CRE guy here. A lot of this "productivity loss" is also due to government related staffing issues and bureaucracy. Most people are describing more complex building codes, so I'll add something new.
I had a project that was delayed by over a year during Covid because the city approved incorrect plans, came back and requested revisions, and then lost the physical plans (without us knowing until we checked in asking what the status was). This was almost a year delay and added cost overruns, etc. It also made the required rent higher to recoup those costs and try to be profitable (that deal will lose money). Remember, there's someone at the city working 9-5pm clocking in and out.. they are not impacted if the project is denied, delayed, etc... while the developer is incurring cost of capital of 7-10%.
Another example of bureaucracy: you have to go through a particular order of inspections when developing property. One of them includes elevator inspections. You have to have power before that, so that's another set of inspections.
IIRC, during Covid there were only something like half a dozen elevator inspections for the entire state of CA. The source below says there was 15 in 2019. If your elevator inspection is 2 months late... guess what, your project is going to be late.
Remember the modular startup Katerra that gobbled money from Softbank? I knew a developer who did one of their projects. He said Katerra would deliver the units on time, but the city's permitting process was so broken that they couldn't actually install or inspect these units. So they would have to find lots to store the material (+costs & +issues). Katerra's "value-add" was the speed of delivery would cut costs down, but in reality this was hard to achieve "on-site".
State and local governments are, as far as I can tell, simultaneously spending way too much money and are badly understaffed in certain areas. Sometimes even while appearing well-staffed, because there's some bottleneck elsewhere in the system (due to insufficient staffing there) preventing the efforts of an army of other frontline workers from being effective. Like the elevator inspector thing—you may have more than enough electrical inspectors but not enough elevator inspectors, so, the extra electrical inspectors can't improve the situation.
Of course the pay's shit, you're subject to all kinds of quality-of-work-life destroying whims of politicians at the top, the bureaucracy is as abusive and ineffective as stereotypes about bureaucracies would lead one to expect, and if you have an effective union shielding you from some of that, about half the politicians are constantly trying to weaken or eliminate that, plus trying to mess with your pension which is practically the only attractive thing about those jobs... so, no fucking wonder, really. Recent wage inflation has made all this stuff worse by making unresponsive government pay scales far less attractive than market-driven wages elsewhere, so systems and offices that were teetering before are now falling over.
>the politicians are constantly trying to weaken or eliminate that, plus trying to mess with your pension which is practically the only attractive thing about those jobs... so, no fucking wonder, really.
>Recent wage inflation has made all this stuff worse by making unresponsive government pay scales far less attractive than market-driven wages elsewhere, so systems and offices that were teetering before are now falling over.
These two are related. The pensions work for government workers because politicians get to advertise low taxes, voters get to enjoy lower taxes and punt the costs to future generations, and union bosses who are older, get to cash out before shit hits the fan (almost all governments have tiers of pensions, where older workers have more benefits than younger will ever have).
The solution is to get rid of ALL deferred compensation. Government pays employees the same as private does. No more muddying the waters with understated liability numbers and underfunding for deferred compensation. Then government can match wages in real time.
They might also simply be exerting too much oversight. The other way to reduce these pressures is to reduce workloads by simply caring less. I'm doing a remodel and I got three pages of comments that were 90% about minor annotation issues that won't make any difference to anything on the ground ever. But it burned tens of hours of plan checker time.
IIRC, during Covid there were only something like half a dozen elevator inspections for the entire state of CA. The source below says there was 15 in 2019. If your elevator inspection is 2 months late... guess what, your project is going to be late.
I couldn't believe this is true, so I actually read the article. Turns out, it's not true. It's multiple orders of magnitude off.
There were 15 inspectors for the city (not county) of LA when this article was written:
"In order to be up to code, each of the 20,974 elevators in the city of Los Angeles needs to be checked once a year.
But there are only 15 inspectors to do it."
Roughly half of the elevators were past due, which means they were inspecting 10k+ elevators per year just in the city of LA, let alone the entire state.
>...also due to government related staffing issues and bureaucracy. Most people are describing more complex building codes, so I'll add something new.
The two are interrelated. There'd be a lot less opportunity for error if building codes were cut in half. For example where I live there is a fair bit oil heating & therefore underground oil tanks. Building code requires that upon switching to something else, like natural gas, the submitted plans must include information about the planned removal or decommissioning of the tank.
This wasn't always a requirement, but now that it is that means someone has to check the plans to make sure that requirement is met. So, bureaucracy and building codes go hand in hand.
Of course in the case of residential oil tanks remaining in the ground, or not being properly decommissioned, there it can cause a variety of problems. Water contamination for example, a major concern for abandoned tanks in any area where residential well water is common. (and for other reasons)
I'm not arguing that bureaucracy as it exists is at all a model of efficiency, but you can't examine or solve that problem without understanding how we got there.
When i read the article i expected something like that to be the reason. Some paper pusher writing down rule books to follow. Then someone else who hasn't gotten his hands dirty in his life writes a report the workers are to blame for bad productivity.
When you say the deal will lose money, do you mean that (1) the project’s operating expenses exceed its income, (2) the building can’t be satisfactorily recapped after completion/stabilization, (3) the MOIC at exit will be less than 1.0x, (4) the investor won’t receive their full preferred return or (5) the sponsor won’t earn any promote?
I could see any of these as being a way to describe a deal that “loses money.”
I was modeling a 2-3% IRR on aggressive numbers when I last worked on it. It was acquired with a proforma 18% IRR. Whenever it's sold, it's going to return less than 1.0x. Not sure how bad the loss will be.
Even if it is recapped, the deal will require a significant cash-in refinance. If the business plan is saved and it takes you another 4 years to exit at a better number, that 4-yr now 8-yr deal results in say a low single digit IRR. Sponsor makes no money and the project sucks up even more resources & labor. But depends if your capital partner is willing to ride it out and if you can even recap where the numbers work
If, all along, you could have rented it out for more money ... why were you planning to rent it out for less money? I get that you wouldn't have to, but it appears that the "market rate rent" was higher than you initially anticipated.
As a corollary, assuming that you had initially planned on the highest rent that the market would bear...it seems that after a year of unexpected delays you'd most likely still choose to finish the project even at a loss. This is because all the loss would have already been sunk cost that you can't change anymore, and at the "original maximum rent the market would bear" you'd still make your IRR/ROI on the marginal future investment of finishing the construction.
So, assuming you couldn't raise the rent, you'd lose money either way, but you'd lose less money by finishing the construction vs. losing more money by abandoning the project entirely.
Pretty sure this is the right answer and calling this "worker productivity" seems a bit harsh. A "Pretty Good House" (book that was on the front page last week) includes insulation above and below the foundation slab, vapour barriers, double studs to break thermal bridges, complex window installation (again thermal bridges), air exchangers and heat pumps with ducts (or mini-splits).
New constructions (for cold zone), need to be air tight and that certainly comes at a cost in time as it is work to apply all the layers, run the conduits and whatnot.
I have no data to back this observation up, but everyone (especially in the media, but also in corporate life) is attacking "worker productivity" lately. Everyone's got a reason, but when you dig into them they all stink.
More build steps, more safety steps, less undocumented overtime, ballooning costs of benefits. And I would be surprised if logistics don't play a role as well. Used to be more buffer in our distribution systems for materials. In a scenario where warehouses have surplus goods sitting around, I expect it's easier to call in a favor and get an extra shipment of materials for the partially finished garage that didn't make it into the estimates.
Book may have been on the front page last week but I assure you very very few people in the US have insulation above and below their foundations or incredibly air tight houses.
As someone who works in construction, I have to say that rolling a few sheets of barrier or framing a couple extra walls really doesn't take that long or cost too much. It's on the order of $5k or less and a couple days work, for both materials and labor.
What does cost time and money is getting permits, planning approval, inspection, etc. Not that those are unimportant, but any delays are certainly not on the construction crew's behalf.
Don't forget all the roofline complexity for "aesthetics". Or higher pitches because they look nice too.
It'd be interesting to see these stats broken out by trade, with an appropriate unit (/sqft might make sense for roofing, but it doesn't for wall sheathing).
I'd think a good chunk of this is due to safety expectations as well. It's a lot easier to walk around a roof if you aren't concerned with fall protection.
I'm remodeling my place right now. You're totally right, the building codes are a lot more complex and there is more 'work' to do as a result. No more just hiding electrical boxes in the walls. Heh.
That said, the products being used have improved a lot. Things like PEX tubing for plumbing (instead of copper) and glue on walls for showers (over doing tile work), make some aspects go a lot faster.
Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention vinyl plank flooring... omg, so easy and the results look and function great.
The big builders like DR Horton and Lennar target build times of 100 days per home that meets minimum code requirements, which is pretty good productivity. A community of 100 homes can be up and running in 2 years.
Copper is superior. I specifically went out of my way to find a house with large swaths of the plumbing done with copper. Pretty neat to have anti-microbial properties built in.
PEX is terrible, pretty much every commercial brand has been shown to leech petrochemicals into your water. This varies a lot based on your municipal water supply's characteristics. Unfortunately cleaner water leeches more.
PEX saves megabuilders $$$ and plumbers time, but it's not good for you.
Those glue on walls seemed to be priced at “we know how much tiling costs”. £36m2 (cheapest I could find on a site similar to Home Depot) for some composite plastic seems crazy. They have some double that price too.
The great thing about PEX is that they made an expensive* tool that makes joining pipes like 90% less skill-intensive.
I'd love to see something similar done for electric wiring. I'm picturing something like an electrical box that you can directly connect Romex that's been stripped with a special tool, and then a circuit-breaker-style snap-in for the actual receptacle. The parts/tools would cost more but might dramatically speed up the installation.
*relatively expensive, especially in the early days.
Isn’t the real headline then that building construction technology hasn’t improved at the same rate as other manufacturing tech?
For example, cars today are orders of magnitude more complicated than 50 years ago, but due to more efficient manufacturing technology, the auto industry has far higher productivity per employee than it did 50 years ago.
I believe this is why we're seeing some of the industry starting to experiment with pre-fabbed homes that are modular but can be constructed using the automation we see in car manufacturing.
The weak link in creating ever more complex homes, with ever more stringent building codes, at faster rates, is to remove the "humans with nail guns and drills" from the construction process.
At some point, us meat sacks are the weak link in optimizing an industry. Humans can only go so fast. That's why (as you've said) we've seen massive gains in productivity for other manufacturing industries.
Building construction technology _has_ improved, but, particularly for residential stuff, people do not care for some of the improvements. You could build Soviet-style modular apartments, but, well, no-one really wants that.
I would imagine that automation plays a role. And maybe car manufacturers can exercise more control over assembly lines, and don't have to worry about unforeseen environmental factors. Of course, that is just a guess, I don't know enough about construction or car manufacturing to really say.
There's the theory that building codes are used similarly (and complimentarily) to zoning laws to limit the supply of new housing (and therefore raise property values).
A great example being fire walls and mandatory self-latching doors between garages and living spaces - definitely a logical thing (cars and their gas are flammable, so let's isolate them from the house).
When you look at the data [0], garage fires are 2% of residential fires because cars don't really catch on fire in garages (fires happen in garages, but usually because of intentionally set fires getting out of control)
So now, in the midst of a housing affordability crisis (or a the end of a great run for real estate, depending on your outlook), we have construction workers using special fire-resistant drywall (that must be cut specially and cannot have holes in it), placing solid steel doors, and generally spending a lot of hours and materials building spaces that people don't even live in, when really, adding smoke detectors in garages solves the problem.
The 2% is a bit misleading because the fire severity depends on how well it's contained. ~50% of fires are "confined" to an object, mostly cooking fires inside pots. Garages are 5% of non-confined fires, which is similar to living rooms (6%) and attics (5%) [0]. The numbers also go slightly up when apartment buildings are excluded[1], taking garage fires to 6% of non-confined residential fires.
This even extends to stuff added to builds that are mandated by law and have little reasonable justification. For example, a city might demand all new apartment units need to have a balcony, and all new apartment buildings might need to have some open courtyard space. Now you've increased the cost per unit by a huge amount by mandating these balconies and also the unrentable voidspace.
I have no idea how much it affects the data used to make that calculation, nor how much is its relevance in the US, but here (EU, Italy) besides the building code improvements there has been a very noticeable increase in amount/complexity of electric and hydraulic/heating/conditioning installments.
> Nail guns can't make up for building code and higher finish work demands. It's not uncommon to see 6 or 7 layers in sheathing today.
Yeah pretty much this I suspect. The paper doesn't propose that more regulations and complex code is why it's harder to build things today. And that's not a bad thing - code is a great thing since it sets a standard.
Houses from 100 years ago, a carpenter could just make game time decisions regarding things that are highly scrutinized today like staircase run/rise, doorway height, etc. If you gut an old house it's amazing how simple they are.
The old saying "they don't build them like they used to" applies here. We don't because we can't and when they did they overbuilt them because they were simple and it wasn't documented what the build had to be.
Also everything that is built needs regular inspection while in progress.
When the frame is put up it is typically inspected to ensure it meets code and that correct fasteners and brackets are used. Until the inspection is done you don't see roofing and electrical finished up. Then you have the electrical and plumbing on top the foundation. And when that is in its inspected again. Also heating cooling piping. Then fiber insulation is put in walls, then you have your drywall installed. Then you have the different finish teams come in. Finish plumbing, cabinetry, tiling, floors. And then another round of builder inspection. Then you get to the city and bank inspections.
Any one of the inspections or the specilaty teams running slow can push the whole project back. If your AC ducts aren't in you can't drywall for example.
Homes are architecturally more complicated than the ranches and bungalows of the past as well. This increases the time spent on each job significantly.
> And second, the authors describe the curious fact that producers located in more-productive areas do not grow at expected rates. Indeed, rather than construction inputs flowing to areas where they are more productive, the activity share of these areas either stagnates or even falls. The authors suggest that this problem with allocative efficiency may accentuate the aggregate productivity problem for the industry.
This is a nice way to say "NIMBYs have made sure building anything in areas where there are jobs is a herculean task"
Houses were much simpler 50 years ago. The building codes have changed a lot since then and modern houses have added construction complexity with better waterproofing, air sealing, fire proofing, bracing, and more advanced mechanical systems.
However many modern homes use inferior material for the job comparing to the older homes in the same area. Probably to cut cost. I'm not sure if it was also the case for older homes built in the 50s/60s though.
It really depends by what you mean by inferior though. Yes, old homes (pre-WW2) were built using old growth wood that is rot and insect resistant. And they overbuilt the structures in many ways. Of course we have some selection bias as the old homes that were not built well (of which there are many) are simply not standing any longer. So the old homes we see today were probably built very well with the materials of the time.
Saying that, those materials (old growth wood) aren't around anymore. I think the industry went through a bad patch from the 1950s through the early 90s where A LOT of construction was bad and we didn't really know what we were doing with the sudden change to engineered materials. We didn't really understand vapor barriers because old homes didn't have them and didn't need them. They dried themselves out because they were so drafty and the old wood wouldn't rot easily. So when we moved to rapidly grown pine and engineered wood and insulation we didn't account for moisture very well and those homes have rot issues. Then we came up with water barriers but didn't account for water vapor and moisture would slowly get trapped over time and begin to rot the structures.
However, today we have an excellent understanding of what make for a quality dwelling. We understand insulation extremely well - where to put it, what type to use where, how to keep it dry), we understand vapor barriers very well and they are made to block liquid water but allow water vapor to pass outside, etc. Windows have excellent R-values today compared to old homes as well.
But yes, you can build cheap homes today that are crap. Code does reel you in a bit but I've heard of code in some areas being so bad it would allow you to sheath a house in cardboard essentially. Insane.
Agreed. Although it's very surprising to me that the efficiencies of mass production haven't gone to housing. They are often still created by manual labor instead of assembling prefabricated modules. I think it should be possible to build panels that are well insulated and have all the needed wiring and everything else already built in.
Housing is a mass customization market more than a mass production one. Most people don’t want to live in a modern Levittown. They want some space, but they don’t want the exact same set choices in their house as 1000+ other people have made.
I do not see why it “should” be more cost effective. Moving big, costly things requires big, costly equipment and expertise. And losses can be higher in the event of a failure.
Structural Integrated Panels (SIPs) and Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) are two examples. SIPs are made from compressed foam with pressed wood on either side and are precut in the factory to fit together at the job site. ICFs are basically giant foam legos that you assemble together and then fill with concrete.
I find both your parent and your comment to be the obvious answers for why "productivity" has dropped. People are probably just as, if not more, productive. It just takes more work to complete a single house/office/job due to both worker safety and building safety.
Having some experience in the field, the idea that migrant/undocumented/illegal/etc workers are spoiling the workforce is pretty absurd (as is suggested in a few other comments). There were plenty of terrible workers that I knew to be or suspected to be in that category but the rate that they were bad was no different than anyone else.
Even better, we could base hiring on solving word search puzzles containing workplace words to select the best of the best construction workers, and maybe some trivia tests.
Speaking specifically about the construction industry in California, because I am very familiar with that topic:
Labor is less skilled, because of huge supply of undocumented workers.
Also building codes and requirements for building safety have increased tremendously. Building a house in CA is WAY more complex than it used to be, since there have been so many requirements added to building codes over the years. Arguably CA houses are better built than they used to be, but the flip side is that it takes more time and experience to build one correctly.
> Arguably CA houses are better built than they used to be
This is inarguable. The aftermath of the major earthquakes of the past have had an very noticeable effect on building safety and the effect on damage done has been measurable. I can't imagine there aren't similar trends in other places for their own local natural disasters.
> And second, the authors describe the curious fact that producers located in more-productive areas do not grow at expected rates. Indeed, rather than construction inputs flowing to areas where they are more productive, the activity share of these areas either stagnates or even falls. The authors suggest that this problem with allocative efficiency may accentuate the aggregate productivity problem for the industry.
This is clearly accurate - people are not buying the cheapest housing in the middle of nowhere. Instead, the most money is spent in cities which are already built up and are more difficult to develop further.
Readit News
I had a project that was delayed by over a year during Covid because the city approved incorrect plans, came back and requested revisions, and then lost the physical plans (without us knowing until we checked in asking what the status was). This was almost a year delay and added cost overruns, etc. It also made the required rent higher to recoup those costs and try to be profitable (that deal will lose money). Remember, there's someone at the city working 9-5pm clocking in and out.. they are not impacted if the project is denied, delayed, etc... while the developer is incurring cost of capital of 7-10%.
Another example of bureaucracy: you have to go through a particular order of inspections when developing property. One of them includes elevator inspections. You have to have power before that, so that's another set of inspections.
IIRC, during Covid there were only something like half a dozen elevator inspections for the entire state of CA. The source below says there was 15 in 2019. If your elevator inspection is 2 months late... guess what, your project is going to be late.
https://laist.com/news/elevator-inspections-los-angeles
Remember the modular startup Katerra that gobbled money from Softbank? I knew a developer who did one of their projects. He said Katerra would deliver the units on time, but the city's permitting process was so broken that they couldn't actually install or inspect these units. So they would have to find lots to store the material (+costs & +issues). Katerra's "value-add" was the speed of delivery would cut costs down, but in reality this was hard to achieve "on-site".
Of course the pay's shit, you're subject to all kinds of quality-of-work-life destroying whims of politicians at the top, the bureaucracy is as abusive and ineffective as stereotypes about bureaucracies would lead one to expect, and if you have an effective union shielding you from some of that, about half the politicians are constantly trying to weaken or eliminate that, plus trying to mess with your pension which is practically the only attractive thing about those jobs... so, no fucking wonder, really. Recent wage inflation has made all this stuff worse by making unresponsive government pay scales far less attractive than market-driven wages elsewhere, so systems and offices that were teetering before are now falling over.
>Recent wage inflation has made all this stuff worse by making unresponsive government pay scales far less attractive than market-driven wages elsewhere, so systems and offices that were teetering before are now falling over.
These two are related. The pensions work for government workers because politicians get to advertise low taxes, voters get to enjoy lower taxes and punt the costs to future generations, and union bosses who are older, get to cash out before shit hits the fan (almost all governments have tiers of pensions, where older workers have more benefits than younger will ever have).
The solution is to get rid of ALL deferred compensation. Government pays employees the same as private does. No more muddying the waters with understated liability numbers and underfunding for deferred compensation. Then government can match wages in real time.
Shouldn't be a mystery.
In many states and localities a massive portion of spending goes to pensions.
I couldn't believe this is true, so I actually read the article. Turns out, it's not true. It's multiple orders of magnitude off.
There were 15 inspectors for the city (not county) of LA when this article was written:
"In order to be up to code, each of the 20,974 elevators in the city of Los Angeles needs to be checked once a year.
But there are only 15 inspectors to do it."
Roughly half of the elevators were past due, which means they were inspecting 10k+ elevators per year just in the city of LA, let alone the entire state.
The two are interrelated. There'd be a lot less opportunity for error if building codes were cut in half. For example where I live there is a fair bit oil heating & therefore underground oil tanks. Building code requires that upon switching to something else, like natural gas, the submitted plans must include information about the planned removal or decommissioning of the tank.
This wasn't always a requirement, but now that it is that means someone has to check the plans to make sure that requirement is met. So, bureaucracy and building codes go hand in hand.
Of course in the case of residential oil tanks remaining in the ground, or not being properly decommissioned, there it can cause a variety of problems. Water contamination for example, a major concern for abandoned tanks in any area where residential well water is common. (and for other reasons)
I'm not arguing that bureaucracy as it exists is at all a model of efficiency, but you can't examine or solve that problem without understanding how we got there.
I could see any of these as being a way to describe a deal that “loses money.”
Even if it is recapped, the deal will require a significant cash-in refinance. If the business plan is saved and it takes you another 4 years to exit at a better number, that 4-yr now 8-yr deal results in say a low single digit IRR. Sponsor makes no money and the project sucks up even more resources & labor. But depends if your capital partner is willing to ride it out and if you can even recap where the numbers work
If, all along, you could have rented it out for more money ... why were you planning to rent it out for less money? I get that you wouldn't have to, but it appears that the "market rate rent" was higher than you initially anticipated.
As a corollary, assuming that you had initially planned on the highest rent that the market would bear...it seems that after a year of unexpected delays you'd most likely still choose to finish the project even at a loss. This is because all the loss would have already been sunk cost that you can't change anymore, and at the "original maximum rent the market would bear" you'd still make your IRR/ROI on the marginal future investment of finishing the construction.
So, assuming you couldn't raise the rent, you'd lose money either way, but you'd lose less money by finishing the construction vs. losing more money by abandoning the project entirely.
"It also made the required rent higher to recoup those costs and try to be profitable (that deal will lose money)."
required rent =/= planned rent =/= actual rent
Higher costs than expected can easily cause a project that would be profitable to be a loss.
Average house size has probably doubled in the last 50 years.
Nail guns can't make up for building code and higher finish work demands. It's not uncommon to see 6 or 7 layers in sheathing today.
New constructions (for cold zone), need to be air tight and that certainly comes at a cost in time as it is work to apply all the layers, run the conduits and whatnot.
What does cost time and money is getting permits, planning approval, inspection, etc. Not that those are unimportant, but any delays are certainly not on the construction crew's behalf.
It'd be interesting to see these stats broken out by trade, with an appropriate unit (/sqft might make sense for roofing, but it doesn't for wall sheathing).
I'd think a good chunk of this is due to safety expectations as well. It's a lot easier to walk around a roof if you aren't concerned with fall protection.
That said, the products being used have improved a lot. Things like PEX tubing for plumbing (instead of copper) and glue on walls for showers (over doing tile work), make some aspects go a lot faster.
Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention vinyl plank flooring... omg, so easy and the results look and function great.
PEX is terrible, pretty much every commercial brand has been shown to leech petrochemicals into your water. This varies a lot based on your municipal water supply's characteristics. Unfortunately cleaner water leeches more.
PEX saves megabuilders $$$ and plumbers time, but it's not good for you.
I'd love to see something similar done for electric wiring. I'm picturing something like an electrical box that you can directly connect Romex that's been stripped with a special tool, and then a circuit-breaker-style snap-in for the actual receptacle. The parts/tools would cost more but might dramatically speed up the installation.
*relatively expensive, especially in the early days.
For example, cars today are orders of magnitude more complicated than 50 years ago, but due to more efficient manufacturing technology, the auto industry has far higher productivity per employee than it did 50 years ago.
The weak link in creating ever more complex homes, with ever more stringent building codes, at faster rates, is to remove the "humans with nail guns and drills" from the construction process.
At some point, us meat sacks are the weak link in optimizing an industry. Humans can only go so fast. That's why (as you've said) we've seen massive gains in productivity for other manufacturing industries.
A great example being fire walls and mandatory self-latching doors between garages and living spaces - definitely a logical thing (cars and their gas are flammable, so let's isolate them from the house).
When you look at the data [0], garage fires are 2% of residential fires because cars don't really catch on fire in garages (fires happen in garages, but usually because of intentionally set fires getting out of control)
So now, in the midst of a housing affordability crisis (or a the end of a great run for real estate, depending on your outlook), we have construction workers using special fire-resistant drywall (that must be cut specially and cannot have holes in it), placing solid steel doors, and generally spending a lot of hours and materials building spaces that people don't even live in, when really, adding smoke detectors in garages solves the problem.
[0] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v14i12.pd...
[0] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v21i2.pdf
[1] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v21i6.pdf
[1] https://fee.org/articles/new-homes-today-have-twice-the-squa...
Yeah pretty much this I suspect. The paper doesn't propose that more regulations and complex code is why it's harder to build things today. And that's not a bad thing - code is a great thing since it sets a standard.
Houses from 100 years ago, a carpenter could just make game time decisions regarding things that are highly scrutinized today like staircase run/rise, doorway height, etc. If you gut an old house it's amazing how simple they are.
The old saying "they don't build them like they used to" applies here. We don't because we can't and when they did they overbuilt them because they were simple and it wasn't documented what the build had to be.
When the frame is put up it is typically inspected to ensure it meets code and that correct fasteners and brackets are used. Until the inspection is done you don't see roofing and electrical finished up. Then you have the electrical and plumbing on top the foundation. And when that is in its inspected again. Also heating cooling piping. Then fiber insulation is put in walls, then you have your drywall installed. Then you have the different finish teams come in. Finish plumbing, cabinetry, tiling, floors. And then another round of builder inspection. Then you get to the city and bank inspections.
Any one of the inspections or the specilaty teams running slow can push the whole project back. If your AC ducts aren't in you can't drywall for example.
What do you mean by this?
This is a nice way to say "NIMBYs have made sure building anything in areas where there are jobs is a herculean task"
Saying that, those materials (old growth wood) aren't around anymore. I think the industry went through a bad patch from the 1950s through the early 90s where A LOT of construction was bad and we didn't really know what we were doing with the sudden change to engineered materials. We didn't really understand vapor barriers because old homes didn't have them and didn't need them. They dried themselves out because they were so drafty and the old wood wouldn't rot easily. So when we moved to rapidly grown pine and engineered wood and insulation we didn't account for moisture very well and those homes have rot issues. Then we came up with water barriers but didn't account for water vapor and moisture would slowly get trapped over time and begin to rot the structures.
However, today we have an excellent understanding of what make for a quality dwelling. We understand insulation extremely well - where to put it, what type to use where, how to keep it dry), we understand vapor barriers very well and they are made to block liquid water but allow water vapor to pass outside, etc. Windows have excellent R-values today compared to old homes as well.
But yes, you can build cheap homes today that are crap. Code does reel you in a bit but I've heard of code in some areas being so bad it would allow you to sheath a house in cardboard essentially. Insane.
Having some experience in the field, the idea that migrant/undocumented/illegal/etc workers are spoiling the workforce is pretty absurd (as is suggested in a few other comments). There were plenty of terrible workers that I knew to be or suspected to be in that category but the rate that they were bad was no different than anyone else.
*George, instead of just putting up this wall, can you have a ticket and close it for every board you put up?*
"Worker injuries and illnesses are down—from 10.9 incidents per 100 workers in 1972 to 2.7 per 100 in 2020."
https://www.osha.gov/data/commonstats
Labor is less skilled, because of huge supply of undocumented workers.
Also building codes and requirements for building safety have increased tremendously. Building a house in CA is WAY more complex than it used to be, since there have been so many requirements added to building codes over the years. Arguably CA houses are better built than they used to be, but the flip side is that it takes more time and experience to build one correctly.
This is inarguable. The aftermath of the major earthquakes of the past have had an very noticeable effect on building safety and the effect on damage done has been measurable. I can't imagine there aren't similar trends in other places for their own local natural disasters.
This is clearly accurate - people are not buying the cheapest housing in the middle of nowhere. Instead, the most money is spent in cities which are already built up and are more difficult to develop further.