It's true that small businesses and craftsmanship are not efficient, but that's not usually the main reason why houses are expensive. They are usually expensive because of planning controls. Look at the price of land: in places where houses are expensive, land with planning permission is by far the largest component of the cost of a house. Building work being expensive is usually a consequence of this.

Having said that, I've no idea where you live so it could be completely different in your area

The standard tract built house erected in 100 days by DR Horton/Lennar/etc is the streamlined, mass manufactured option.

Any more streamline than that is apparently more costly or otherwise unappealing to people. It isn’t not small businesses building most homes in the US, they are large, and sometimes publicly traded businesses.

Every once in a while someone will bulid a house in a day. However it is more costly to do this. you either need expensive really fast cure concrete or a low quality wood foundation. You need to carefully plan who is where and when so plumbers and electritions are no standing in the same spot (think sink with an outlet nearby). You need to specify where everything is to a pipe and wire are not in the same place with enough slack that the pipe can be put in. You pay your crews to arrive early so as soon as the last crew is done with a section next con start.

your 100 day house has slack built in so if one crew is running late the next isn't affected. This means you can tightly schedule the labor a month in advance.

Tract home builders are building hundreds of homes in quick succession. 1 house in 100 days, but also 500 houses within 2 years.

There is no slack, because each team has to be operating in lockstep so work never stops, otherwise margins tank and a profitable project becomes a loss.

The expertise of managing and executing this non trivial task is why those businesses succeed, and why landowners outsource development to them.

There is slack - but the slack is in the house schedule not the human. A house can sit for several work hours with nothing going on and not care. The humans working on the house do not like being idle - they are working for money and when they have no work they get no pay and in turn that makes it hard for them to pay their own bills. The bank cares a bit about idle time, but the interest charges from a few hours here and there of idle time isn't that much and so that is where builders put the slack in. Of course those interest charges still add up and so there is effort to reduce them but the costs of scheduling a crew and then not being ready for them adds up even more than interest.

They are still too small to innovate (to take risks, to invest in better technology), the jobs are also small for better tooling, everything requires too much on-site labor, etc.

SFH is itself a waste of money. And land, which is especially expensive where housing costs are high. For every small house different crews need to go there, prepare the site, do the foundation, etc.

Half of the hard costs is labor. (Which is, again, usually high in areas with high housing costs.)

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-makes-housing-so...

And of course the opportunity cost due to lost density effect is substantial, blablabla.

The tragedy is that there's a huge discontinuity here, and overcoming that would require a lot of capital (social, political, financial).

And in general construction productivity is extremely meh, to phrase it politely.

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insight...

>people, of course, are always surprised how expensive housing is, but then reject any kind of streamlined mass-manufactured option.

It's a pretty specific type of person who rejects the construction of streamlined social housing - somebody who definitely doesnt pay rent and someone who probably receives it.

No it is people wha have no idea how mass produced a conventional house is. They think there is something for a factory to do. Then they go elsewhere and complain how houses all look the same these days.

Yeah a competent framing crew can bang together a 2-story 4000 square foot home from sticks in 2 weeks.

Transportation costs are so high that it's often cheaper to stick-build a house than to bring in a manufactured one.

The manufactured ones only win when it's very tiny (think: trailer) or when you do an entire development with them, and even then you often need a rail line or something to make it work.

Even the "put together on site" kit ones run into problems that the stick-built basically avoid, like things not lining up exactly right.

We're building houses, maybe not enough, and almost certainly not exactly where some people want to live, at the price they want. But they're being built.

Note that stick built most of the wood is cut to size at a factory. If the wall is 8 foot, then you just grad the precut stack of 92-5/8" studs (after adding the top and bottom plates that works out to 8 foot with some needed slop for the ceiling and flooring), likewise you will get 104-5/8" for 9 foot walls. No other wall size is common in the US because then you have to cut all the boards on site for higher costs. Likewise the windows and doors are standard sizes from a factory. No plumber is making pipes on site, they just use a factory made pipe, valve, sink... A modern house really is a kit, there are just enough different size options and styles that there are many factory options and it seems each is custom even though most of the parts are standard.

Yeah, when people think "modular home" they think pre-assembled wall panels, etc, but those have other problems (like it's hard to wrap the insulation around the walls when you have to connect them).

Real expensive custom homes are where you change dimensions so that non-standard parts are needed (not even things like wider doors, but non-standard widenesses).

People do a lot of inconsistent things, a pretty bad one among these is complaining that housing is expensive, and then paying ~40% of the cost just for land every time someone wants to live somewhere, and when folks recommend putting homes on top of each other a plurality opposes this. (insert surprised pikachu image)

Of course there's a lot of things to automate. As I mentioned in this comment half of hard costs is labor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42932445

> Not just politicians in general, but people, of course, are always surprised how expensive housing is, but then reject any kind of streamlined mass-manufactured option.

You can build a tract of homes in 90 days (or less) using stick frame. They won't be fancy, but they'll be up to code (and with a little extra cost (<10%) and effort, they can be made much more efficient than just code).

A crew of 4-5 guys (plus some subs) can build a custon home in 80 days:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYd73YP57Ik&list=PL8XEQ1XKYN...

If you pipeline that and use a standardized, cookie-cutter plan an entire row can be build out in a similar time frame. Production builders do it all the time:

* https://www.newhomesource.com/learn/custom-or-production-bui...

There are of course mass-manufactured elements that can speed things up, like using trusses. There are also now services for pre-cut framing that saves on-site effor of measuring and such:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2FdAdxjSpw&list=PLDYh81z-Rh...

The building of the structure is not the bottleneck, it is the approval process and NIMBY road blocks that can add 2(+) years to a project.

In my experience pre-built framing just moves the error down into the foundation.

> In my experience pre-built framing just moves the error down into the foundation.

There are ± tolerances at every interface, so if you're off a bit on the foundation, you can balance things out in the rough frame, so by the time you get to finish framing things are pretty square/plumb/level.

But if the pre-built stuff is ±0, then there's no wiggle room in that part of the build, so the rest of it has to be that much tighter as you've not nowhere to adjust things.

It's not just the cost of building the house. Utilities and infrastructure (and the taxes to pay for it all) add up. Now, if you were to build smaller, densely, and close enough to amenities that residents could walk or bike to their daily activities, or to public transit that can take you farther away, you save a significant amount on initial AND recurring costs. And what's better, people WANT that! Or, a least, they're willing to eat the downsides in order to benefit from the upsides, including lower costs. But there lies the rub: when these types of places get built, they get offered at market pricing, not in a way that reflects their lower costs. So people say, "Why spend the same for less?" and move to a traditional suburb (or, more likely, put off home-buying altogether).

The problem with housing in America always comes down to the way it was financialized and securitized: too much relies on "line go up, forever". There's no room for new blood/capacity (read:competition), there's no room for "investments" to lose value.

One of the problems is that the people who need housing aren't buying new houses.

Nobody is going to spend $x on a brand new house without having some say in it, and so those houses tend more and more toward "high end/luxury". After all, why go through the hassle of all the paperwork and building and NOT sell for the highest price you can get?

Same thing happens with cars; the market for car buyers is much larger than the market for new car buyers, but only new cars ever get made. Nobody is making used cars, or even the absolutely cheapest possible, which affects the whole supply.

Most new houses are only slightly custom. You generally start with a floor plan from the builder, and then choose the color of the walls or other minor details. Sometimes a new house is cheaper than a used one because you can move into a used house much quicker, while a with new house you have to wait for them to finish. Usually a new house is more expensive than a comparable used house, but not by much. Even a fully custom home is generally not much more expensive because your builder will tell you what costs a lot of money (if you ask for 8.5 foot ceilings the builder will talk you into 9 foot because those are much cheaper since precut parts are available), and what is insignificant. Generally walls can go anywhere and are cheap to move around.

Market prices is not the problem. The problem is getting these bigger projects through permitting is. The cost savings are lost in litigation.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/market-rate-housing-will-make-...

Charitably, that's a very flawed blog post. Studies of housing affordability in Finland should not be used to make points about America. Finland has a number of legal protections that shield its citizens from the rampant price-fixing, collusion, investor-oriented building, and other predations of the American market.

That's not to say housing construction regulation isn't a problem. It is, but two things can be problems at the same time.

Without reading your link: this is a problem across new and existing builds, so it can't be an issue wih permitting. Housing cost growth has outpaced wage growth for decades. We are reaching an inflection point of unaffordability (unequally distributed geographically, of course). The problem is that market rates must support a number of (often unnecessary or inflated) concerns, including but not limited to permitting and litigation. Profit for a rotating cast of securitized mortgage holders is another major one. Insolvent municipalities that can't see property taxes fall is another.

> they get offered at market pricing, not in a way that reflects their lower costs

Well, duh!

Yep, speed is pretty good, though there's still a long way to go.

As mentioned in this comment[0] land and labor are still the dominant part of the costs. So if municipalities would allow and prefer denser housing cost would be lower.

And of course if we are already talking about quasi-standardized (cookie-cutter) units, then there's even more reason to scale up projects so prefab components could be shipped in. (Though of course we again run into the tragedy of small scale. Metro areas are made up of too small suburban cities, they don't want a big project, they don't have the infrastructure for it, they don't want the extra traffic, and so on.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42932445