This house is 375 sq ft and uses low end materials, and it doesn't include setup, so it's going to cost ~$100k, or $266 / sq ft. Most new home construction is more like $150 / sq ft. And with this system, you're very limited in what you can build.
If you can get this contraption on your property (foundation, plumbing hookup, electric, all permit fees.) for under 100k in a desirable area, like the Bay Area, it's a great deal.
If I had a flat lot that was accesssble, I would look into this further.
In my town, even with the protections Gov. Neusome provided, getting an ADU is still a hassle.
In my town, rich people are using ADU's to add square footage to their existing houses. Some are actually successful with getting a variance, if they kiss enough ass. Or, know someone on that council, but I can't prove this alleviation now. I could a few years ago. Variances are over $1000, and until recently very few, like less than 1 percent, were granted. The town kept those fees though. Gotta keep those fees, and fines.
That said, it's still a rich man's game:
1. Council members go over every aspect of your ADU.
2. They even had the gall to ask an older homeowner whom will be living in the ADU. The guy said it would probally be a attendant, but felt he didn't need to discuss his medical history on tv. (San Anselmo tapes their meeting. I guess it's for litigation fend offs? If that's the case, they are not doing themself's any good. They are obviously biased.)
3. The town has a right to tell you what color paint your addition will be.
4. The town tells homeowners to go to their neighbors, and basically beg for their remodel.
5. The town can determine where you place windows.
6. The town can tell you what kind of roof they will approve.
7. The town can tell you what kind of siding to use. Better not use stucco, if they want wood?
8. The town can dictate what plants you use around unit.
(I'm conflating an ADU, and a remodel--a remodel usually requiring a variance. I'm not sure how difficult is is to just put in an ADU. If any town signed off on these modular units, they are quite a buy. I have my doubts.)
I looked into building an adu a few years back, and I can backup most of what you said. At least in California, in an incorporated city.
We worked out that it would cost us $30k in fees, and required spending before we could even dig the footers. Things like a soil test, inspections, variance’s etc.
You can always build an ADU, but it’s a rich mans game. And not really accessible to most people. We calculated our unit to cost roughly $80-90k, and would be almost 2x $/sqft of our home. A remodel made more financial sense, but the above problems still persist.
Those sound like good things. I live in a place where non of those demands are considered acceptable (or noone bothers to coordinate) and family-home suburbs look absurd. Every house is from another world, like the neighbors didn't exist. Color, style, fence, roof: everything is as random as you can imagine. It's a continuous spatial conflict.
Since they're very up front about referring to them as Accessory Dwelling units, the primary market is likely people who want to quickly put an ADU in place alongside a traditional single-family home for extra living space or rental income.
About one-third of the cost of new multifamily development is typically tied up in zoning/permitting/planning processes. Against that backdrop, ADUs -- particularly if the city pre-approves designs, which seems like something this product would be ideal for -- are a growing part of housing inventory and housing affordability in many cities.
If you think new home construction is $150 / sq ft. (in the US), you haven't been keeping up with the times. It was $220 / sq ft. before COVID, now its $300+ for stick built. Modulars are $200-$250. When material prices tripled, the cost got offloaded to the customer, and given the demand hasn't changed.. it probably isn't going to regress to the mean anytime soon.
Are you quoting prices including the cost of the land? Around here there's plenty of new construction being sold at well under $200/sq. ft., and even a fair amount at or under $150 / sq. ft. This is even when you include the price of the land.
Where I live the market rate was $100-125/sqft for single-family before the lumber supply squeeze. I think you just happen to live somewhere where inflation effects are ahead of the rest of us.
You can't just generalize like this. There is no standard price, as it is highly dependent on your geographic location.
Before COVID I just built a fully custom house in the OKC area for $142/sq. ft. including all my upgrades (base was $135 including land in a subdivision). Prices have definitely gone up due to lumber and are now in the $155-165/sq. ft. range base including land.
Looking at this primarily on a cost per square foot basis seems like the famous slashdot mistake of 2 decades ago of dismissing the iPod because it had less memory than a shitty competitor.
I mean, it's an ADU, designed to be small, but would basically have the same fixed costs (appliances, plumbing, electrical) of a house twice the size, and I'm sure the manufacturers could make a house twice the size with only a marginally increased cost. But keeping it small is obviously ideal for people with limited yard space who are using this as an ADU.
The headline touts cost, I think it's fair to look at the actual cost benefits. If Apple designed the iPod and promoted it based on cost Slashdot would have had a point. Apple never says 'hey look how affordable our product is'.
This headline caught my eye as I'm interested in how the fuck people are going to afford homes in the near future. I am disappointed. The "home" is not somewhere young people can raise a family. It appears to be aimed at home owners who want more home which is entirely uninteresting to me.
80% people who want the ease of setup of a double wide but really, really, really want to visibly distance themselves from the stereotypes and can afford to pay a premium and give up a lot of square footage to do so. (There's a reason this is on the front page of HN.)
20% developers who will pay big bucks to skirt some local busybody ordinance that says "no trailer homes".
Bingo. Same as "tiny homes". They're not solving a problem without an existing—possibly even superior—solution. They're just solving it in a way that doesn't offend one's class self-image. Modular homes, prefabs, trailer homes, RVs, all already exist and have for a long time—but they're associated with he wrong sorts of people.
The construction prices you quoted are not correct at least in the Bay Area. And I am guessing $150/sq ft achievable at scale.
Pricing ADUs is tricky because the some of things in a house cost same for a small to medium size home. For example, the costs of plumbing, electrical, kitchen, bathroom, etc are more of less the same between a 500 sq.ft. house and a 1000 sq. ft house.
> the costs of plumbing, electrical, kitchen, bathroom, etc are more of less the same between a 500 sq.ft. house and a 1000 sq. ft house.
Don't larger houses have multiple bathrooms, thus not the same cost for plumbing? At least when I watched Selling sunset, it seemed it's about having at least 3-4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms in a house...
Driving to Minot a decade ago... you'd see more modular houses on trailers on the road than cars at times. The flood of 2011 messed up a lot and this was also in the oil boom there.
There were even tent cities for people there after the flooding.
Yes, these modular houses would have been quite welcome there.
A tangent question to this is "how easy is it to undo it?"
A guy I know wants to do some major renovations on the house - gut it and fix it. It will take a year or two to do. In the meantime... where do you live?
Another situation where this could have been useful would have been Biloxi after Katrina where, again, housing is needed in short order.
In the same way a lot of products have become cheaper because of some process optimization (packaged more compactly to reduce transportation costs), I'm excited to see modular homes/home 3d-printing etc. play out and become cheaper over time until they are more affordable than convention home construction or somehow unique and better in ways that conventionally constructed homes cannot be.
To answer your question, one possible target customer is the rich (wo)man who wants a cabin house far away but something more comfortable than a cabin house.
The substack Construction Physics has an excellent overview of the now 100 year failed promise of modular building and the eternal cycles of the exact same value props being pitched in ambitious efforts to reform construction and why conventional construction has refused to be disrupted.
If you are rich, there are a lot of options that are likely to better cater to your richness. Or why build a 50k shed on a million dollar piece of ground?
Maybe people in hurricane and flood zones? If you insist on living there, might as well live in a disposable house (Possibly want to get the price lower than 50k).
Small aside, I just looked up what houses look like in other parts of the world. Very few look like houses found in the US.
Tiny houses have a large cost per square foot. One of the early forces in tiny houses remarked that his house was simultaneously the smallest in his city and the most expensive per square foot.
Part of it is the cube square law's little brother, the "square linear law?" You have proportionately more wall for the enclosed area. On top of that you still have the expensive bits… bathrooms and kitchens.
And here is the prime example of perverse incentives when it comes to housing - particularly in the US. Only focusing on acquisition cost.
How about cost of utilities per square foot over 10 years? My money is on the smaller, vastly better constructed smaller home than traditional build to minimum code mass market crappy tract housing that dominates much of American suburbia.
Who lives in one house for the majority of their life any more? It's pretty rare. In my development it was only a few thousand more to double the insulation and convert to more efficient HVAC - less than half the people building a new house did it. Heck it was $750 to insulate the garage - maybe 1/3 did - you can tell because the people who did got insulated garage doors with windows. A neighbor across the street bought a house where the previous owner didn't insulate the garage. The master bedroom is over the garage. I asked him if his master bedroom got cold in the winter - he got wide eyed and said that as a matter of fact it did. I pointed out the insulation difference - he had a buddy come over and help him pull down the drywall in the garage, they insulated all the walls and added more to the ceiling and re-drywalled and the difference was night and day. Building codes tightened up quite a bit in 2010 so I think they force builders to do that insulation for everything now, but that's just one example of how people care more about granite countertops than paying attention to core infrastructure that could impact a building for it's entire life.
A pithier way to put it - much of your square footage discrepancy is from people sacrificing short term cost for long term costs we all pay for.
I was wondering that myself. I fantasize about plopping a house down out in the desert, but their video shows a crane used to unfold it. By the time you get all the heavy machinery out there to prep the land and assemble the structure you're most of the way to just building something unique.
>but their video shows a crane used to unfold it. By the time you get all the heavy machinery out there to prep the land and assemble the structure you're most of the way to just building something unique.
This[0]
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But many municipalities prohibit it because if you make housing too cheap the "wrong kind of people" might move in. In the desert you shouldn't have problems though.
Once you have found the contractor to do all that, you’re all the way…and off the end of the runway with two points of failure and no single responsibility when things don’t line up.
And the contractor is only making overhead and profit on half the work of a tiny budget which means that you are not a priority…even if the construction cycle was flat which it isn’t.
The efficiency of the market is why people don’t build this way much. As Heinlein says every generation thinks it invented sex. They think they invented modular housing too I think.
My friend and I were having a similar fantasy of putting places like that all over the western US so we started with a one-off project to build a tiny house so that it can just be “plopped” down (or rather rolled in).
How big were you thinking? Something like 400 SF? Or a proper house?
As I said in another comment on this thread I think it’s possible to build something totally custom for a similar budget (200-250 psf) as long as it’s on a trailer because you avoid most of the code and inspection issues in several western states by putting it on wheels.
Still working on the interior but this house is built better than my actual house in a high-cost market in California. It is super tiny though (200 sf and that includes the loft).
Thought the same about the crane. Surely there is a way you could adjust these to avoid the crane? As in, have a pulley mechanism that could be built into the frame to lower the floor? And roof panels that slide across rather than fold over?
But I guess you need to deliver the thing, and that means truck and crane anyway, unless they're towed to site and the trailer is part of it. Couldn't slide it off a trailer without damaging it. Unless you reinvent the trailer which significantly ramps up your costs.
The first idea that strikes me (aside form the obvious in-law apt addition) is to use this approach for the homeless.
It's been shown that the best solution for many (non-mentally-ill) homeless is to literally provide a home. E.g., merely the fact of falling on enough hardships to lose a home and having no fixed address is a major impediment to getting a new job and becoming a homed, taxpaying resident.
Yet I've read repeatedly that California is spending net $1 million per home to create low-standard living spaces for the homeless. This is more than a 10X improvement in these costs.
In London, they used shipping container homes to house homeless people on unused local government-owned land. Pretty much instantly stories were in the media about how the conditions were "inhuman" (bizarrely, from people who had chosen to illegally immigrate to the UK from France, and complained that they had a nice house in Sudan or wherever).
So I think the reality of these schemes is often...difficult because they are a non-ideal solution to a non-ideal problem (and unf, the alternative in the UK is sheltered housing with huge levels of crime, B&B which cost taxpayers £150-200/day, or council housing that is worth £500k-1m...again, there are no real solutions here).
EDIT: btw, I should add...I have actually lived in a shipping container, I went to a boarding school and part of the school was being re-developed so a small number of proportion of the group had to spend a term in converted containers...no issue. It was totally fine. These kind of housing solutions are used pretty extensively in mining/oil and gas, and they are quite comfortable.
The main problem with homeless people is not a lack of housing, but that the vast majority of them want to be homeless. That this is even a controversial statement to many is the real tragedy holding back "solving" the homeless problem. In this area the only time there are shelter problems are when it gets too cold for them to realistically stay outside. And yes, the shelters do provide them with networking opportunities, fixed addresses, services to ensure they are clean and have good clothes for job interviews, etc. The majority are not interested. For a wide variety of reasons (and no, not all of them are healthy reasons) they like being independent and not tied to anyone or anything.
Simply providing someone a home and trying to stuff them in there is only a minuscule part of the overall issue.
Sure, though some of that relies on your city having large parcels of empty land to situate them on. And these are much bigger and nicer than the ones we recently rolled out here in Portland[1] but cost almost 10X more, so you'd hope they are.
The real cost savings is they build exactly the same 4 floor plans over an over again, and very little modifications are allowed. They then have jigs to cut the pieces to the exact size needed. Instead of a carpenter with a saw measuring a 2x4, they cut everything to the exact size needed without using a tape measure.
I see everything starting at $300 / sqft. Last time I got a quote for $160/ft I called the guy 2 months later and he said he redid his construction business to focus on kitchen/bathroom remodels.
Anyway, the site work for something is not going to be less than $50k. 50k if you're very lucky or are a contractor yourself.
Personally, I don't like having neighbours, I like nature, I don't mind living small. Such a house would allow me to put more of my resources in land. Then if I need more room for stuff I can build that myself (stuff requires less isolation and there are less strict rules for it in my country, etc).
A single wide mobile home, which is x2-3 as big as this, is cheaper than this costs. And, in most parts of the country, you can buy a full home with land for less than this costs installed.
Their advantage seems to be how quickly they can deliver and install them. Digging into their website, it sounds like they're targeting temporary housing for natural disasters, etc. which makes sense.
- Transportation = $2-$4 per mile from las vegas
- Assembly = "Boxabl only sells room modules. We will connect you with a Boxabl certified and state licensed installer in your area."
- The rest = "Whats not included in that price is your land and site setup. This can include utility hookups, foundation, landscaping, permits, and more. Depending on your location and the complexity of your site, this cost can range anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000."
The target customer is people with extra land who would like to put up an ADU on their land to make extra revenue from AirBNB. It could probably pay for itself within a year.
In my CA county, the newest ADU rule states that it can't be used for short term rentals. Of course, you are grandfathered in if you already had an ADU.
Finland did that and reduced homelessness by 33%. It fell short of their goal of ending homelessness entirely, but it's hard to argue that a 33% reduction is anything short of amazing.
People who fall for stuff like Hyperloop. The biggest problem with housing is not the building itself, its the land and the scarcity of it. This is yet another tech 'solution' in search of a problem. And that problem is political, not technical.
And then $80k to install between new electrical box, getting raked over the coals by your local water/sewer district, having to build a foundation, stairs from door, etc., etc.
Your estimate is way too high. At least in most parts of the country. I know because I’m building right now in a mid-priced coastal metro.
A small monolithic slab foundation is maybe $8k at most. Running buried electric on a 20 foot setback is $2k. Water and sewer lines are $3k. The municipal water and sewer tap are $5k total. And the county capacity fee is $4k. Altogether these ancillary “hookup” costs are $20k, and that’s for a “get it done fast” job at a period of labor and material shortages.
This comment deserves to be higher. People just think you can put these anywhere but you need water connection, sewer connection, electrical, telephone line/cable, permits and red tape, by the time you're done it'll be double. And I don't think these solve any of our housing affordability problems, the land in a desirable area will be far more expensive than what's on top.
So my question is, if you had a piece of land, concrete foundation, electrical, water and sewer connection, is it possible to get something better for 50k?
I wish some of these interior designers would check out European or Japanese apartments for the layout. You could do a lot better (and I would never want to have to use the sink proposed in that clip on a day-to-day basis). That A/C location is just plain wrong (the kitchen is where you'll spend the least time). And that shelf splitting the living room + the bedroom? What?
Meanwhile you have like... storage for plates for 20 people as if you could ever feed more than 3 people at once. And that double-door fridge... I imagine that if you're in a more rural area it's more necessary but there's a lot better choices here if you are actually trying to make a livable space, instead of a place that offers good shots.
This looks a lot like a "set up your own AirBnB" thing. So much so I wouldn't be surprised if AirBnB made a strategic investment in this.
> This looks a lot like a "set up your own AirBnB" thing. So much so I wouldn't be surprised if AirBnB made a strategic investment in this.
In another video they talk about how initially they are targeting the recently lessened restrictions on backyard units in CA, so yeah, AirBnB and people looking to rent out granny units are the current target I think.
> Meanwhile you have like... storage for plates for 20 people as if you could ever feed more than 3 people at once.
Assuming you can't have outdoor furniture and and host people outside? One of the benefits of a small house might be more usable outdoor area. In Northern California, you generally get at least 3/4 of the year with good weather you can be outside fairly comfortably, and you get quite a bit more in Southern California. I've heard Arizona is quite nice all the time except for the summer months.
That AC location easily covers the entire main room. You could put it on any wall and it would be effective in that tiny of a space. If you put it on the opposite wall now you potentially have plumbing on the front of your house, or longer line sets to tuck the exterior unit around the corner - increasing complexity and cost.
As for the kitchen I know this may shock a lot of people but there are ways to feed yourself that don't involve restaurants, take out or delivery. If anything I'd prefer a slightly larger stove/oven even if it intruded into the other space more. I enjoy cooking for myself so a decently sized fridge and pantry storage is more than superficial. Heck there are two story four bedroom houses that were built in the 70's around here that have similarly sized kitchens - it's insane when most RVs have better kitchens these days.
I do agree the TV shelf thing seems more like an opportunity to be clever with a rotating TV but that's a relatively minor quibble - the rest of the layout is actually quite functional.
This company is popular for being the company chosen by Elon Musk[1]. He's supposedly living in one in Starbase, Texas. I guess it's also a study to understand the dynamics of living in a small space as any dream of inhabiting some other planet passes necessarily by the adaptation of a lifetime in a tiny space.
> I guess it's also a study to understand the dynamics of living in a small space
How out of touch must one be to even consider this? News flash: the vast majority of mankind lives in what a North American would consider "small places" [0].
Same goes for population density - North American and Australian urban sprawl is largely unknown in most areas of the world. If you want to "study the dynamics" of living closely together in tightly packed spaces, just move to Hong Kong or Singapore for a year.
I'm talking about him. I didn't say it was a scientific study about the world. He, one of the richest men in the world, is experiencing living in a small space with houses from this company. This company has also demo videos about houses on mars.
I really want one of these and I don't know why. I'm struggling to come up with uses for this other than for AirBNB style short term rental places or pre-planned communities for helping homeless people get back on their feet or something. Doesn't seem as portable as a mobile home, and doesn't really have enough of a rustic look for me to want to consider this as a cabin.
I feel like I'm missing a big use case here, but unless I planned to live in this full time, what are the benefits over buying a sprinter van or something.
In one of the videos on the site it is explained that they are currently targeting people who want to build "backyard houses" or "ADUs" that are popular in some places like in California. Family members can live in them or you can rent them out, provided it has a foundation, power, plumbing etc.
Probably a way to industrialize it a bit. Run a management company that leases these out, handles site prep and paperwork and offer the homeowner a buyout option after a few years.
Add an Airbnb service on top that markets, cleans and maintains it for those that want to dip their toes into it.
Then start stacking them on top of each other until something gives.
"Starter home" is the niche this fits. It wasn't all that long ago that sub-1000 square foot houses were a normal thing people bought and lived in until they could afford (and had a reason to) to move to a house better suited to support spouse/kids/etc.
I also want one of these, because I want starter homes to be that again, not just an impediment to scrape off of the lot to make way to build the largest house that zoning allows. It's nice in some ways that ADU options like this seem to be prying open that niche again.
The UK is full of these in holiday parks, either as homes for middle class retirees downsizing to a nice little community in the country (the economics aren't quite as impressive when you consider the annual charge for the park land and facilities...) or as holiday lodges, including holiday lodges exclusively used as summer/weekend retreats
Technically these are all "mobile" but they won't move after delivery.
Someone I know is looking into building tiny home communities for the impoverished. He has not been impressed by the available resources.
Overwhelmingly, these tiny/modular homes are hype. If you want to build a tiny home (or really any home), do it with 2x6s and nails. You can get cheaper roughing with rammed earth, CMUs, etc, but finishing is more expensive.
Timber homes at that size can almost compete on price (because most of your members are under 12'), but some of the new energy saving building codes are not timber frame friendly.
You can buy a prefab SIP home, but generally it will always be cheapest to just build the thing in place. Especially if you are planning on building more than one at a time.
There is an economy of scale and efficiency in building large prefab pieces of a house on a factory, as opposed to the ad-hoc local conditions. Machines can do a lot on a factory which they cannot do on a traditional construction site, and human labor is not cheap in the U.S., especially if you want licensed contractors to build a house according to the code.
Also, these homes don't look the cheapest edifices you can produce. A part of their value proposition is deployment speed. IDK if it's an important differentiator for that market segment.
I also suppose that such homes can be rolled back nearly as efficiently as they are deployed, several times, so they can serve as mobile homes for disaster relief, construction in remote parts, etc.
This is exactly what my friend and I have been thinking. People are being priced out of even the cheaper, though still desirable, mountain and other rural communities in the western US. I strongly feel like tiny houses are a good solution for some folks who don't feel like they need 300-400 SF per person in their home. And they can be built to extremely rigorous standards for _relatively_ little cost.
As I've said elsewhere in the thread, we're building one right now (https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR) and our hope is that this somehow is something we can reproduce, potentially on a cheap parcel of land, where people who can't otherwise afford a conventional house can afford these. We're definitely thinking it's for the not-quite impoverished, though, because when people have zero money/jobs you're relying on government to step in and fund/subsidize.
Of course lots of questions about entitlements for tiny house communities; affordability when financing isn't available; etc., but gotta start somewhere. Seems like there's a path to providing some long-lasting shelter for folks who otherwise would have to opt for single or double-wides or, worse, end up unhoused.
If your friend would like to crank out multiple tiny homes, they should look for a company nearby that has automated Light Gauge Steel Framing machines. An example of a manufacturer of such machines is https://www.framecad.com/
Once your design is done, they can easily spit the parts out in an automated fashion, the parts form the wall and roofing panels. The panels are easily trucked to the site and erected.
Not sure if you have in-depth knowledge about this so I can avoid doing a deep dive on the linked site, but what's the cost of something like this? If you were going to do a 20x20 footprint, what would those 4 walls cost if you assume 3 penetrations for a window on each wall and a door on the 4th wall?
Totally get it if you say "go to the website" but if you're involved with one of these companies maybe you could answer that more readily than I can figure it out.
I have a 40 acre plot in Maine and ordered a "camp" hand built by Amish craftsmen using decent timber for 12K delivered. Granted, I have to build out the interior but when all is done I'll be into it for < 25K. https://themainelandstore.com/camps-sheds-for-sale/
Aren’t caravans quite poorly insulated so if you heat it year round and don’t have extremely mild weather like most of UK then you’ll waste a lot of money keeping warm (or cool)?
The attraction of a modular home to me would be that it can have proper construction with heavy triple glass windows and so on.
I can't tell you the specifics. I know from holidays that they have improved a lot. The newer ones have much better insulation and double glazing. Sure, they are geared towards a UK climate.
Every static caravan I've been in has been a horrible building. The walls are paper thin, the whole thing shakes when you walk around, it's poorly insulated, the furnishings are cheap.
I'm not sure how much of that requirement comes from weight limits due to road transportation vs cost cutting vs target market, but those things are just horrible to spend time in. Houses need to feel solid.
Dunno why you are getting voted down but you are spot on. Mobile homes have MANY severe compromises to keep the weight down that this solution does not have to worry about.
It's laughable that people think they are even remotely comparable.
Readit News
Who's the target customer for this?
If I had a flat lot that was accesssble, I would look into this further.
In my town, even with the protections Gov. Neusome provided, getting an ADU is still a hassle.
In my town, rich people are using ADU's to add square footage to their existing houses. Some are actually successful with getting a variance, if they kiss enough ass. Or, know someone on that council, but I can't prove this alleviation now. I could a few years ago. Variances are over $1000, and until recently very few, like less than 1 percent, were granted. The town kept those fees though. Gotta keep those fees, and fines.
That said, it's still a rich man's game:
1. Council members go over every aspect of your ADU.
2. They even had the gall to ask an older homeowner whom will be living in the ADU. The guy said it would probally be a attendant, but felt he didn't need to discuss his medical history on tv. (San Anselmo tapes their meeting. I guess it's for litigation fend offs? If that's the case, they are not doing themself's any good. They are obviously biased.)
3. The town has a right to tell you what color paint your addition will be.
4. The town tells homeowners to go to their neighbors, and basically beg for their remodel.
5. The town can determine where you place windows.
6. The town can tell you what kind of roof they will approve.
7. The town can tell you what kind of siding to use. Better not use stucco, if they want wood?
8. The town can dictate what plants you use around unit.
(I'm conflating an ADU, and a remodel--a remodel usually requiring a variance. I'm not sure how difficult is is to just put in an ADU. If any town signed off on these modular units, they are quite a buy. I have my doubts.)
We worked out that it would cost us $30k in fees, and required spending before we could even dig the footers. Things like a soil test, inspections, variance’s etc.
You can always build an ADU, but it’s a rich mans game. And not really accessible to most people. We calculated our unit to cost roughly $80-90k, and would be almost 2x $/sqft of our home. A remodel made more financial sense, but the above problems still persist.
This was my thought as well. Seems like a quick and dirty solution to getting a house on an existing lot for immediate move in.
If you're cost conscious then going the longer term route of building your own might be better.
About one-third of the cost of new multifamily development is typically tied up in zoning/permitting/planning processes. Against that backdrop, ADUs -- particularly if the city pre-approves designs, which seems like something this product would be ideal for -- are a growing part of housing inventory and housing affordability in many cities.
Before COVID I just built a fully custom house in the OKC area for $142/sq. ft. including all my upgrades (base was $135 including land in a subdivision). Prices have definitely gone up due to lumber and are now in the $155-165/sq. ft. range base including land.
I mean, it's an ADU, designed to be small, but would basically have the same fixed costs (appliances, plumbing, electrical) of a house twice the size, and I'm sure the manufacturers could make a house twice the size with only a marginally increased cost. But keeping it small is obviously ideal for people with limited yard space who are using this as an ADU.
This headline caught my eye as I'm interested in how the fuck people are going to afford homes in the near future. I am disappointed. The "home" is not somewhere young people can raise a family. It appears to be aimed at home owners who want more home which is entirely uninteresting to me.
I agree with the iPod analogy.
80% people who want the ease of setup of a double wide but really, really, really want to visibly distance themselves from the stereotypes and can afford to pay a premium and give up a lot of square footage to do so. (There's a reason this is on the front page of HN.)
20% developers who will pay big bucks to skirt some local busybody ordinance that says "no trailer homes".
Pricing ADUs is tricky because the some of things in a house cost same for a small to medium size home. For example, the costs of plumbing, electrical, kitchen, bathroom, etc are more of less the same between a 500 sq.ft. house and a 1000 sq. ft house.
Don't larger houses have multiple bathrooms, thus not the same cost for plumbing? At least when I watched Selling sunset, it seemed it's about having at least 3-4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms in a house...
Or someone who thinks it's the future and love telling his or her guests about it. Or someone who's fascinated by IKEA furniture.
They also seem to be getting into the tiny house game: https://dornob.com/flat-pack-ikea-house-built-shipped-for-un...
There were even tent cities for people there after the flooding.
Yes, these modular houses would have been quite welcome there.
A tangent question to this is "how easy is it to undo it?"
A guy I know wants to do some major renovations on the house - gut it and fix it. It will take a year or two to do. In the meantime... where do you live?
Another situation where this could have been useful would have been Biloxi after Katrina where, again, housing is needed in short order.
To answer your question, one possible target customer is the rich (wo)man who wants a cabin house far away but something more comfortable than a cabin house.
Some great posts are:
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/building-componen...
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/operation-breakth...
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/construction-effi...
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/book-review-indus...
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/industrialized-bu...
Despite this, he's cautiously excited about some of the potential future industrialized systems such as Foldable Buildings https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/folding-at-home 3D printing https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/3d-printed-buildi... Plywood Systems https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/facit-homes-wikih... And Broad Homes https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/broad-group-part-...
'Person' is the non-gendered word that goes here.
Small aside, I just looked up what houses look like in other parts of the world. Very few look like houses found in the US.
The target audience for these are squeezed between owners of trailer parks and cheap shacks.
Part of it is the cube square law's little brother, the "square linear law?" You have proportionately more wall for the enclosed area. On top of that you still have the expensive bits… bathrooms and kitchens.
How about cost of utilities per square foot over 10 years? My money is on the smaller, vastly better constructed smaller home than traditional build to minimum code mass market crappy tract housing that dominates much of American suburbia.
Who lives in one house for the majority of their life any more? It's pretty rare. In my development it was only a few thousand more to double the insulation and convert to more efficient HVAC - less than half the people building a new house did it. Heck it was $750 to insulate the garage - maybe 1/3 did - you can tell because the people who did got insulated garage doors with windows. A neighbor across the street bought a house where the previous owner didn't insulate the garage. The master bedroom is over the garage. I asked him if his master bedroom got cold in the winter - he got wide eyed and said that as a matter of fact it did. I pointed out the insulation difference - he had a buddy come over and help him pull down the drywall in the garage, they insulated all the walls and added more to the ceiling and re-drywalled and the difference was night and day. Building codes tightened up quite a bit in 2010 so I think they force builders to do that insulation for everything now, but that's just one example of how people care more about granite countertops than paying attention to core infrastructure that could impact a building for it's entire life.
A pithier way to put it - much of your square footage discrepancy is from people sacrificing short term cost for long term costs we all pay for.
This[0]
Is[1]
A[2]
Solved[3]
Problem[4]
But many municipalities prohibit it because if you make housing too cheap the "wrong kind of people" might move in. In the desert you shouldn't have problems though.
[0] http://www.illmoveit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/IMG_1521...
[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/x9MwVxBK254/maxresdefault.jpg
[2] https://ewscripps.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/994f83b/21...
[3] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BhU7yhMVdfE/hqdefault.jpg
[4] http://www.pacificwalkhomes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/a...
And the contractor is only making overhead and profit on half the work of a tiny budget which means that you are not a priority…even if the construction cycle was flat which it isn’t.
The efficiency of the market is why people don’t build this way much. As Heinlein says every generation thinks it invented sex. They think they invented modular housing too I think.
How big were you thinking? Something like 400 SF? Or a proper house?
As I said in another comment on this thread I think it’s possible to build something totally custom for a similar budget (200-250 psf) as long as it’s on a trailer because you avoid most of the code and inspection issues in several western states by putting it on wheels.
https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR
Still working on the interior but this house is built better than my actual house in a high-cost market in California. It is super tiny though (200 sf and that includes the loft).
edit: formatting
But I guess you need to deliver the thing, and that means truck and crane anyway, unless they're towed to site and the trailer is part of it. Couldn't slide it off a trailer without damaging it. Unless you reinvent the trailer which significantly ramps up your costs.
Plus it can be self assembled
It's been shown that the best solution for many (non-mentally-ill) homeless is to literally provide a home. E.g., merely the fact of falling on enough hardships to lose a home and having no fixed address is a major impediment to getting a new job and becoming a homed, taxpaying resident.
Yet I've read repeatedly that California is spending net $1 million per home to create low-standard living spaces for the homeless. This is more than a 10X improvement in these costs.
So I think the reality of these schemes is often...difficult because they are a non-ideal solution to a non-ideal problem (and unf, the alternative in the UK is sheltered housing with huge levels of crime, B&B which cost taxpayers £150-200/day, or council housing that is worth £500k-1m...again, there are no real solutions here).
EDIT: btw, I should add...I have actually lived in a shipping container, I went to a boarding school and part of the school was being re-developed so a small number of proportion of the group had to spend a term in converted containers...no issue. It was totally fine. These kind of housing solutions are used pretty extensively in mining/oil and gas, and they are quite comfortable.
Simply providing someone a home and trying to stuff them in there is only a minuscule part of the overall issue.
1: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/tiny-home-pods-help-p...
Cost savings on the surface but when things come together they're just not there.
A lot of the actual prefabricated style solutions that do save money seem to be small changes within your traditional systems.
I love the idea of modular houses, but they seem so expensive. Especially when factoring in the inability to sell the same as houses, etc etc.
Anyway, the site work for something is not going to be less than $50k. 50k if you're very lucky or are a contractor yourself.
People who otherwise could not afford to buy a house, I assume.
Their advantage seems to be how quickly they can deliver and install them. Digging into their website, it sounds like they're targeting temporary housing for natural disasters, etc. which makes sense.
EDIT: They also state this in their FAQ (https://www.boxabl.com/faq/):
that's $5k revenue per month, or ~$165 per night averaged. Yes, some places could rent for ~$200/night, but I doubt you'll have 100% occupancy rate.
Dead Comment
https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/eradicating...
People who fall for stuff like Hyperloop. The biggest problem with housing is not the building itself, its the land and the scarcity of it. This is yet another tech 'solution' in search of a problem. And that problem is political, not technical.
INB4: but we're gonna deploy these on Mars!!
Look at Manhattan or Hong Kong. You just stack the homes and offices and stores on top of each other.
And the problem they search for has been solved half a century ago — the modern highrise apartment building.
And your property taxes will go up.
A small monolithic slab foundation is maybe $8k at most. Running buried electric on a 20 foot setback is $2k. Water and sewer lines are $3k. The municipal water and sewer tap are $5k total. And the county capacity fee is $4k. Altogether these ancillary “hookup” costs are $20k, and that’s for a “get it done fast” job at a period of labor and material shortages.
This is the problem which smart people should be working on, not some prefab home.
Meanwhile you have like... storage for plates for 20 people as if you could ever feed more than 3 people at once. And that double-door fridge... I imagine that if you're in a more rural area it's more necessary but there's a lot better choices here if you are actually trying to make a livable space, instead of a place that offers good shots. This looks a lot like a "set up your own AirBnB" thing. So much so I wouldn't be surprised if AirBnB made a strategic investment in this.
In another video they talk about how initially they are targeting the recently lessened restrictions on backyard units in CA, so yeah, AirBnB and people looking to rent out granny units are the current target I think.
> Meanwhile you have like... storage for plates for 20 people as if you could ever feed more than 3 people at once.
Assuming you can't have outdoor furniture and and host people outside? One of the benefits of a small house might be more usable outdoor area. In Northern California, you generally get at least 3/4 of the year with good weather you can be outside fairly comfortably, and you get quite a bit more in Southern California. I've heard Arizona is quite nice all the time except for the summer months.
As for the kitchen I know this may shock a lot of people but there are ways to feed yourself that don't involve restaurants, take out or delivery. If anything I'd prefer a slightly larger stove/oven even if it intruded into the other space more. I enjoy cooking for myself so a decently sized fridge and pantry storage is more than superficial. Heck there are two story four bedroom houses that were built in the 70's around here that have similarly sized kitchens - it's insane when most RVs have better kitchens these days.
I do agree the TV shelf thing seems more like an opportunity to be clever with a rotating TV but that's a relatively minor quibble - the rest of the layout is actually quite functional.
[1]https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-50k-house-texas-pictures...
How out of touch must one be to even consider this? News flash: the vast majority of mankind lives in what a North American would consider "small places" [0].
Same goes for population density - North American and Australian urban sprawl is largely unknown in most areas of the world. If you want to "study the dynamics" of living closely together in tightly packed spaces, just move to Hong Kong or Singapore for a year.
[0] https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e7b2a43103...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvtJPDpAY7c
Dead Comment
I feel like I'm missing a big use case here, but unless I planned to live in this full time, what are the benefits over buying a sprinter van or something.
I absolutely love this, and I really want one. Have you sold many/any yet? What stage of development is the company at?
Also, what sort of time frame can I hope to just order one and have it show up in a month or two?
Add an Airbnb service on top that markets, cleans and maintains it for those that want to dip their toes into it.
Then start stacking them on top of each other until something gives.
I also want one of these, because I want starter homes to be that again, not just an impediment to scrape off of the lot to make way to build the largest house that zoning allows. It's nice in some ways that ADU options like this seem to be prying open that niche again.
examples: https://www.tingdene.co.uk/residential-park-homes/our-homes
Overwhelmingly, these tiny/modular homes are hype. If you want to build a tiny home (or really any home), do it with 2x6s and nails. You can get cheaper roughing with rammed earth, CMUs, etc, but finishing is more expensive.
Timber homes at that size can almost compete on price (because most of your members are under 12'), but some of the new energy saving building codes are not timber frame friendly.
You can buy a prefab SIP home, but generally it will always be cheapest to just build the thing in place. Especially if you are planning on building more than one at a time.
There is an economy of scale and efficiency in building large prefab pieces of a house on a factory, as opposed to the ad-hoc local conditions. Machines can do a lot on a factory which they cannot do on a traditional construction site, and human labor is not cheap in the U.S., especially if you want licensed contractors to build a house according to the code.
Also, these homes don't look the cheapest edifices you can produce. A part of their value proposition is deployment speed. IDK if it's an important differentiator for that market segment.
I also suppose that such homes can be rolled back nearly as efficiently as they are deployed, several times, so they can serve as mobile homes for disaster relief, construction in remote parts, etc.
This is only true if you are building 1 home. If you are building 25 or 100 homes, on-site construction is the way to go.
As I've said elsewhere in the thread, we're building one right now (https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR) and our hope is that this somehow is something we can reproduce, potentially on a cheap parcel of land, where people who can't otherwise afford a conventional house can afford these. We're definitely thinking it's for the not-quite impoverished, though, because when people have zero money/jobs you're relying on government to step in and fund/subsidize.
Of course lots of questions about entitlements for tiny house communities; affordability when financing isn't available; etc., but gotta start somewhere. Seems like there's a path to providing some long-lasting shelter for folks who otherwise would have to opt for single or double-wides or, worse, end up unhoused.
Once your design is done, they can easily spit the parts out in an automated fashion, the parts form the wall and roofing panels. The panels are easily trucked to the site and erected.
Totally get it if you say "go to the website" but if you're involved with one of these companies maybe you could answer that more readily than I can figure it out.
https://www.abiuk.co.uk/our-collection/the-roecliffe/
I'm not sure how much of that requirement comes from weight limits due to road transportation vs cost cutting vs target market, but those things are just horrible to spend time in. Houses need to feel solid.
It's laughable that people think they are even remotely comparable.