America's affordable house of the future failed

https://thehustle.co/originals/how-americas-affordable-house-of-the-future-failed

by Anon84 • 2 years ago

48 68 2 years ago

ghaff8• 2 years ago

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.

rayiner2• 2 years ago

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.

pfdietz• 2 years ago

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.

Also: for discussions of construction and cost, see this blog: https://www.construction-physics.com/

CharlieDigital2• 2 years ago

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.

ryandrake2• 2 years ago

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.

ghaff8• 2 years ago

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.

detourdog2• 2 years ago

I’m really surprised that permits and paperwork could hold a candle to actual buildings costs.

woodruffw3• 2 years ago

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.)

jcranmer• 2 years ago

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!

wizerdrobe• 2 years ago

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.

fragmede• 2 years ago

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.

ghaff8• 2 years ago

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.

acover• 2 years ago

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.

ghaff8• 2 years ago

Typically the alternative is a concrete pad. That's what my brother's fairly large house on the coast of Maine has.

I assume if you just put in posts those would tend to rot over time.

ADDED: Per sibling comment, a concrete pad is often not about just pouring a load of concrete.

rayiner2• 2 years ago

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.

Waterluvian• 2 years ago

Ahh is this basically the house that homes in the Fallout series are imitating?

ajross• 2 years ago

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".

davidw4• 2 years ago

Yes. Some of the biggest problems with housing are political, not technological.

Oregon, for instance, built more apartments (low-rise apartments are the least expensive form of housing here) in the 1970ies than today: https://www.sightline.org/2023/02/07/yes-oregon-there-is-a-w...

Of course, it is expensive to build things in the US in general, and that's a problem worth pursuing as well.

kwhitefoot3• 2 years ago

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.

Daunk• 2 years ago

The expectations are lower outside of Scandinavia.

mason55• 2 years ago

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.

kwhitefoot3• 2 years ago

But were they more expensive in the long term?

zdragnar• 2 years ago

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.

jethkl• 2 years ago

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.

knowaveragejoe• 2 years ago

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?

HankB99• 2 years ago

One of the strength of Weber kettles (Charcoal cookers) is that they are enamel, not painted and unless chipped or dented can last a long time.

adolph• 2 years ago

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.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll

davidw4• 2 years ago

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.

nonethewiser3• 2 years ago

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.

steveoscaro• 2 years ago

And also why it’s possible to buy a perfectly fine house in Japan for $30k USD. Their demographics also contribute to this too though.

mistrial92• 2 years ago

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

boringuser2• 2 years ago

If you want to secure the future for your people, you need to execute large government infrastructure programs.

Turns out leaving all of this to the profit motive puts people on the street. Amazing.

mistrial92• 2 years ago

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.

DataDive3• 2 years ago

America has plenty of affordable housing; it is just in the wrong place. There are enormous swaths of land with low populations and ultra-cheap homes.

We don't have a housing problem; the problem is that affordable housing has undesirable locations.

Make the locations attractive, and all of a sudden, there is no housing problem.

(I don't claim to know how to achieve that)

swells342• 2 years ago

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.

DataDive3• 2 years ago

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.

Ralfp• 2 years ago

How many of those locations would need development? How economically viable is developing them?

ghaff8• 2 years ago

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.

WalterBright• 2 years ago

You used to be able to buy a house from Sears, which you assembled on site.

http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm

dghughes• 2 years ago

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.

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/06/thomas-edisons-forgott...

kkfx• 2 years ago

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.

arh68• 2 years ago

“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]

[1] http://www.singingwheels.com/business-week-article.html

[2] https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,888...

kwhitefoot3• 2 years ago

How does one stop a metal box getting damp? The last thing you usually want to make walls from is something that has such high thermal conductivity.

America's affordable house of the future failed

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