guy wasn't going to buy a brand new house, but through the substitution effect across a wide swath of society eventually down the chain it does filter down to everyone ultimately affecting their access to housing. And hey, added bonus, current homeowners property is also worth more when building becomes more expensive so why not juice that one housing related death for all you got even if you know saving that one in a million rich person's life ends with 2 more dead homeless people or whatever.
The ability for voters, already homed, to just change up the codes on everyone while not having their own homes subjected creates a cruel moral hazard and socially bifurcating effect. The guy that gets in early comes in and gets his, then says fuck you, you have to play by different rules.
I'm not saying the houses should be torn down. I'm saying any updates should put situation where homeowner voters are subject to their own medicine. I don't think they'll choose to tear down the houses. No they might decide after all "hey good enough for me, good enough for you."
As for "can't build with X thing they did/didn't have before." Well you can update the codes to allow both the old and new method for something. That would satisfy conditions for both standing and new construction without uniform enforcement causing old houses to be demolished.
It's honestly kind of insane I've had a couple people basically suggest that if the rules be applied evenly, they're going with the "go and tear down houses when code is updated and see how quick we can make everyone homeless" option to pick up their toys and go home rather than give others the same chance they had by allowing the old ways in the code. That's the only way I can make out you would seriously think people would end up homeless.
We as a society have strong reasons to provide a glide path towards reducing that moral hazard created by old entrants.
Forcing them to eat their own medicine would allow the youth to also have the chance to build a house, even if it's not perfectly safe, closer to the cost their parents had to spend. Rather than changing the game and screwing over new entrants while old entrants enjoy immunity to the same rules.
I've noticed that there has been mass hysteria in some California-centric websites that flood insurance must be provided by the Federal government in Florida, but not that earthquake insurance must be provided by the Federal government in California.
Botton line, the private sector doesn't handle this type of correlated risk well, and somehow picking on Florida when California does the same thing is pretty weird. We know there will be a big earthquake that will level a lot of property in California just we know there will be a big flood in Florida. Yet "entitled fucks" keep choosing to live in these states. Life goes on.
Earthquake insurance availability is mandated within the state. Why would we need a Federal mandate when we have an effective state mandate. It's not attractively priced, but Federal flood insurance often isn't attractively priced when they've updated maps recently either.
Anyways, you are confusing the issue of whether insurance is mandated with the fact that no private insurer will cover it, and so the risk is socialized and the only providers are government.
That's what people are complaining about -- that private insurers walked away from covering flood/earthquakes in regions prone to the same, and so the government has to step in to insure the correlated risk. This causes no end of outrage for Florida but is somehow just fine in California. And my only point was to point out this hypocrisy and argue that there are good reasons for government to cover correlated risks and that there is nothing wrong with either state or those who choose to build in either state. They can accept risk or they can purchase government insurance.
AFAIK, your residential insurance carrier is mandated to offer you Earthquake insurance. If there's some exception I'm not aware of, let me know.
Soft-story retrofits are a thing and should be expanded with long-term State loans
There are fewer places where it is more reckless to build housing than coastal California.
What happens when insurers won’t insure older properties? Those without insurance will make due until a catastrophic event or sell to someone for cash, and those with a mortgage will suffer exceedingly high premiums until the mortgage is paid off and they can go without insurance (or they’re of sufficient means they can afford the premiums, currently running roughly $4k-$12k/annually).
I'd be surprised if Maine, Vermont, New York and the other North-Eastern states don't have something similar.
This winter has been the exception.
It'd be interesting to see these stats broken out by trade, with an appropriate unit (/sqft might make sense for roofing, but it doesn't for wall sheathing).
I'd think a good chunk of this is due to safety expectations as well. It's a lot easier to walk around a roof if you aren't concerned with fall protection.
They do make the house look bigger (on the outside) than a same-square-footage house with a more traditional floor plan, though, so... I guess that makes it worth it, to someone?
What does cost time and money is getting permits, planning approval, inspection, etc. Not that those are unimportant, but any delays are certainly not on the construction crew's behalf.
For example, cars today are orders of magnitude more complicated than 50 years ago, but due to more efficient manufacturing technology, the auto industry has far higher productivity per employee than it did 50 years ago.
The weak link in creating ever more complex homes, with ever more stringent building codes, at faster rates, is to remove the "humans with nail guns and drills" from the construction process.
At some point, us meat sacks are the weak link in optimizing an industry. Humans can only go so fast. That's why (as you've said) we've seen massive gains in productivity for other manufacturing industries.
Are they doing anything different than what was available in a Sears catalog 50 years ago?
For American-style suburban homes, it's most efficient to build most of the home on site, and only manufacture off-site a handful items like roof trusses. People might not realize this, but a small crew can frame several houses in a single (very, very long) day.
Since the parent company dissolved them in '08, I haven't seen any of the other subsidiaries using the same techniques or scheduling, and it's always rather surprised me. They invested literally 10s of millions of dollars into us figuring out how to make it all work, then trashed the knowledge.
There was a recent HN post on a shortage of electricians that got me to thinking why studs, which already come pre-cut to exactly 92 5/8", don't also come pre-drilled for wiring at outlet and switch height (at least I've never seen that in wood studs).
Yeah pretty much this I suspect. The paper doesn't propose that more regulations and complex code is why it's harder to build things today. And that's not a bad thing - code is a great thing since it sets a standard.
Houses from 100 years ago, a carpenter could just make game time decisions regarding things that are highly scrutinized today like staircase run/rise, doorway height, etc. If you gut an old house it's amazing how simple they are.
The old saying "they don't build them like they used to" applies here. We don't because we can't and when they did they overbuilt them because they were simple and it wasn't documented what the build had to be.
When the frame is put up it is typically inspected to ensure it meets code and that correct fasteners and brackets are used. Until the inspection is done you don't see roofing and electrical finished up. Then you have the electrical and plumbing on top the foundation. And when that is in its inspected again. Also heating cooling piping. Then fiber insulation is put in walls, then you have your drywall installed. Then you have the different finish teams come in. Finish plumbing, cabinetry, tiling, floors. And then another round of builder inspection. Then you get to the city and bank inspections.
Any one of the inspections or the specilaty teams running slow can push the whole project back. If your AC ducts aren't in you can't drywall for example.
And this is a very good thing indeed. One thing I really love about the system here is we have detailed code and objective inspections based on it. Creates safe structures that can be planned and priced and immune to bribery.
[1] https://fee.org/articles/new-homes-today-have-twice-the-squa...
What do you mean by this?
Edit to add: this really hasn't changed all that much in the past 100 years. Our house is over 100 years old, and is built very similarly to a modern stick framed house, with the exception of not having insulation (when built), and with the sheathing being planks instead of plywood. Also, the lath&plaster interior walls were a lot more involved in making than modern drywall finishing.
A great example being fire walls and mandatory self-latching doors between garages and living spaces - definitely a logical thing (cars and their gas are flammable, so let's isolate them from the house).
When you look at the data [0], garage fires are 2% of residential fires because cars don't really catch on fire in garages (fires happen in garages, but usually because of intentionally set fires getting out of control)
So now, in the midst of a housing affordability crisis (or a the end of a great run for real estate, depending on your outlook), we have construction workers using special fire-resistant drywall (that must be cut specially and cannot have holes in it), placing solid steel doors, and generally spending a lot of hours and materials building spaces that people don't even live in, when really, adding smoke detectors in garages solves the problem.
[0] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v14i12.pd...
Can’t have apartment buildings reading hands for $100mn when a new one costs $20mn (or have the land sell for $80mn when you only allow 2 stories to be built on it).
[0] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v21i2.pdf
[1] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v21i6.pdf
The root cause is that homes are in part appraised (for mortgage purposes) on hypothetical rebuild costs, so this is a way to make those rebuild costs higher (and justify why you’re paying $500k for something that cost $40k in 1980).
If it weren’t car garages, it would be kitchens.
Cars are a separate problem, as evidenced by the extreme housing prices in some of America’s least car reliant cities (NYC, SF, Boston, DC, etc.).
> By the late 1960s, most new homes had central air conditioning
So the addition of central HVAC likely isn't a big factor, because most new homes in the US already had it 50 years ago.
This is clearly accurate - people are not buying the cheapest housing in the middle of nowhere. Instead, the most money is spent in cities which are already built up and are more difficult to develop further.
My guess is incompetent government is at the root of the problem.
The more you scale red tape, the harder it is to do anything. Look at the California high speed rail.
Corrupt governments make far more money by slowing down a project and using it as a washing machine to extract rents.
Getting large public projects to misspend their funds on red tape, lawyers and other while delaying building is way more profitable than just letting any construction project simply get the job done fast.
The corruption of the government itself and hybrid with larger construction companies very likely incentivized slow and never complete construction.
Why would you want the work done fast when drawing it out and slowing it down is far more profitable, to milk it forever:
That also makes me think that SWE should either break all those red tapes or put up their own. Nowadays they are simply being milked by everyone else who is behind a red tape or a stamp or a certification or something similar.
Ordinary people can argue it. They'll just get argued back at and mired by the other 50% of people who will knee jerk defend the government and the government and the interest groups will laugh all the way to the bank.
Having separately elected house, senate, and president is a primary source of gridlock. Each body can reject a legislative change, while none can effectively create change. The only way laws can be passed in this system is under a very rare set of conditions. When those conditions are present (government shutdown imminent, filibuster eliminated, plurality requirements reduced) you see large omnibus bills pushed through as fast as possible, without time to adequately vet the details.
From an engineering perspective, this would be like pushing a few massive commits every few years rather than making regular bug fixes as needed. As such, our laws are buggy and unmaintained. Unfortunately, this leads many to believe that regulations generally are ineffective rather than the poor implementations of such being ineffective.
Poorly written legislation puts more pressure on the judicial system to litigate between the lines. This is an externality that is extremely expensive for every individual and company to have to deal with.
I advocate for a more parliamentary style system where politicians continued careers are based on their effectiveness and continued approval rather than fixed terms. There are plenty of ways to ensure proper checks and balances without stopping government dead in it's tracks.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mom_%26_Pop_Store#:~:text=...
Not efficiency.
For example, it's easy to sit in an air-conditioned office and say "thou shalt not overload the trucks" but when you actually drag your ass to somewhere you can observe the conditions in which the per-load work is being done it becomes clear that much analysis must be done to figure out if more trucks at 80k is in fact safer than fewer trucks at 120k.
- Vinyl windows compared to old growth wood windows from 100 years ago.
- Vinyl siding compared to cedar shakes.
- Extremely poor wood quality in the lower end 2x4 and 2x6 lumber.
- Sheathing that's essentially cardboard in really cheap builds.
- Flooring is sad today in cheap to moderate homes.
Thing is there were really badly built homes 100 years ago and they just aren't standing any longer. We do get a but of selection bias when we compare old homes. The ones that are still standing were probably built well and of quality materials and have been taken care of.
You can build an awesome home today out of excellent materials like engineered wood, high quality OSB/ply/ZipSystem, and of course whatever you want to spend on flooring, siding, windows, etc.
Of course, there will always be different quality materials available at different prices.
But I would bet the lowest quality house with the lowest quality materials and build quality 100 years ago is much worse than the same today.
> Flooring is sad today in cheap to moderate homes.
I never understood this lament. It has never made a lick of difference to my quality of life if the hard flooring under me was tile/real wood/granite/LVT. Whether or not it is a heated floor is the only thing that has increased the utility I get from the floor.
Otherwise, the LVT I can buy at Costco gives me better utility than some fancy real wood floor. I can not give a shit about it, not spend a dime or second maintaining it, and fix it in 15 minutes. And you can change the whole look for much cheaper, and get it in whatever design/color you want.
I get it, everyone has different tastes and budgets, and values. to me, wood floors feel nice, they look nice, and they sound nice when walked on. Laminate flooring clicks and areas that get walked on just a bit more begin to wear out and begin to lose their printed finish.
> Yeah it's all going to look awful in about 2 years but you can just replace it with more cheap junk.
That is the difference, it does not. The higher quality (and even decent quality) LVT performs very well, and for a long time. Even hotels use it, and in my experience, for normal wear and tear around a house, anything Costco quality and up will not noticeably degrade. I am regularly in many tract built houses from 5 to 7 years ago, and the flooring does not look worn at all.
There probably is super low quality cheap LVT that does not have sufficient longevity, but my point is just because something is composite instead of “real”, or lightweight instead of heavy, does not mean it cannot do the job.
Cedar shakes are a fire hazard, and most people use cement board rather than vinyl.
You can't have everyone use virgin forest wood. And with that said especially in non load bearing walls why use your best wood, it's just a waste. You get far more strength by use of modern fastners and straps.
Until the sun or termite-treating the home degrades the vinyl.
I'll also assume you've never pulled the putty out of the old windows and had to redo them, because it is a lot of work.
- Old windows from 100 years ago were single pane. I grew up with them. My bedroom was freezing cold in the winter and roasting in the summer. And they couldn't seal so they leaked water which rotted out the window frame. Not exactly a great example of old homes lasting longer.
- Cedar shake is a fire hazard. Yeah, we don't build houses like that because a century ago entire towns would light up like a match. It was a regular occurrence.
- New constructions (At least mine was) built with 2x6, so it has a higher R rating and better soundproofing. My energy bills are a fraction of those for an older house.
- New homes are better sealed, and contain air tight vapor barriers. Water can't get in and rot the wood like with old homes. Yes, it's not old growth wood, but it will last longer. Better sealing, air filtration and HVAC will reduce your chance of getting lung cancer from air pollution.
- Modern high end LVP flooring is substantially more robust than hardwood. Dogs can't scratch it, you can drop a cast iron pan on it, it's waterproof. If you want to instead spend money on hardwood there's nothing stopping you, but LVP looks great and is easy to replace.
Yes but you can (and should) weatherstrip them. Fully integrated weather stripping and storm windows will solve the problems you're addressing. Yes still lower R-value but old homes are leaky and putting in modern windows won't save you much in these instances.
> New homes will hold up better a hundred years from now
Most won't. My home is over 100 years old and I'm 100% positive it will outlast 90% of modern construction put up today 100 years from now. I've seen my house gutted in many places and it's pristine. I've seen many 20 year old homes that are full of mold and rot.
> Cedar shake is a fire hazard.
Depends where you live. It looks great and there are millions of homes with it. At least where I live where there is a lot of spacing between homes and we don't have forest fires like out West.
> - New constructions (At least mine was) built with 2x6, so it has a higher R rating and better soundproofing. My energy bills are a fraction of those for an older house.
That's how I'd do a new build. But what does it have to do with sound proofing? I can use 5/8 drywall and use rock-wool or w/e between rooms if I want. It's what I've done when I remove plaster and lath walls. Agree about energy.
> New homes are better sealed, and contain air tight vapor barriers. Water can't get in and rot the wood like with old homes. Yes, it's not old growth wood, but it will last longer. Better sealing, air filtration and HVAC will reduce your chance of getting lung cancer from air pollution.
Might be. Hope the guy installing it cared enough not to install some flashing wrong or didn't forget to seal something. There's so much bad workmanship and a lot of today's better materials demand it's done very precisely. Saying that, a good contractor will inspect and test, but most won't. Old homes are still standing because water was/is kept away with larger eves (ever notice homes after water barriers came out stopped having large eves or any?) and by virtue of not having great insulation. They literally dry themselves out. God, the number of windows I've seen where the vapor barrier is installed/folded wrong or the flashing is wrong; or ZipSystem walls where the taped seals aren't quite right because of a weird angle.
> Better sealing, air filtration and HVAC will reduce your chance of getting lung cancer from air pollution
You can install HVAC with whatever filters you want in an old house. I've done it.
> Modern high end LVP flooring is substantially more robust than hardwood
I think it's appropriate in a basement room but I'd never consider having it in the rest of my home.
An old house in disrepair or what hasn't bene renovated is probably a pretty bad thing that isn't going to last long. But if you've put the money into it and renovated you have a home that's setup for another 100 years and simply has gobs of character and charm you'll never get in a new home. But that's all a value call.
One of the main problems with modern houses is that they go to shit very quickly if they're ever unoccupied for a while. They need heating and cooling (especially the dehumidifying effect of AC) or they'll require extensive repairs and renovation within a year or two. Saw tons of these when looking at houses after the '08 bust—some of the bigger banks let houses sit for a couple years without even trying to sell them, and they inevitably had major visible mold problems, and probably a lot more going on inside the walls.
It's the sealing differences that do it. Modern houses are built to be super-tightly-sealed, but that means they have (at least seasonal) moisture problems without an active HVAC system. Older houses were built to breathe. Modern materials also aren't built or installed with major seasonal temp swings in mind, so you'll get things like badly-cracking drywall seams, buckling trim, buckling floors, fucked-up doorframes, and so on, due to thermal expansion and contraction. Even intricate, tight woodwork in very-old houses was crafted to survive that kind of thing (it had to be).
Not that older houses don't get into trouble without maintenance, but it takes longer and serious problems pretty much require a roof or wall breach. Modern houses will fall apart while the roof and exterior walls are totally fine.
Frankly wooden windows are a personal pet peeve of mine. I have old (many decades) wooden windows in my house, and also new-ish wooden windows and plastic windows that were installed at the same time by the same company during a single renovation by the previous owner, so I can compare either old-new or new-new. If aliens landed and asked me "hey, we need to identify a few idiots among your species, can you give us the most reliable way to find one? Doesn't have to be broadly applicable, but does have to be a sure bet." I'd say "Look for people ordering wooden windows." I just utterly cannot comprehend why anyone would do it.
Wood windows that are clad in aluminum or fiberglass will last 50 years and perform.
Same for siding. Vinyl siding fades from the sun and warps and stops doing its job after a few years and now water is getting in.
There’s a reason only the cheapest construction uses these materials.
The wooden windows of the same age and roughly the same dimensions installed by the same company are all kinds of wonky; they slide poorly because of I guess gradual shape change and wear of the wood, and don't seal well. Also a minor installation defect caused the top of one of the windows to rot. Not a problem with plastic, if there's a defect just fix it, window is good as new. When the window guys told me I need to replace the window I just said while you're at it do you want to rip out all the other ones too an replace with plastic? :)
Vinyl warps more than twice as much as wood and 7 times glass and is very weak to resistance. On an extremely hot or cold day the temperature outside and inside are hugely different. This matters more in regions that see more extreme temperatures throughout the year.
Now it might be you live in a climate where the weather barely changes and it might be your windows are quite small. Smaller windows don’t suffer as much as larger windows like a 36x52. So I’ll grant environment matters. Even which direction they face will matter.
And yes there are different qualities of vinyl windows. But I’d put a lower quality aluminum/fiberglass clad wood window against the best vinyl every day.
And while there’s no accounting for taste, vinyl windows look awful.
Also just googling "vinyl window wrap" or deformation (I assume vinyl is what people typically call cheaper plastic?) I cannot find much of anything. On the other hand if you google for wooden windows or siding moisture/deformation/rot, you find plenty of advice and complaints alike. These physics seem to be reality defying, or they apply in some extreme conditions when comparing with the best possible wooden window...
And I tried to avoid bringing up taste, even though I wanted to, but I guess I have to bite now. That actually gives me additional disdain for wooden-window-buying - yep, they are still popular because a significant fraction of the population still thinks that e.g. craftsman houses with "nooks" and 4-to-7ft sloping ceiling on the 2nd floor are "timeless" and modern functional ones are "soulless boxes". I can only chalk it to misplaced nostalgia... I'm sorry, the Neolithic called, they want their mud huts back :P
I also vosited quite a few apartments where they used thinner material and sound proofing is not exactly great.
We’re building more cheap crap, sure, but also a few rare, well-built buildings.
Here's a page showing some of those mail order catalogs: https://www.thoughtco.com/foursquare-house-plans-catalog-fav...
Looking from the basement up through to the framing, or from the second story down to the flooring, EVERYTHING was built from really thick timber. If you've walked around a modern unfinished project you can see nearly everything wood is made from fast growing wood or particles of wood just glued together. And that holds true even for "high-end" home projects (aka homes sold as high end because they have fancy kitchen appliances, not solid construction).
Very nice wood floors used to be more common, too. Very nice by modern standards, anyway—normal, then. "Very nice" back then would have been ultra-luxe now, like fancy patterns or parquet or something.
Basically, decent wood has become incredibly expensive. Almost all our lumber sucks now, unless you pay crazy-high prices. So things like nice solid-wood doors are impractically expensive unless you salvage them (and then you have the problem of sizing and constructing framing for them, rather than for standard frame-included modern doors)
[EDIT] Oh and the solid doors sure seemed to do a much better job of sound-proofing than modern ones do.
Growing up, basically all trim & baseboards in early-90s-or-earlier houses was solid wood, even in poorer neighborhoods, though by then solid wood front and interior doors were on the way out as features of middle-class houses. These days, you might see solid wood in one or two public rooms as a kind of highlight feature in upper-end McMansions, but almost no-one finishes e.g. extra bedrooms with solid wood baseboards anymore. They used to be standard for the whole house—you almost never saw anything else.
Saying that, those materials (old growth wood) aren't around anymore. I think the industry went through a bad patch from the 1950s through the early 90s where A LOT of construction was bad and we didn't really know what we were doing with the sudden change to engineered materials. We didn't really understand vapor barriers because old homes didn't have them and didn't need them. They dried themselves out because they were so drafty and the old wood wouldn't rot easily. So when we moved to rapidly grown pine and engineered wood and insulation we didn't account for moisture very well and those homes have rot issues. Then we came up with water barriers but didn't account for water vapor and moisture would slowly get trapped over time and begin to rot the structures.
However, today we have an excellent understanding of what make for a quality dwelling. We understand insulation extremely well - where to put it, what type to use where, how to keep it dry), we understand vapor barriers very well and they are made to block liquid water but allow water vapor to pass outside, etc. Windows have excellent R-values today compared to old homes as well.
But yes, you can build cheap homes today that are crap. Code does reel you in a bit but I've heard of code in some areas being so bad it would allow you to sheath a house in cardboard essentially. Insane.
Having some experience in the field, the idea that migrant/undocumented/illegal/etc workers are spoiling the workforce is pretty absurd (as is suggested in a few other comments). There were plenty of terrible workers that I knew to be or suspected to be in that category but the rate that they were bad was no different than anyone else.
"Worker injuries and illnesses are down—from 10.9 incidents per 100 workers in 1972 to 2.7 per 100 in 2020."
https://www.osha.gov/data/commonstats
So... basically high-rises and mobile homes?
It's hard not to see this as a direct result of city councils universally loathing oversized housing blocks.
https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synops...
https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/construction-work...
https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/web-developer/sal...
What is my narrative, exactly? You seem to think you know. I'd love to hear what it is.
*George, instead of just putting up this wall, can you have a ticket and close it for every board you put up?*
Housing, healthcare and education are the three sectors infamously outpacing inflation in the modern economy. In the latter two, workers usually have at least a decent, if not good, career prospect. Construction, meanwhile, is considered a gig for noncitizens who can't be hired in the regular economy — notwithstanding the special subsets like electricians and plumbers.
Part of this likely has to do with the incredible amount of unemployment risk faced by a construction worker; construction volumes may plummet in any region at any time, forcing workers to move hundreds of kilometers away or change jobs entirely. Worse, these fluctuations are often correlated among regions, practically guaranteeing that many builders will be out of a job in downturns. Education and healthcare, at least, suffer almost none of this, despite other stressors.
One mitigation may be a sort of "Keynesian public housing" apparatus: while the populist thing to do is to call for public housing when prices are at their highest, this just puts more strain on a squeezed construction market. But if the state picks up the slack during downturns by specifically building small, affordable-type (if not explicitly subsidized) units, it may maintain employment volumes and (long-run) prevent lower-class pain during housing booms, while the units built will not directly compete with the sort of large & luxurious housing built by the private sector.
This is a nice way to say "NIMBYs have made sure building anything in areas where there are jobs is a herculean task"
https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/...
Either way its a pay drop.
Your expense is someone else's wage + a capitalist's profit margin.
Expenses across the entire economy can only outgrow wages if someone's taking a bigger slice of profit off the top.
When we talk about inflation, we always conflate the two, as if they are the same thing. They are not.
Have you paid attention to the Delta between executive pay and that of general labor over the past 4 decades? This is exactly what has been happening.
Source? Even the famously wrong[1] productivity/wage gap graph from epi.org admits that wage has at least been growing in real terms.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6rtoh4/produc...
Then there is some reference to Mankiw making some assumption about labor supply and demand being infinitely differentiable and continuous, as well as violating "Rule V" in the adjacent sidebar. Meanwhile the newly-constructed local Taco Bell has two employees, a closed dining room, and the drive-in queue starts on the road before the entrance to the parking lot. This is my shocked face, at Mankiw doing something dumb.
Essentially, we should not see 40 year runs of compensation lagging productivity due to some outsized returns to shareholders. That would likely reveal a structural problem in the labor market, at least by my understanding. "This would be a bad thing and our system is perfect so this accusation of badness must be wrong!" OK, Pollyanna. It would be inconvenient if the increased market concentration we see in every industry has given the remaining firms greater pricing power both as buyers of labor and inputs and sellers of products, so let's assume that didn't happen even though this graph clearly shows it.
Truth in advertising for this subreddit, it seems. Psychological commitment to the status quo yields unconvincing arguments plainly contradicted by public experience.
[0] https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synops...
What about waste on MBAs?
-
I have MILLIONS of square feet of FAANG builds under my belt (including healthcare, which is never included in FAANG (but now that one of the hospitals I was designer of was purchased under the Zuck's name...)) should be included.
I've made so many people more rich.
The cake you can't have and eat at the same time is: "I want affordable housing" and "I want my house to be a good investment."
No it is not. Construction costs (material, labor) are sky high even if property costs are as well. Building high-end housing has always been more profitable than otherwise, low-end housing is simply high-end housing 20 or 30 years in the future.
That was maybe true in the past, but todays exurban sheetrock palaces are impossible to be turned into low-income/entry-level housing. It starts with the zoning requirements - are you really going to divide a 2500 sqft McMansion into a duplex without an epic zoning fight? And then there's the transportation/parking issue.
The real problem is that 1200 sqft entry level housing like it was built in the decade after WW2 isn't made any longer but is urgently needed.
It is my understanding that builders are responding to the demand from home buyers, and people that can afford a (starter) home want 2000sf at minimum.
Also the costs of a house dont scale linearly[1]. A small home costs almost as much as a 2000sf home.
[1]https://www.togal.ai/blog/the-average-cost-to-build-a-house-...
Even in cities with little zoning requirements (like Houston, and heck, even Tokyo), you still see McMansions being built rather than low income housing. Low income housing is still old housing from the 80s/70s, and the problem you are referring to (that housing built today is not very convertible) is one for a sadder future.
> The real problem is that 1200 sqft entry level housing like it was built in the decade after WW2 isn't made any longer but is urgently needed.
Having shopped for homes in the last few years, there were plenty of 1200 SQFT options in the places I looked at, they were just $700-$800k rather than $900k-$1.1m. Condos are the more realistic options in that case (I saw one I liked for $700k with a reasonable HOA, my wife wasn't having it, however). She preferred a 900 SQF SFH over that, for reasons I couldn't figure out. All were still considered luxury however since they were almost brand new.
Note that yes, I live in an expensive area, but usually when we talk about affordable housing, we are talking about places where people want to live (vs. say Detroit).
This is the highest in the world. [1, 2]
That's got nothing on San Mateo's $1264 average sale price and $160-350 per square foot in construction costs. [2]
Outside of major metros zoning rules make houses massive, twice as big as in the 70s. While the inflation-adjusted per square foot cost has remained roughly constant since the 70s, the much bigger size makes each house far less affordable.
It really is zoning.
[1] https://cbreemail.com/rv/ff019c9050e5e959ddee96391147a04f828...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234783/average-sales-pr...
Isn't much of the listing price related to land costs (and then of course profit)? To say that construction costs are only 50% of the sold to cost doesn't tell me much, how much did they pay for the land on a SQFT basis?
How long does it take to raise a house?
For 580k I could hire 2 skilled men and 3 undocumented immigrants for a year.
Something isn't right.
Sounds like southern california done fucked themselves with over-regulating that stuff.
A single Ritcher 5.8 quake in Virginia in 2011 caused $300 million in damage and disrupted utilities for days in 12 states. A series of earthquakes in 2019 (6.4, 5.4, and 7.1) in California caused so little damage that it's hard to find a tally. Power was knocked in some cities and restored within hours.
Yes, CA construction is more expensive. But it's also stronger and more resilient than the cheap crap in the county next to you.
This myth of zoning being the only factor is maddening. It's almost like the California folks think their housing market is the only one. Plenty of jurisdictions have loose zoning laws and we still see skyrocketing property values. There's interest rates and inflation to consider.
The cold hard truth is: when a bunch of people all want to live in the same areas, housing is going to be expensive. There's no way around it.
I expect it to drop to below $200k here once they finish rebuilding the thousand or so homes one of our recent wildfires took out.
Sure it wouldn't go for closer to $1.5M?
Outside of major metros, zoning makes houses much bigger, twice as big on average as the 70s.
Stop blaming everything on immigrants, pls. You have your own agency, dont play a victim and get your destiny in your own hands.
Immigrant labor is what keeps this country together, all those back breaking jobs that Americans consider themselves too good for and prefer sitting on the welfare/unemployment/etc - these jobs are done by immigrants while being paid peanuts.
Without immigrants the housing would be even more expensive and unaffordable, as well as all other services like plumbing, electricians, fast food/dining, hospitality, etc
And wages would be commensurately higher. The greatest real income increase in America happened between 1940 and 1970 when there was virtually ZERO immigration.
How many houses did you build, $username?
Touche?
Even if you build a "cheap" single family house that's still going to be more expensive than some equally cheaply built townhomes, or apartments because of stuff like parking requirements and minimum setbacks.
Unfortunately we have bad incentives aligned here versus stated goals.
Manhattan and San Francisco are like Japan and Argentina in economics. They're just not the same market as most places. In Manhattan in particular the value really is the land.
Building a bunch of housing in the middle of nowhere for unhoused people isn't going to work unless you also provide them heating, utilities, transportation, etc. The least expensive way of doing that is to make it dense like a city. At which point you're just building a planned city for indigent people, which is not particularly in the purview of the US on a few axes.
Another contributor to the problem was outside speculators buying residential properties. Specifically Berkshire Hathaway and Zillow come to mind. But I'm sure others were doing it too. It should be illegal.
There are lots of levers that determine if a person can afford a home. income, interest rates, % income that goes towards housing, etc. But its obvious cost of building the home plays a factor.
Go compare the costs of identical pieces of plywood from the Home Depot on West 23rd Street in Manhattan and the Home Depot in Jersey City, directly across the river.
Manhattan: $76; Jersey City: $37
Is that the cost of shipping a piece of plywood an additional 3-10 miles? Is it taxes?
It's the rent.
Such knowledge can also be transmitted from one subculture to another, with varying degrees of success. In order to bring in new people, one must either bring in a few beginners into a majority competent population, or have one subculture highly motivated to absorb and replicate the success of another.
This is well covered in Migrations And Cultures: A World View by Thomas Sowell.
Over time, these folks become skilled, and generally end up running crews. It's very commonplace to find the more experience undocumented workers being the ones running small subcontract crews under the table with day labor, because they speak fluent Spanish.
I'm interested where the blind-eyes are built in.
The blind eyes are built in at every single layer. I mean, it only requires a master's license to pull a permit, but master's in trades almost are never hands on, it's all journeymen, apprentices, or day labor. You as a general contractor sub out a master and his crew, and as long as the permitting happens in a timely manner and the inspection passes, you really don't care about anything else. The city doesn't care, because the master is on-site for inspection, so as long as inspection passes, they're not going down the line and asking everyone for ID or anything.
There's SO MANY blind eyes, at every layer. It's pretty much a "don't ask, don't tell" policy because if we actually started enforcing the law, nothing would get done. There are significant industries in the US that are almost entirely reliant on day labor / undocumented immigrants, construction is one of them.
Given that, very large successful organizations whose competitive edge is not software may still have terrifyingly low software production efficiencies.
> and each crew has mostly new/unskilled folks with a few skilled folks to guide them and keep them on track.
In some cases the crew changes from day-to-day so any context a work has on a particular job isn't necessarily carried over form day-to-day. The day laborers are highly dependent on the crew chief for direction.
> It's very commonplace to find the more experience undocumented workers being the ones running small subcontract crews under the table with day labor, because they speak fluent Spanish.
This too introduces inefficiencies if that crew chief isn't present, late, or leaves the site for any reason. And often the crew chief will instruct works to do the wrong thing, or lacks the knowledge (e.g. electrical) to challenge something.
I hope you understand, because of the implications.
Undocumented workers are sometimes paid in cash.
"Southern California" was/is a very, very big area. I grew up southeast of downtown.
Can you share where/when you grew up? Just curious.
As far as 'replacement': I can't dismiss such opinions out of hand, but for another anecdote: two of my great grandparents, who came from Germany in the late 19th century, lived in the US for many decades and never learned English that well.
Their children, my dad's father, of course spoke English fluently.
I think you're confusing the term "undocumented" or "undocumented worker" with the underlying concept that's referenced by the terms. The concept has long been in in the public spotlight using different terms ("illegal" or "illegal alien").
Here's some statements from Gerald Ford on the same concept, using the old lingo: https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0110/1181...
Border crossings are at a 20 year high, but the problem is that border controls are too tight? That seems odd.
Considering they pay income taxes, sales taxes, social security/medicaid, and don't make much use of US resources, it seems to me that you would want border crossings to increase dramatically, as long as they're accompanied by a corresponding crossing back home at the end of the day.
...which is exactly how it was, 20ish years ago, before 9/11.
I'm in favor of open borders mostly on humanitarian grounds, and I offer our lower wage laborers as offerings on the pillar of sacrifice for that.
Just look at what has happened to Puerto Rico. Everyone who can, leaves. What's left is grim. Easy access to the USA is a great deal for the minority who get out, but for most Puerto Ricans, it's hard to imagine that they're better off as a result.
> I'm in favor of open borders mostly on humanitarian grounds, and I offer our lower wage laborers as offerings on the pillar of sacrifice for that.
Half the country agrees with you, but they'd never admit it.
Either way, the idea that "tight border controls" are a contributing factor to the large number of illegal immigrants in the united states is entirely divorced from reality.
They wouldn't be illegal immigrants if we didn't have "tight border controls" by definition, so it feels related and not "divorced from reality"...
We lived through this, basically all of American history up until 9/11, where the Mexican border was "loose"(er, the US committed some pretty fucked up atrocities using that border a few times in its history); it seems to me that if we returned to that level of interaction with Mexico, the vast majority of concerns raised by anti-immigration folks would be quelled.
I guess pretending the issue is just some kind of Fox News conspiracy theory is easier than actually understanding it?
People use the language of "invasion" for a reason. In Texas, non-hispanic whites make up ~30% of births[0], but accounted for only 5% of the population growth[1].
You'll write that off as "muh replacement conspiracy", of course--I can tell that you've been well programmed!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Texas [1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/12/texas-2020-census/
I think it'd be awesome if we all had to learn Spanish in some parts of the US. What a boon for cultural diversity that would be! The exchange of ideas would be so good for our shared society.
How did the US southern border work in your memories? Would you be surprised to learn it was almost unrecognizable compared to what it is now?
This is from 43 years ago.
I am confused by this assertion. If they are undocumented, wouldn't they be excluded in the stats? And if they aren't included in the stats, shouldn't we expect an artificial increase in worker productivity? If there is a 4:1 undocumented to documented ratio, then that 1 documented person will get "credit" for the work of 5 people! Even if 4 of those people are relatively unskilled, that's still a big boost.
My initial thought about this is that productivity declines because workers wait around a lot, and they wait around because of ballooning administrative overhead. This would also be consistent with what we know about state of the medical industry and academia during the same time period.
If I was to steelman the idea, though; I would guess that removing incentives in the form of higher pay will lower the contributions of everyone involved?
If you think it means the worker is on the books, but is not a citizen, then you get to your question. It should be roughly the same.
If you think it means that the worker was off the books, regardless of citizenship, then you arrive at the other.
My consideration is if I am a cleaner and get my child to help out on a few jobs, my child will not be a documented worker and it will be a transparent boost to my productivity. Indeed, many subcontractors and migrant workers will use family as a cheap way to boost productivity so that they can take more jobs.
I grant that construction may land on the other interpretation. There are usually more rules for that kind of work. (Though, in rural areas? Not sure.)
It's just shorthand for "person who has immigrated illegally" anyway, arguing over these words is a distraction. You have any solutions?
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/ann...
The current legal immigration levels are way too low, hence people breaking the law trying to establish roots in the country (or fleeing persecution elsewhere). We used to call people foreign-born instead of illegal, and not care about their immigration status at all. Oh, wait - that's when the Europeans were immigrating: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/ann...
If many many people are breaking a law (i.e. jaywalking), one should consider whether the law is actually reasonable in the first place.
Thieves, murders, fraudsters, etc
Illegal immigrant doesn't seem especially derogatory for someone who illegally immigrated.
I think it would be better to focus on the fact their felony crime rate is far below the native population than arguing over a pretty tame word used to describe them.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=illegal+immigr...
Look at the amount of legal immigration:
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/ann...
There have been plenty of people who have been in this country without appropriate paperwork historically - they were never called illegals (see above). In fact even now people make differentiations between "visa overstayers" and people who snuck across the border, even though both are technically illegal aliens.
I think you don't have to go far to see the implications.
1. you seem to be implying that during periods of "white" immigration, americans were fine but the public changed their tune when it became south american/asian. However, irish/italian immigrants also received pushback. Specifically, irish were hated because they were catholic, and itlians weren't considered white back then.
2. You can also flip this around to say that as a society, we've gotten more accurate with our wording. Rather than lumping all immigrants (legal and illegal) into one bucket, we take care to point out that we're only against the illegal type of immigration. That seems like a win to me.
I’m not sure if something similar happens in construction, but I’ve heard that in the landscaping business a supervisor will just pull up to a Home Depot with a pickup truck, and there’ll be a bunch of people waiting around, and they’ll go “Who wants $X for Y hours?” And then 4 or 5 guys get in the back of the truck and they head to the work site.
In a situation like that, you’re probably keeping track of how many people you employ each day so you can figure out how many you need for future projects, but you’re not gonna be able to produce a list of social security numbers if someone asked.
or, as usually happens, being "documented" have become more and more difficult, so the number of undocumented workers has gone up as a consequence.
also, immigrants are replacing those workers who are not willing to do the job most of the time.
it's not unusual everywhere you go in the west to witness that a large portion of construction workers are immigrants.
Here in Italy it's mostly people from Romania, North Africa and other eastern European Countries.
Virtually no Italian wants to be a mason anymore.
They rather prefer to work for app-based tech companies (Glovo and such).
And don't underestimate bureaucracy.
Most likely explanation is just that we have been burdened with infinite amount regulatory busy work.
> There are several plausible channels for labor measurement difficulties in construction, including a higher than average frequency of employees working irregular hours, contractor labor that may be misclassified by survey respondents, and, especially in more recent decades, labor supplied by undocumented workers.
It then goes on to talk about that in more detail, but I won't copy that in because every time I do, someone goes on with "but what about X?" where X is also in the very next paragraph.
Nothing wrong with coming up with the hypothesis, honestly. But the extraordinary number of responses to your comment that speculate on something that one can immediately find are just so typical of HN comments.
I sometimes see that in software engineering where some engineer will tell me about some library we're using that we have access to source code for: "yeah, I looked at the docs and it's not clear if it does A or B". But...the source code is right there. Why not just use that? At least then if the library is doing it wrong you'll know for sure.
You can see this literally everywhere. Unless you are going to pay 200K+ you will have difficulties hiring reasonably intelligent, motivated, conscientious workers.
This also has to do with overall rise in cost of good education and decreasing quality of education in public schools across the board.
In contrast, a concrete milestone service contract with re-bid sections of the contract that miss their milestones can create a competitive construction landscape.
Things I am omitting. Red tape slowing down construction.
Changing the incentive structure can probably help boost efficiency on the provider side.
Also, does this paper take into account increased regulations? Both the time spent complying with new building codes as well as the time spent waiting for inspectors?
I don't see the point you're making. Houses are twice as big, so they require twice the amount of finishing work. If productivity was growing or staying the same, you shouldn't get less productivity as a result of that.
See also "Chinese ghost towns": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...
Currently looking to raise a sunken living room due to flood risk. I have a room that is connected to the sunken living room that is raised currently via a wooded frame. The dry wall is open so its clearly visible. There is clearly open space under the floor lift. Guy gives me a quote, I was very clear when I met him that I needed under the side room filled as well and that the goal was to prevent water seeping in due to the floor being lower than ground level. I have him come out again because I am ready to hire him but want one more walk through. I ask what the risk or complication is pouring concrete under the raised side room and the existing floor lift system. He acts surprised and says it was not part of the quote. I ask the complexity of pouring the concrete behind the fireplace because there is a gap behind it and the wall. He acts surprised and says its not included. All of this was clearly visible when he came out the first time and the stated goal was to raise the floor to prevent water seepage due to height discrepancy inside and outside. He says he would have to demo the giant fireplace...
My prior experience I had a contractor that I was working with who kept telling me that the crew was at the house working and I had to call and tell him over and over that no one was there. For months...
They do this nonsense every single time, they submit a BS quote just to get the job figuring once they are in they can just charge whatever and figure it out. I have yet to meet an honest or competent contractor.
If I ask a contractor how to prevent water seeping into my sunken living room and surrounding areas, and he tells me filling it with concrete is the best approach and provides a quote to do so I expect that he has taken all existing facts into consideration.
That seems to be rather more related to the distribution of capital than work output. If the construction industry were getting more efficient, you'd actually expect its margins to be declining, right? I don't think this is measuring what people want it to measure.
The "mistake" in the linked article is assuming all construction work is equal and unchanging over those decades where CLEARLY there have been infinite real estate fads over the decades. There's just no way replacing countertops with granite can generate as much financial productivity as sewer work, and the fraction of the market spend on low-profit countertops is vastly higher now.
Now working as an analyst it is important each time to have a ground knowledge and business expert to avoid obvious measurement biases. Especially when comparing different eras.
I had a project that was delayed by over a year during Covid because the city approved incorrect plans, came back and requested revisions, and then lost the physical plans (without us knowing until we checked in asking what the status was). This was almost a year delay and added cost overruns, etc. It also made the required rent higher to recoup those costs and try to be profitable (that deal will lose money). Remember, there's someone at the city working 9-5pm clocking in and out.. they are not impacted if the project is denied, delayed, etc... while the developer is incurring cost of capital of 7-10%.
Another example of bureaucracy: you have to go through a particular order of inspections when developing property. One of them includes elevator inspections. You have to have power before that, so that's another set of inspections.
IIRC, during Covid there were only something like half a dozen elevator inspections for the entire state of CA. The source below says there was 15 in 2019. If your elevator inspection is 2 months late... guess what, your project is going to be late.
https://laist.com/news/elevator-inspections-los-angeles
Remember the modular startup Katerra that gobbled money from Softbank? I knew a developer who did one of their projects. He said Katerra would deliver the units on time, but the city's permitting process was so broken that they couldn't actually install or inspect these units. So they would have to find lots to store the material (+costs & +issues). Katerra's "value-add" was the speed of delivery would cut costs down, but in reality this was hard to achieve "on-site".
If, all along, you could have rented it out for more money ... why were you planning to rent it out for less money? I get that you wouldn't have to, but it appears that the "market rate rent" was higher than you initially anticipated.
As a corollary, assuming that you had initially planned on the highest rent that the market would bear...it seems that after a year of unexpected delays you'd most likely still choose to finish the project even at a loss. This is because all the loss would have already been sunk cost that you can't change anymore, and at the "original maximum rent the market would bear" you'd still make your IRR/ROI on the marginal future investment of finishing the construction.
So, assuming you couldn't raise the rent, you'd lose money either way, but you'd lose less money by finishing the construction vs. losing more money by abandoning the project entirely.
"It also made the required rent higher to recoup those costs and try to be profitable (that deal will lose money)."
required rent =/= planned rent =/= actual rent
Higher costs than expected can easily cause a project that would be profitable to be a loss.
However, as sibling comments to yours mentioned, there are flaws to this perspective:
- You can make the apartments 'better' and charge a premium on top of whatever the better appliances cost. So if that raises operating costs by $100/unit month, raise rent by $200/unit month.
- Real life doesn't always map perfectly onto microeconomic theory. In particular, discovering the profit-maximising price is tricky. However, I would still argue that the landlord would rationally still pick whatever they would assume the profit-maximising price would be.
- Since everyone else is probably facing delays and cost overruns, probably not as much construction is getting done as might have been assumed, therefore the landlord faces less competition than anticipated and can raise rent higher than expected without losing too many prospective tenants.
>If, all along, you could have rented it out for more money ... why were you planning to rent it out for less money?
... the original post never said they would rent it out for less money. Nor did it say they would rent it out for more money. They only said the rent required to break even went up.
This is clear in the original post, which says they could not achieve this higher rent required to break even.
> This was almost a year delay and added cost overruns, etc. It also made the required rent higher to recoup those costs and try to be profitable (that deal will lose money).
is the 'try to be profitable' that implies they did end up raising rent higher than otherwise planned, but you are right that this isn't necessarily true.
If you can hit the same 10% return on 20% lower revenue... you can attract more capital and execute with a better measure of risk. My point was that the I of ROI increased substantially and we needed to try to hit the rate R of ROI.
Of course the pay's shit, you're subject to all kinds of quality-of-work-life destroying whims of politicians at the top, the bureaucracy is as abusive and ineffective as stereotypes about bureaucracies would lead one to expect, and if you have an effective union shielding you from some of that, about half the politicians are constantly trying to weaken or eliminate that, plus trying to mess with your pension which is practically the only attractive thing about those jobs... so, no fucking wonder, really. Recent wage inflation has made all this stuff worse by making unresponsive government pay scales far less attractive than market-driven wages elsewhere, so systems and offices that were teetering before are now falling over.
Shouldn't be a mystery.
In many states and localities a massive portion of spending goes to pensions.
>Recent wage inflation has made all this stuff worse by making unresponsive government pay scales far less attractive than market-driven wages elsewhere, so systems and offices that were teetering before are now falling over.
These two are related. The pensions work for government workers because politicians get to advertise low taxes, voters get to enjoy lower taxes and punt the costs to future generations, and union bosses who are older, get to cash out before shit hits the fan (almost all governments have tiers of pensions, where older workers have more benefits than younger will ever have).
The solution is to get rid of ALL deferred compensation. Government pays employees the same as private does. No more muddying the waters with understated liability numbers and underfunding for deferred compensation. Then government can match wages in real time.
I couldn't believe this is true, so I actually read the article. Turns out, it's not true. It's multiple orders of magnitude off.
There were 15 inspectors for the city (not county) of LA when this article was written:
"In order to be up to code, each of the 20,974 elevators in the city of Los Angeles needs to be checked once a year.
But there are only 15 inspectors to do it."
Roughly half of the elevators were past due, which means they were inspecting 10k+ elevators per year just in the city of LA, let alone the entire state.
The two are interrelated. There'd be a lot less opportunity for error if building codes were cut in half. For example where I live there is a fair bit oil heating & therefore underground oil tanks. Building code requires that upon switching to something else, like natural gas, the submitted plans must include information about the planned removal or decommissioning of the tank.
This wasn't always a requirement, but now that it is that means someone has to check the plans to make sure that requirement is met. So, bureaucracy and building codes go hand in hand.
Of course in the case of residential oil tanks remaining in the ground, or not being properly decommissioned, there it can cause a variety of problems. Water contamination for example, a major concern for abandoned tanks in any area where residential well water is common. (and for other reasons)
I'm not arguing that bureaucracy as it exists is at all a model of efficiency, but you can't examine or solve that problem without understanding how we got there.
I could see any of these as being a way to describe a deal that “loses money.”
Even if it is recapped, the deal will require a significant cash-in refinance. If the business plan is saved and it takes you another 4 years to exit at a better number, that 4-yr now 8-yr deal results in say a low single digit IRR. Sponsor makes no money and the project sucks up even more resources & labor. But depends if your capital partner is willing to ride it out and if you can even recap where the numbers work
Sorry to hear about it, the CRE guys I know are all pretty damned smart and incredibly hard working and it’s nonetheless a tough business for them. Though if one has the chops, not a bad “get rich slowly” scheme, lol.