There’s something similar to Amdahl's law at work here. A lot of house building isn’t amenable to mass manufacture, so mass manufacturing the parts that are doesn’t speed up the overall process that much. Maybe it’s different in the Midwest, but in Maryland virtually every house has a basement. Our neighbor has a modular home (a nice one with two stories and three bedrooms—looks just like a stick built house) and they wanted a basement too. Grading the plot, digging out the basement, and dealing with drainage and whatnot takes a lot of time and skilled labor. The actual framing and finishing proceeds surprisingly quickly in comparison. Then, electrical, plumbing, insulation, HVAC, and other skilled trades take forever and cost a fortune. So speeding up and reducing the cost of throwing the structure together doesn’t revolutionize the pricing.
Where I live, the biggest costs of building a single family home are: 1. Land, 2. Permits and paperwork, 3. Everything else. You’ve spent the majority of your budget before a single shovel gets put into the ground. Seems like these would also be good things to start with when addressing the price to build a home.
Permits and paperwork are probably mostly a time and restrictions on what and where you can build cost rather than a direct monetary cost. But certainly indirectly have a lot of influence on where and how you can build.
permits aren't too expensive that's true but the surveyors and engineers are.
the waiting can be very expensive for individuals as they have to live somewhere. for developers it's more about the indirect cost of having a lot of capital tied up during that time.
then there's environmental assessments, some places have to deal with archaeological assessments too. developers need to pay people to deal with the permitting processes. lawyers are often involved throughout as well.
architects and engineers need to be involved, often repeatedly, if you're modifying an off-the-shelf design too.
as with buying a house, there are a lot of expenses that very few people consider, and are hard to predict even if they do.
That would have to be calculated as an opportunity cost, That can be fudged to anything. Many real estate development are only successful because the property was bought from the original bankrupt developer.
The article is about a single family home. And pretty much all the costs mentioned in another comment (and maybe more) apply to a manufactured home as well.
You want the basement floor to be below the frost line, so I'd imagine going north of Maryland (or anywhere with colder winters) would encourage basements at least as deep.
There are new-ish monolithic pour techniques that enable slab foundations in frost prone areas. In particular, the usage of rigid XPS insulation in the soil and maintaining a minimum temp in the structure allow more efficient foundation construction.
I grew up with a basement (in MD) and have one now (in MA). Basements seem so incredibly practical and useful that if I could have one, I’d choose one for sure.
Not disagreeing (have a finished basement myself), but what's in question here is affordability and efficiency.
In that context, a monolithic slab has a lot of benefits including reduced material that has to be removed, reduced site prep, reduced construction time, reduced material costs, reduced labor costs, and reduced complexity.
If the goal is to make more housing, more accessible economically, then it makes sense in that context.
It depends somewhat on how dry they are. Mine isn't very. But there's generally a fair bit of utility infrastructure that has to go somewhere. And even if it's not a finished basement it provides a lot of storage which is really useful if you don't have an attic.
Much of the US South doesn’t have basements. Maryland is an outlier for climate (colder winters) and demographic (wealthier) reasons.
(Separately, this is one of the great reasons to prefer multi-family constructions, and why US building trends have slowly realigned towards them: you only have to build one basement and electrical/HVAC system for 20 families.)
What style of multifamily are you referring to here? Every townhome and apartment style I’ve ever lived in has discrete electrical, plumbing, and HVAC.
I’ve only rarely seen condo styles with shared systems and those typically come with unappealing expensive management fees, insurance, and shared expense to the tune 500+ per month on top of the price for the unit itself. My father used to mantain the infrastructure for such a development and those were prices circa 2000 or so.
I’ve seen modern townhomes and apartments in Maryland with shared electrical and HVAC; not sure about plumbing. I’ve also seen constructions in North Carolina with shared electrical and plumbing, although each unit had its own HVAC.
(I don’t have a sense of expense for any of these things, but I assume they wouldn’t build them this way if there wasn’t some economic envelope that they fit into.)
> Much of the US South doesn’t have basements. Maryland is an outlier for climate (colder winters) and demographic (wealthier) reasons.
The Midwest, Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and most of the West have as cold or colder winters than Maryland. Indeed, it's largely only the Pacific coast and South/Southwest that don't have colder winters. Hard to call Maryland an outlier when like half the country lives in places that get that cold or colder!
Maryland and Kansas overlap in terms of temperature overall. Wichita Kansas is on average 5 degrees warmer in January than Frendsville MD, High 40f vs 36f vs low 25 vs 20. Kansas City in the northern bit of Kansas and only goes down to 39° / 21°.
So there’s not that much of the US that’s actually colder than MD.
> A lot of house building isn’t amenable to mass manufacture
That's because we keep making houses as these boutique hand crafted items. If we can't mass manufacture basements, then don't make the basement part which we can't mass manufacture. We're able to mass manufacturer cars, which are devilishly complex machines. Houses are simpler, but bigger. We could mass manufacture houses if the right incentives were put in place.
Hilariously, once self driving car technology lets us have self driving RVs, we'll be in a place where we are mass manufacturing homes.
There are absolutely companies that mass manufacture houses and put them on concrete pads. And there's some market for that. But, as other comments mention, custom building costs for that class/size of house are not really the major cost issue in the scheme of things.
When the Lustron came out, The Home Depot was not yet even a startup, and there had never been anything like that. Consumers had never had a fraction of the convenient access to the building materials that's now been expected for decades. And key materials realistically had been mass-produced for a number of decades earlier, before there were considerations to appeal to retail DIY consumers.
When the cost of labor skyrocketed in the 1970's, tens of millions of Americans were rapidly excluded from the new home market for their foreseeable future. Even though they had been on the verge of participating, on the reliable path that had been established for so many millions that had come before, it just floated further out-of-reach. The ground was fertile for The Home Depot to sprout and grow.
If you watch a subdivision of raw land be built into a neighborhood using the typical "ASAP at all costs, but cheap"[0] approach, this is so mature that specialized tools, materials, and workflows have been honed to drastically minimize the hours that actual skilled workers are on each home. They really have been working like an assembly line for quite some time.
So mass production had always been part of the equation, Lustron had a superior technology product that could compete on costs but didn't turn out to be cheaper though. To some extent there might have been an underlying dependency on a hail mary for it to end up so cheap they flew off the shelf. There were a number of reasons that didn't happen, obviously a bonanza is the exception not the rule, but without 20/20 hindsight at the time it's easy for anyone to overlook something that can be pointed to later.
The real problem for them was the (large) capitalist market that they were trying to operate in, when they were grossly under-capitalized for the competition, on terms that were beyond their ability to significantly influence toward overall advantage.
They would have probably been better off circling the wagons and not trying to make waves in a huge established market. Firmly occupying their unique adjacent niche sustainably, and then venturing forward from there in ways that previous progress will not be lost if goals are not fully met.
[0] All costs to be borne by the buyer, so pull out all the stops.
What are the options for a foundation? Why can't you just put posts into the ground? Or on the ground and adjust? Like a mobile home but without the wheels.
Ground isn’t stable. A house by contrast weighs 100,000-200,000 pounds. The dirt under the house will not only settle under the weight, but will continually shift due to surface and underground water movement. To prevent that, you need grading to make the land flat and direct water away from the house. You need to tamp down the soil so it doesn’t compress. You need drainage layers to allow water to percolate downwards (instead of saturating the dirt right under the house). You need layers to keep plants from growing straight through the middle of the floor.
Even a simple concrete pad will crack and heave in a few years without a proper foundation. We recently had a 8x30 paver patio/driveway built in front of our house. It took a team of 4-5 guys more than a week just to dig out the foundation, lay gravel drainage layers and landscape sheeting. Actually putting down the pavers took just a couple of days. And that’s for a patio that’s supporting at most 10,000 pounds of cars, not 200,000 pounds of house.
One amazing feature of Lustron houses is that their enameled exterior has aged amazingly well. I live near several of them, and all of them, without exception, appear to have survived 7 decades in a harsh northern climate. The enamel appears to be colorfast, does not chip or stain, and the material must be nearly indestructible. It isn't obvious from the photos, but the roofs are also enameled, and I believe all the houses near me still have the original roofs. I'm guessing the individual panels are basically impossible to replace or repair. They have survived well in a very tough environment.
I don't know if it's mentioned in the article, but is living in these particularly noisy in rain/wind? How is sound transmission in general within them?
Manufactured homes that aren't "mobile homes" do exist, mostly in lower cost non-dense US areas where land can be relatively cheap. The cost of building a small single family house in an arbitrary location isn't really the main driver of pricing in the most in-demand areas.
IME all prefabricated homes I've seen so far are of VERY dirty-cheap quality, not at all easy to repair, not at all accessible (in terms of owner ability to change wiring, piping, ...), not durable, not really cheap given the rest.
Beside that homes are not for single individuals, but for families and families are not that standard... So well, they are a hard task for mass manufacturing and those who have tried mass manufacturing them have designed almost only crap.
IME:
- first choose wood :: it's easier to rework/extend/modify by the owner, if someone want to buy a cheap home ALSO plan to do plenty of stuff alone to lower the final price;
- second carefully designs flexibility :: let's say just electricity, consider a modern "start-like" distribution BUT every room just get a derivation box with all relevant power circuits and anything depart from it, it's not super cheap, but in gross terms it does not count much and allow much flexibility, similarly design easy access to plumbery;
- third do not assume furniture :: just design the home, offering some options but allow the owner to choose all the rest;
- fourth take easy repair into account :: let's say just windows, if they are mounted with some factory-assembled strange setups are a nightmare to substitute thereafter, mount them in ways they can be unmounted with very little effort, use as much as possible "common", "standard" components and so on.
PERHAPS at that point you get some meaningful results.
Cost of construction is not the problem with housing policy. In point of fact housing has been getting cheaper to build steadily over the decades. An all-steel (!!) home just intuitively seems ridiculous to launch into a market trying to compete with OSB and drywall.
We need places to put the homes and rules that allow for denser homes. We're doing just fine on "cheap homes".
And those low population areas carry low paying jobs, which are proportional to high population areas. Yes, we have a housing problem. For the average person on an average local income, a house is unaffordable. If you look back at the 70s, 80s, and 90s, houses cost many times more (before and after adjustment for local average income) now, regardless of where you look.
The key measure to compare everything is disposable income rather than inflation-adjusted this or that.
Disposable income of the 70s was a tiny fraction, many orders of magnitude smaller than the disposable income of 2024.
In addition, houses in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s are not comparable to houses today. Modern houses and cars should cost a lot more because they offer a lot more.
All I am saying here is that the picture is a lot more complicated and nuanced and needs a more detailed evaluation than a simplistic scaling factor into the past.
Well, it is average locally earned disposable income compared to local housing cost, as a percentage. And in that case, houses are ridiculously expensive now. Most of my prior generation relatives purchased homes in the 70s in their early 20s while working minimum wage jobs as single income households. They were forklift drivers and steel workers, required no education, yet somehow a house was cheaper than 2 years income. I think you need to question your understanding a little more thoroughly. Also look at how ridiculously cheap the average rent was... if you don't own, you rent, and rent was something like half of a paycheck, making saving for a house much easier.
Right. And (although perhaps not including SF and NYC), there are plenty of HCoL cities that you can travel 60-90 minutes from and there is pretty affordable (houses for a few hundred $K), even if not dirt-cheap, housing available. That's may not be really rural or parts of the Midwest cheap but it's not $1M+ for a condo either.
ADDED: And a lot of the jobs associated with those cities are actually a fair distance outside the cities anyway.
> “My experience, as you see,” said Fruehauf, “lends support to the complaint . . . that some RFC officials were determined all along to wreck Lustron unless they could get control for their friends.” [1]
A curious tale.
Sounds like a political failure, more than anything else. I also wonder how, in August of '48, Time reported that Lustron has got no steel to build its houses. [2]
I thought this was going to be about Edison Houses the invention of Thomas Edison meant to be affordable to help the poor (and he just bought a cement company).
His idea of an all concrete house made using a single pour of concrete. Even the cabinets, beds, toilet were supposedly part of design and created during the concrete pour.
> The Lustron, for all its failings, certainly proved its durability. Of the ~2.5k built, ~1.8k are still standing,
Doesn't sound like much of an achievement.
The town I live in (in Norway) is full of wooden housing built in the same period or earlier. I'm pretty confident that far more than 75% of them are still standing.
The brick built house I owned in the early 80s in Southampton, England, was one of a street of hundreds of houses built in 1890. The whole street is still there together with dozens of others of similar or greater age.
I imagine that both of those were quite a bit more expensive to build.
The point isn’t that houses from the 40s are still standing. The US also has tons and tons of those. The point is that the cheap, modular, assembly-line houses are still standing. Cheap usually equates to non-durable so it’s notable that these cheap houses are an exception.
The article mentions that the houses were often razed because the land was more valuable than the building.
I don't know about the parts that were enamel coated, but I imagine some of the cost might be recouped from recycling the steel.
I don't think I've lived in a building newer than this era since I was a child, and I've moved quite a bit in both brick and wood framed houses in the Midwest US.
But the US never developed two qualities fundamental to the Lustron: the idea that houses should be consumed like cars and the ability to mass-produce modular housing.
“Houses . . . consumed like cars” makes for an interesting thought experiment, like “The Roads Must Roll”[0] but doesn’t strike me as a meeting an actual need. Maybe I’m wrong.
Apparently, in Japan they view housing as more of a 'consumption good' than we do in the US, and that has some benefits in terms of being more amenable to building enough and being less NIMBY about things.
I imagine Japan’s “view” on housing is downstream of macroeconomic conditions like deflation and population decline. Ie, houses don’t appreciate much in price therefore people dont look at them like investments, not the other way around.
In support of this is China, where there are similar cultural views about “used” homes being undesirable. Yet (to this point) prices have appreciated and they have used them as investment vehicles.
To put it another way, would Japanese homes really depreciate with rapid population and economic growth? There is just no way.
From what I hear this attitude is centuries old, far predating demographic decline. Traditionally Japanese homes had paper walls and were expected to be damaged by their frequent earth quakes. Fires were also frequent. They were not expected to last.
I believe Tokyo requires demolition after a certain amount of time or ownership change right? Not entirely sure, and Ive also seen some info that suggest real estate has appreciated in Tokyo lately.
Point being maybe its demographics and regulation, with a cultural attitude that jives with it and even explains the regulation to demolish, but not attitude being operative.
What we have in the US is far from optimal. In many 'hot' markets during the recent runup in prices, houses were "making" more money in a year than the median household earned. That's a recipe for a whole host of problems.
a mass producer of roof frames in the Western USA succeeded in making the parts at low cost and high volumes, but the immediate middle-men could not stop cheating each other and their sub-contractors using crooked contracts and hidden costs. The whole effort backed up and stalled after several years.. some parties took more than their share of profit, and others were cheated and went broke. The production may have halted completely.
source: discussion with a small business person around 2005
nah - between govvies, frat guy investors, or giant companies .. none of those are guaranteed successful. Each of those can and will fail miserably, or get a lot done.
