Factory-built housing hasn't taken off in California

Token reduction in labor costs are not going to solve housing to start with. It doesn't cost a 2 million dollars to build a house in California because we pay framers $1,000 an hour, it is property costs and a shitty political class blocking competition to their and their buddy's current investments.

I completed our modular home/factory built [Honomobo] single family home last year in CA. Over all it was worth it. The whole process took a year. It only took four hours to land and install on-site with a crane. The uphill battle was convincing my local city that it was viable, up to code and possible.

A developer in my hometown tried to build a manufactured/modular housing development. He got the approvals, demolished most of the existing structure that was on the parcel, purchased the modules from a supplier in Quebec and began to assemble them. Everyone was on board.

It was a complete disaster. The developer hired contractors who didn't know what they were doing and ignored stop work orders when the city learned of the problems, which included setting the modular units on their foundations without the proper permits and in violation of state building code. A separate fire department inspection deemed the structure "unsafe for interior firefighting or for interior response by first responders." The site has been abandoned for about 5 years, and the development company filed for bankruptcy.

I live in a double-wide 3-bedroom manufactured home in the Sierra Foothills.

It cost me less than half the median CA home price, with 7 acres, most of which I made walkable. I just had a nice morning walk through my "arboretum" of mostly manzanita plants. Real pretty ones, and I took some nice photos.

I could't move the home, nor place a new one in most locations, including the vicinity of my local downtown area. I checked, just for jollies.

Land costs drive CA housing. Look at charts or ask ... you know who.

Were the market functioning, there would be sufficient additional housing near jobs that investors could not sit on and rent-seek reselling property near those jobs as a source of profit.

The market is not free. It is heavily regulated by what can be built where when. There is a distinct lack of planning and regulation to protect consumers in this market.

> Factory-built housing has the potential to reduce hard (labor, material and equipment) costs by 10 to 25% — at least under the right conditions,

It's surprising to me that even the most optimistic estimate here is so modest.

I'm pretty sure we've had a collapse in trade hours available per capita at a rate that's far exceeded productivity gains. If a GC has a fixed labor pool that can build at either 200$/ft or 600$/ft, then labor constraints basically makes the housing market an open auction. Housing costs have gone up because you're bidding on the final cost overhead per foot. The result is the trades aren't paid more: just the house does. (Nicer finishes, etc.)

The modern construcion site is a factory. They move the entire factor to the job, but that doesn't mean it isn't a factory.

My hot take as some one who follows the space is that traditionally a big blocker of factory built housing has been unionized trades people who lived in the area of the housing developments. These trades people had purchased their homes prior to housing costs skyrocketing in California.

For them, blocking factory built housing meant they had a monopoly on the local housing development projects and easy commutes from their homes (which are protected from property tax increases by Prop 13) to the local job sites.

As these original local trades people have aged out of the workforce they are replaced by younger trades people who can't actually afford housing in the area face 1-2 hour commutes, I think there will be less resistance..

The thought of living in a huge home in Riverside or Fresno with a 10-20 minute commute and building in houses in a climate controlled, OSHA inspected building will start looking more attractive.

Isn't land use and zoning the real problem? (Interesting that there is no occurrence of "land" in the article.) Who cares how the houses are built when you have nowhere to put them anyway. The most recent housing developments are in the literal fucking middle of a hill where you have to drive for 30 minutes for any signs of human life.

What people do not understand about housing crisis:

1. Baby boomers biggest demographic group holding on to homes, that means a huge decrease in housing supply

Read it twice as that is the major obstacle, nothing more nothing less; and notice you cannot solve it by asking retirees to sell that home and downsize as over time they lost purchasing power to do exactly that move!

> have been pining for a better, faster and cheaper way to build homes.

And they've gotten it. Build quality and durability is the poorest it's been in decades. Do you really think I want to live in a 200 unit timber framed apartment building with the thinnest walls legally allowed by code?

> Henry Ford, but for housing

Do these people not live in houses? Or do they just assume that the lack of luxury is something people /want/?

> Will the state step in?

Haven't they done enough damage already?

What we're witnessing isn't just an issue of localizing policy failure or even state policy failure but systemic failure. And we just need to look at China for how to do this correctly.

China treats housing primarily as providing a place for people to live, not a speculative asset. In the West, housing is largely a speculative asset where everyone from investor companies to individual homeowners become incentivized to make housing scarcer and more expensive at every level. China, on the other hand, makes it more expensive and more difficult to own second and third homes.

Now you might be tempted to object and point to things like the Evergrande bubble. And that's actually evidence of success not failure. Xi Jinping quietly changed China's policy, starting around 2014 to focus on living not investment, and Evergrande was essentially allowed to default because housing access is a priority over investors.

You really see this plays out with trains.

Chengdu has the 5th largest (by rail length) metro system in the world. It didn't exist before 2010. China standardized rolling stock so there's no time-consuming and expensive procurement process and there are economies of scale.

China has spent less than $1 trillion building ~50,000km of high speed rail. They initially bought high speed trains from Germany and Japan (IIRC) but now they make their own. To compare, the California HSR, if it ever happens, is estimated to cost in excess of $130B.

The point I'm getting to is that in the West every aspect and level of this is treated as a profit opportunity, which ultimately is a wealth transfer from the government to some company. Procurement, maintenance, track building, land acquisition, track maintenance, station building and so on. These are all state enterprises.

Back to housing, IMHO nothing will solve this problem so long as housing remains a speculative asset. There'll simply bee too much resistance to change.

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