I remember coming across a video of a product from Europe where the entire wall assembly is sold as one piece (outer wall, insulation, inner wall). I'm not sure if this type of product is common in Europe.

If you then have wire conduits and junction boxes built-in, you are a lot closer to a livable home. Perhaps floor assemblies with hookups for plumbing.

I'm not sure why these things aren't standardized to be the point of plug-n-play. A lot less work for the tradespeople maybe.

Very popular here in Austria. And they are mostly very good quality. I have friends who built one of these "Fertighäuser" (prefab houses) and even though cheaper than a custom build they are really impressive. The walls are delivered just as you describe.

https://www.liebfertighaus.at/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Ado...

https://www.google.com/search?q=fertighaus+teile&tbm=isch

There are some efforts now being made to reduce the amount of concrete and build with more sustainable wood.

Good quality prefab panels from eastern Europe installed by incompetent foreign companies with no incentive to stand behind their work result in occasional sob stories here in Switzerland.

You get what you pay for.

Here in Switzerland, you are likely to pay through the nose for a mediocre product / service. Caveat emptor, particularly since consumer laws are weak.

There's a rather huge prefab industry here in Estonia. Starting from small pre-fab components (such as a single small wall section) to some houses that are essentially 90% completed in the factory.

If you have the foundation already done, then the assembly of the rest of the house takes around 3-5 days

Random promo video of one company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqAxoBAE2pc.

Looks pretty, but how about fire, excessive snowfall or wind, rodents and pests, flood/water leaks etc?

Well for one, if it didn't stand excessive snowfall you'd find out pretty quickly in Estonia.

What’s the price for prefab like? Their website wouldn’t say.

This is extremely common in the Netherlands. Also very well sorted out these days. My parents' company used to assemble these. A specialised contractor digs and pours a concrete foundation for the walls and once those would be cured a crane, a loader truck and a crew of maybe 3-6 people would on average have a new house ready every 3 days (walls, floors, roofs, wiring, piping), 'ready' being very close to how they're sold to individual owners.

A prefab house design will typically be replicated in several projects / cities, usually with a few customisation options. Different prefab factories have different levels of standardisation and automation. The prefab production lines I designed long ago for example used fully parametric designs to offer standard concepts sized to fit. At the time (~10-15 years ago) a novelty, by now must be pretty standard.

Sounds really interesting.

Do you have any links to learn more about your prefab designs and a company that assembles these designs?

Not in the Netherlands but in Sweden one of the biggest house makers is Älvsbyhus, you can select a base model (begin by selecting number of floors/layout, then size) and customize colors and some details online.

https://www.alvsbyhus.se/vara-hus/

Basically trailers or RLBs. We have those…

I built a house like this in US. The company is called Bensonwood / Unity up here in NH. It is not cheaper but it is faster and higher quality. From slab to dried in house in 4 days. Passive house level airtightness and insulation.

Wall assembly is zip->10 inch blown in insulation around 10inch I-Joist -> OSB -> 2x3 interior wall studs to hang your sheetrock off of and run utilities. (All pre-drilled for faster running of pex and conduit.)

You do have to do all the interior work after, though.

I still dont understand why people keep talking about "House". When 90% of area that needs urgent "housing" are in needs of Tower Blocks / High Rise Residential Buildings. We Need to find a way to quickly and cost effectively build a lot of mid to high quality apartments. Better heat isolation. Network Pipes ready rather than relying on WiFi.

Note: Yes, I know zoning and planning etc are still the biggest hurdle.

Because house is cool and has integrated comfort. No neighbors, no useless administration.

Building tall buildings is not a rocket science. Look at Burj Khalifa‘s construction: clever designed crane, lots of rebar and extremely powerful concrete pumps. And it’s really fast. One year to build enough space for thousands of people.

>And it’s really fast. One year to build enough space for thousands of people.

Building Tall building isn't Rocket Science, but building them fast, high quality ( comparatively speaking ) and cheap has not been done yet. And one year to build space enough for thousands of people is not my definition of fast. At least building "On Site".

From what I have found watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eIxUuuJX7Y and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXZ_0wOY96E is that very tall buildings are cool only for the very rich but they are not very liveable.

Burj Khalifa does not have a severage system. Trucks are used to take the human waste away every single day from burj khalifa.

Mmmm, there are a few examples of prefab high-rises that have gone up in weeks or months. I guess high-quality is something of a shifting bar, but if you prefab all the pieces, build them at volume, and have enough demand to justify that volume, it's been done before. That's how all the plattenbau (ugly commie concrete towerblocks went up in eastern europe) got done.

I figure the problem is basically politics. Liberal democracies typically do planning by asking 'stakeholders' (e.g. business owners, home owners, etc) what they think about proposals. Since you're asking the stakeholders in an asset class whether or not you should build more of their asset, usually nearby, the answer is usually a lawsuit.

Do you have any links on that? Most of the reference I found, Pre-Fabs only works for about 10-15 Floor buildings.

It's kind of a genre: watch like, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhLk7L1B_fE, and you can see a bunch of others in suggested links.

From what I gather, a industrial-scale air-conditioning unit company basically broke the space open, since they were essentially doing large scale prefab construction already.

Just think about it from first principles. You can build large structures out of prefabricated parts, and if you design the parts sufficiently well, it's possible to fit them together fast. The problems are stuff like weight (transport costs start to dominate), volume (if there's not enough demand for skyscrapers, you don't want to be sitting on a skyscraper factory), etc.

In East China, they have a lot of structural advantages: a huge, hugely dense population, a government that loves big construction projects, a massive housing market, a great deal of experience in doing civic infrastructure fast, etc.

There must’ve been years and years of design work behind the Burj Khalifa, no?

Should have taken more than one year so they wouldn't have to haul away sewage by truck.

https://inhabitat.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-the-burj-k...

Because Americans regard living in anything other than a detached house as a failure.

Well would you want to share a wall and roof with most Americans?

Idiotic comment. Sharing walls with other humans simply brings different challenges, but also benefits…bringing nationalities into is completely unnecessary.

What would possess someone to say this? You think there is something different about americans or that americans don't live in apartments?

I just go to Walmart often.

And the wonderful solitude and quiet of my old house in a dying town contrasts sharply with my college years living in apartments.

I do think there is something different that leads Americans to desire homes and consider apartment living a failure.

Some of it is the rhetoric about owning a home being part of the American Dream. Some of it is about the nature of the US housing market being a such an avenue to wealth (Americans have a disproportionate amount of their wealth wrapped up in their home). Some of it may be the individualistic mindset.

American apartments in general are shoddily constructed and thus are a lower quality of living. There's no getting around that. Walls that are paper thin with no insulation so you can listen in on your neighbor's phone calls. Poorly done ceilings/floors so the upstairs neighbors' kids running around wakes you up in the morning. Single pane glass so heating/cooling bill is expensive, and the sounds of the street are audible throughout the day (you never want to live above a bus stop). Neighbors from all walks of life, which can be a nightmare if those walks of life include drug dealers and addicts and domestic violence, with norecourse from the police. No elevators up to the fifth floor. No trash pickup for large items. Shite public transportation and no good parking options. Horrible corporate landlord management company to contend with.

I would love to live in an apartment complex in, say, Sweden, but there's a huge cultural component to apartment living in America that would have to change before it matches apartment living elsewhere. Even if building codes changed tonight it would still wouldn't address the issues of city design/public transportation that hurt the very notion of living that tightly together to begin with. It's just not at all convenient to live in an apartment complex that's miles away from the nearest public transportation hub or even a strip mall.

> Walls that are paper thin with no insulation so you can listen in on your neighbor's phone calls.

These sound like wild assumptions with nothing to back them up.

https://basc.pnnl.gov/code-compliance/air-sealing-and-insula...

"Many builders are insulating these walls fully for sound proofing purposes per the International Building Code (IBC), Section 1207, Sound Transmission walls, partitions, and floor/ceiling assemblies separating dwelling units from each other must have a sound transmission class (STC) of not less than 50 for airborne noise when tested in accordance with ASTM E 90."

Also the comment I replied to said 'americans' not 'in america'

Home ownership rate in the US had been over 60% for a long time. Because of that there is a high chance that your apartment neighbors grew up in a detached home and have no habits that apartment dwellers teach their children. Combined with the fact that apartments are usually temporary accommodations this can produce very disruptive neighbors.

This is not unique to America, all the countries that went through rapid urbanization that moved millions of former farmers from detached homes into city apartments have an archetype of a rural rube unable to accommodate to communal living with strangers.

Apartments do not have to be noisy. A well built apartment with concrete floors and concrete interior walls greatly reduces noise. There are many other things that can be done to reduce noise, double pane (or triple) windows, carpeted floors, apartment noise policy.

Quite the broad generalization! What say you about American cities? The Americans living there are viewed as failures by other 5, as well as themselves?

How would I let my pets run around in the garden? Where do I put my wood fired pizza oven? How do I teach my kids how to grow potatoes and build things? Where do I put the koi pond?

There is perhaps some platonic ideal of an apartment where you can live a similar quality of life to a house. But in the reality that we actually live in currently, living in a house usually has a much better quality of life so it's natural that people would prefer it.

It depends what you want from a home. I'd prefer a house than my current apartment, but a different set of preferences makes apartments perfect (and more people in apartments necessarily make it easier to supply houses for those of us who prefer houses).

Europeans don't need those things

I am European.

What a ridiculous generalization. Everyone has their own preferences, needs, and wants.

There are places that do many of those things, but in a community format.

My SO and still think back to how great it was to have an apartment with a park next door where we could let our dogs run. They had more space there than our current home.

I've never seen a public wood fired pizza oven but community bbq's were pretty standard at our apartments in the past.

We have a community projects place that gives us the opportunity to do all kinds of woodworking (my personal hobby) without spending tons on equipment. Plus there's always people there more competent that I can learn from.

I think what you're talking about is certainly possible, but it takes a concerted approach to meet the needs of a community. I tend to think people in the US prefer housing because there is a much more individualistic mindset.

So I'm actually British, not American, but I think we largely have similar attitudes towards desiring a house here. I think most European countries do too, really, once you get past a certain age. I'm not sure about how Asians are on average, but most Asians I know would certainly prefer to live in a house if they're past their mid 30s.

There are a few European countries where >50% of people live in flats: Spain for example. In Spain, however, the reason most people say they live in a flat isn't out of preference, it's because houses are too expensive. The other thing to note is that the European countries where flat habitation is popular tend to have interesting reasons behind it. In many cases, it's because they were built during the Soviet era.

I do think those community amenities are valuable, whether people live in houses or flats. I live in London, in an area with quite a good sense of community. I have an allotment, help at the community garden, live next to a very well maintained park, etc. but it really isn't the same as having your own private space. For example with the building stuff, I used to go to a Hackerspace, but I'm getting a lot more done now that I have a bunch of equipment at home. Simply getting things to and from my old Hackerspace was a nightmare without a car. Shared spaces also have rules which may not be compatible with what you're trying to do. My allotment doesn't allow irrigation systems, for example, so my little automated irrigation project in my garden wouldn't go down too well there!

Plus there are all these small things like talking to my neighbours over the wall, being able to easily get my bicycle in and out, not having to walk up 12 flights of stairs because someone is moving in and has the lift blocked, etc. One of my favourite things to do in this past warm summer was to just work outside in my garden, in the breeze, with my laptop plugged into my outdoor sockets, fast WiFi and the ability to just pop into the kitchen for drinks.

I'm not saying flats shouldn't be made more tolerable - but aside from density meaning you can live closer to the centre, is there any case where a flat is really a better quality of life?

Also an interesting thing to consider is: how different is building vertically with elevators, versus building horizontally with trains, anyway?

There are plenty of high density apartments that have public and private gardens available. But yeah, not something that will ever be available to everyone simply because there is only one ground floor.

In general, though, density doesn't mean that you can't have yards. Do you need a front yard, back yard, and two side yards to set up a wood fired pizza oven, grow potatoes, and build things? Nope. Just a backyard could be fine. So you could share an exterior wall with your neighbors, stick your front door right up against the street, and do all the same things as a freestanding house but at lower cost and higher density. If townhouses were more of a thing, you could have everything you want, AND not have to drive. The only problem is zoning laws.

My house is actually semi-detached with a driveway and flower beds, rather than detached, but there is one huge disadvantage to town houses: it's practically impossible to get equipment into your garden, which makes a lot of landscaping really, really difficult. Even just getting forks and soil into your garden is bound to make a mess of your house. Terraces (like town houses but with front gardens or driveways) are very popular in the UK, but most people will ultimately prefer a semi-detached for that reason.

An interesting approach we used to have was where rather than adjoining gardens at the back, we'd put an path down the back of the townhouses between the gardens, with a door into each garden, so you could easily walk/cycle and, if needed, get equipment into your back garden. Apparently we stopped doing that because those alleys turned into major crime and antisocial behaviour hot spots, and people stopped buying houses with alley access due to people constantly jumping your fence and nicking anything in your garden that wasn't tied down.

Where I grew up was like a townhouse/semi-detached hybrid - the upper two floors were terraced, but at ground level there was a car garage that connected the street and back garden. A lot of people don't like that design because it's associated with council homes (mine was a council home), but I actually thought it was a best of both worlds.

This! Honestly, this is the reason that I want a house. In reality, I don't want the house, but a bit more space that isn't just in my apartment. A little space out back for if I want to dabble with grilling. A basement or garage if want to start a larger project. These are things you can't easily do in a standard apartment. That's also why I think the next stage of development will be more townhome focused. Think UK row houses, where you have a little backyard and maybe a garage, but not detached.

Your conception of quality of life is not universal.

Assume I have a detached home in the suburbs. How am I going to walk to the grocery store when it's miles away? How do I live without a car when there's no public transit? How do I get access to job opportunities, cultural experiences, dining options, and other amenities that come with close proximity to an urban core?

If your answer is "But my detached home is near the urban core!" then you're fortunate, but as large American cities have shown us that doesn't scale.

In the UK, we don't often to have miles of suburbs without a grocery store. That's a separate choice around car centricity that the US has made.

I live in London, in a suburb, but within a 10 minute walk, I have multiple pubs, doctors, dentists, restaurants, small supermarkets, library, community garden and - most importantly - a train station that takes me into central London in about 10 minutes.

The way we structure housing here tends to be arranged around lots of smaller satellite town and villages connected to a large city centre. Big cities like London will provide trains for commuters and going "out out", but in a smaller town you often live a lot of your social life more locally and might commute to work by car.

The other thing in the UK is our houses aren't particularly large. A terrace home might not be more than 50% bigger than an apartment, but you get a garden, driveway and actually own some real land.

> I live in London, in a suburb, but within a 10 minute walk

I would dispute that "in London" actually counts as a suburbs. The real suburbs (the ones we'd need to build if everyone lived in a detached house) would be way out.

I hate apartment living. People on all sides, you have to live like a mouse, no room for any activities.

Have you thought about bunk beds? I saw a documentary awhile ago where it was discovered that switching to bunk beds creates ample room for activities.

I mean like a garden, a pool, a wood/metal working shop, gun range, kids play area, badminton court etc.

Are you saying you want access to each of those or you want your own private resource for each of those? They are very different questions with different answers.

Own private for each of those like I do right now…

That’s wonderful but I don’t think it’s representative. It’s basically just a weird flex at a certain point to use that as a societal goal post.

I’d love to have my own airport and marina, but I’m not sure that’s the goals we should be using to create a society.

You better tell that to the people living in the county with the highest per capita income. Message to Manhattan residents -- you're failures!

Being that close to other people sucks, and so do housing associations.

You get neighbors screaming and fighting, playing music at 2am, apartments turned into meth labs with explosive toxic chemicals, dangerous predators can be right next door, people who don't take care of themselves and give your whole unit rats/bedbugs/insects, people who don't know you should fix water issues and cause mold, roof assessments that can be tens of thousands of dollars surprise! That you're forced to pay...

It isn't some fairy land where we all love plants and hold hands in our communal space - living close to other people IS failure.

This is all stuff that happens with houses also. I've had a house down the street blow up, dealt with shitty neighbors blasting music at all hours (or fighting/insulting each other), had my house flood due to neighbor's construction. And have to deal with property line issues on top of it all.

We live in a society, and that means dealing with people. Even if you live in a place where the nearest neighbor is half a mile away, you're going to have issues with someone. We used to have issues with people riding dirt bikes and trucks on our land, kids breaking in to have parties in our woods, people with horses who shit on the streets, and lots of illegal dumping.

The world is full of shit heads.

One person in your apartment complex is filthy and has bugs, everyone in your building has bugs. I don't have that problem in my house.

Also a house blowing up due to cooking meth - down the street, which is not connected to your house - is a much better situation.

Dirt bikes and teenagers partying the woods is definitely the better option too, imo.

"We live in a society" - true but one of these things is clearly better than the other. It's just not very convincing to think people want to be stuffed into apartments.

Every time I’ve lived in an apartment or condo the whole building smelled like trash. They need a better solution for managing waste disposal instead of a stinky room on every floor.

I thought the universal solution was a chute for rubbish to be thrown down ultimately landing in an external bin outside the bottom of the building?

The universal solution is also great for spreading fire. In many places the trash chute violates fire code

I never really gave this much thought as I never lived in a building that uses a chute. But it does make sense. You can build a large building, but it usually has many firestops in it. When wiring crosses a firestop, it must be sealed up to some standards. Ventilation systems are kept isolated across firestops as well. Anything that could encourage a spread is forbidden.

In contrast, a fire chute is basically a giant convection tower that should spread smoke and heat across all the higher floors of a building immediately.

It's possible to apply the same fire solutions used for elevators and stair wells to garbage chutes. Build them separately out of cinder block towers and use UL rated doors.

While you are right, that is easily circumvented by someone propping the chute door open.

In my building people kept throwing glass down the chute, which explodes at the bottom and injured some employees working around there. It was poorly designed, and after two injuries they welded the chutes shut and put in a trash can on every floor. I still think trash chutes are a good idea, but they have to be implemented properly.

Garbage chutes are a luxury I've only recently acquired, but it was done well in my opinion at my building. The room is tiny but enclosed with a garbage chute with a closing chute door that has a rubber gasket to seal it. Negatively pressurized so any remaining smells aren't pushed into the hallway. Everything goes down to a compactor in a ventilated utility room. How it's processed from there, I'm not sure but smell certainly isn't an issue.

I lived in a recently-built high-rise in the U.S. that had a trash chute. A problem is that bags tear open easily, people throw away liquids in their bags (which leak even without tears). I've seen trails of trash juice leading from people's apartments to the trash chute, and even with the ventilation, when you open the door to the trash chute, it smells and it's dirty (because of torn bags, and the fact that the chute hatch is smaller than the average full trash bag, meaning you have to squeeze it in, usually causing more tears).

Make bigger trash chute doors, better bags, and smarter people, then trash chutes work. #1 is doable, #2 is hard because it's always a race to the bottom, and #3 is impossible.

Not faced that problem here in Berlin, neither in the the place I'm renting long term now nor in the series of AirBnBs I was in back in 2017 while starting to look for a place.

Whatever Germany is doing, copy it.

I don't think you can copy culture very easily, which is the primary source of the problem being described.

That seems like a problem of going to giant scales. Here in Germany the norm for condos or apartments is 2-5 stories with 1-6 apartments per story. That gives you 2-30 units per building, and at that scale a couple of weekly emptied trash bins on the ground floor or in the parking garage do their job.

This is also a scale where construction and maintenance is straightforward, and where the building makes sense in a walkable neighborhood (as opposed to taking 5 minutes to even leave the buildings).

In the US even zoning to allow 5 story, 25 foot wide row homes to be built everywhere residential housing is allowed would make it easier to develop a lot of housing quickly and cheaply. It’s cheaper to build 1,000 units all at once than 2 units at a time, and if you can fit 500+ units on 500 feet of street frontage, you don’t need to buy a square mile of land in order to build a profitable development.

Where I live, you can basically only build houses. There is the random lot here and there that somehow got zoned for a duplex.

So people focus on building houses because that is all you can build.

You say you know that zoning is the biggest hurdle but it's literally the answer to your question. Most zoning in America is for single family homes or large apartments.

I’ve had some pretty bad experiences living in mid size apartment buildings. Everything from a drugged out neighbor causing a fire, to bed bugs coming through the wall from a slob next door, to someone nearly stealing my car until I shouted at them from four floors up, to landlords who wouldn’t fix leaks for weeks/months after I left a voicemail on their high priority line, to dreadful indoor temperatures because the thermostat controls are overridden by time-of-year policies and heating/cooling is disabled.

All this in Boston, at nearly $2,000 per month for a single bedroom, in the mid 2010s.

Conceptually, I’m on board with apartment buildings. I would like to think that the future looks more like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood than the one that I lived in. But the people who evangelize high rise buildings must be either paying for a ritzy place or never actually lived in one.

I think the general idea is that living in a high rise is better than sleeping in your car or on the street...

We can't have density without multi-family units. And density is what's required to make housing affordable in medium-size or larger cities.

> must be either paying for a ritzy place

Yes, a compromise for a more pleasant place to live is price. But a side-effect of more affordable housing is that nicer places also get cheaper.

Another compromise to get a nicer place to live for the same price is to move to less desirable location.

If a nice place is becoming cheaper, it’s also probably becoming less nice.

Is that true though? Or is it just something that your monkey brain feels?