
House Costs Just $20k-But It’s Nicer Than Yours - weef
https://www.fastcompany.com/3056129/this-house-costs-just-20000-but-its-nicer-than-yours
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olliej
The bulk of a "house" price in populated areas is the cost of the _land_.

That's why rundown, dilapidated, etc "homes" in the Bay Area are so expensive.
You're paying for the land. So a $20k home is still going to cost you a stupid
amount.

If you go out to the middle of nowhere, you can get huge, and amazing, homes
for less that $100k (because no one wants to live there).

~~~
kevindong
> If you go out to the middle of nowhere, you can get huge, and amazing, homes
> for less that $100k (because no one wants to live there).

In flyover country, the land is pretty close to free and typically you can buy
the house at a discount to what it would cost to rebuild the same structure.

~~~
rdtwo
Which is interesting because you can’t build a new house for that price in
most urban areas even if land and permits were free. The costs of an ADU are
typically in the 150-200k range and once you add permits and sewer it’s easily
200+

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jdhn
What I want to know is how we can incorporate some of the innovations that
they used (such as cantilvers for the foundation) into traditionally built
houses. Also, how we tweak building codes to allow for these new innovations
so that the houses pass inspection without having to have days long classes to
explain to inspectors that yes, they really are safe?

~~~
wahern
I don't think the cantilevers are innovations. Here's a description and
explanation of cantilevered footings from a 1924 book:
[https://www.google.com/books/edition/Reinforced_Concrete_and...](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Reinforced_Concrete_and_Masonry_Structur/EjNLAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Cantilever+Footings&pg=PA192)

I'm guessing the issue here isn't that these techniques are innovative, it's
that they've done their homework and the tolerances are tighter. If you
construct them properly, they're more than sufficient. Emphasis on _if_. An
inspector can't just walk in and eyeball something using his 30 years of
experience to judge adequacy.[1] _That 's_ the problem--the classic tradeoff
between administrative efficiency vs accuracy.

[1] The irony is that an inspector circa 1950 probably would have been able to
do that.

~~~
m0llusk
The interesting problem they solved is building with cantilevers efficiently
in the context of a small home. Historically cantilevers were considered
exotic and expensive with Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water being one of the
few well known examples of residences using cantilevers.

~~~
wahern
Those are a different kind of structural concrete cantilever. Look at the
pictures of the various houses this group has built. What they all have in
common is that: 1) they sit atop tall concrete or block columns on 2) uneven
terrain and 3) otherwise use straight-forward, typical wooden beams and joists
for the flooring (yes, they might cantilever some, but that's neither new nor
uncommon).

I'm no architect, but I think the cost savings as compared to modern
techniques (but very much, if not exactly, like older techniques) is the
avoidance of 1) clearing and leveling the land and 2) pouring a huge
reinforced concrete slab.

Before the advent of hydraulic bulldozers it was just too cost prohibitive to
clear land and pour big slabs for mass-scale housing. Instead, you would pour
(or build) some small footings, and then lay some beams on the footings,
possibly elevated by some short columns (or simply stones or concrete blocks).
But unlike what would be common for cheap housing 50-100 years ago, building
codes won't allow you to build a whole house on simple footings like that
because of the potential for ground instability exacerbated by uneven weight
distribution and uneven weight-bearing capacity of the soil under each
footing.

But what you can do, apparently, is use "cantilevered" footings tied to a
small number of deep, robust, secure pads. Those pads are what guarantee the
house won't move, and all you need are some shovels and a pick-up truck, and
you don't even need to level any land. You then "cantilever" some simple
concrete footings off those pads using reinforced concrete beams (which I bet
are probably flush with the ground and look like a gratuitous use of
concrete). I'd bet money that such cantilevered footings are what are
underneath many or most of those columns you see under those houses, the rest
of the columns sitting directly atop the pads.

~~~
megameter
This sounds approximately right, though I would love to see a real explanation
from the creators.

It signals another example of changing practices in this century due to new
ideas around materials accompanied by precision machine crafting. Cross-
laminated timber, for example, is very hyped now since it can withstand huge
loads and charring while still being a cheap and familiar "wood, glue,
preservatives and pressure" composite, capable of being shaped into panels,
arches and doorframes out of the factory with a CNC machine for reduced build
times. Yesterday I saw a video of a CLT passive house built in Australia: The
build, while not aiming for cost, was made simpler in design by having the
load bearing parts of the structure also handle most of the insulation, and it
put up impressive test numbers.

~~~
wahern
Maybe I'm overthinking it and/or maybe the article is using an idiosyncratic
meaning of "foundation". The article says "The foundation of the Tiny House
uses cantilevers, seesaw-like joists that help save wood and concrete and
actually make the house stronger than a typical foundation would." Which might
be a fancy description for basic techniques[1] used to build countless old
houses in Alabama and elsewhere, some of which I got to crawl under or around
when working summers with my Dad, who did remodeling and other contractor work
in Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana. Not all those houses had footings directly
underneath the permitter; the joists and walls might cantilever, while the
footings were still basic and not tied together like with the cantilevered
footing system. Although the cantilevers might be more extreme in these new
designs.

Unfortunately, I can't find any technical material on the school's website.
Here's the page for the various homes:
[http://ruralstudio.org/project_tags/20k/](http://ruralstudio.org/project_tags/20k/).
Notably, some of them do seem to use modern concrete slab foundations, and at
least one of the pictures shows a bulldozer in the background. Looks like they
have a bunch of different designs.

[1] Basically just like people build decks today. Of course, lots of decks are
dangerous, shifting and collapsing, precisely because the techniques aren't
very forgiving of mistakes or poor siting.

EDIT: Here's a blog post with a better description, which seems to be
discussing the same house(s) depicted in the Fast Company article: "Siteworks
are a major cost item and cantilevering the floor joists past the foundation
piles reduces the area of siteworks. ... Cantilevered floor girders act more
efficiently as beams, making smaller and less expensive timber sections
sufficient. Floor joists are cantilevered from the girders for the same
reason." [https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2016/08/31/architecture-
misf...](https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2016/08/31/architecture-
misfits-24-rural-studio/) So it seems the usage of "foundation" in the other
article was misleading. And these definitely aren't new techniques, not if you
count the stock of 50-plus-year-old homes built in poor, rural America (i.e.
not simply the stereotypical New England farm house). So presumably what's
innovative is that the students have done the proper analysis and testing to
refine them, ensuring they behave as intended as well as meeting modern
standards of safety and reliability.

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kevindong
I'm curious about why they decided to design a one bedroom home. In my midwest
hometown of ~10,000 people (which was also the biggest town for ~12 miles in
any direction), one bedroom homes essentially don't exist (I checked Zillow
and there's exactly 4 listed as for sale or recently sold).

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hindsightbias
Rural Studio typically does projects scaled to elderly, disabled and poor who
would otherwise be renting mobile homes. The goal is to make them home owners
with a durable asset.

Also the scale of the projects allow it to serve as a thesis project for
Architecture students.

~~~
bayouborne
It's ironic that it's situated in Serenbe, an exclusive $300k-$1M+ 'new urban
community' that, despite its efforts to appear otherwise, is designed for
anyone other than the common person.

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taitems
What a needlessly abrasive headline.

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Jsharm
Why does a mortgage cost the bank $2300?

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curryst
I'm guessing those are administrative costs related to servicing the loan.
Doing due diligence on whether you're credit worthy, filing the paperwork,
maybe some form of insurance.

$2,300 does still seem high for that, though. I would love to see that broken
down.

