Could Home-Building Robots Help Fix the Housing Crisis? (cnn.com) 120
CNN reports on a company called Automated Architecture (AUAR) which makes "portable" micro-factories that use a robotic arm to produce wooden framing for houses (the walls, floors and roofs):
Co-founder Mollie Claypool says the micro-factories will be able to produce the panels quicker, cheaper and more precisely than a timber framing crew, freeing up carpenters to focus on the construction of the building... The micro-factory fits into a shipping container which is sent to the building site along with an operator. Inside the factory, a robotic arm measures, cuts and nails the timber into panels up to 22 feet (6.7 meters) long, keeping gaps for windows and doors, and drilling holes for the wiring and plumbing. The contractor then fits the panels by hand.
One micro-factory can produce the panels for a typical house in about a day — a process which, according to Claypool, would take a normal timber framing crew four weeks — and is able to produce framing for buildings up to seven stories tall... She says their service is 30% cheaper than a standard timber framing crew, and up to 15% cheaper than buying panels from large factories and shipping them to a site... She adds that the precision of the micro-factories means that the panels fit together tightly, reducing the heat loss of the final home, making them more energy efficient.
AUAR currently has three micro-factories operating in the US and EU, with five more set to be delivered this year... AUAR has raised £7.7 million ($10.3 million) to date, and is expanding into the US, where a lack of housing and preference for using wood makes it a large potential market.
There's other companies producing wooden or modular housing components, the article points out. But despite the automation, the company's co-founder insists to CNN that "Automation isn't replacing jobs. Automation is filling the gap." The UK's Construction Industry Training Board found that the country will need 250,000 more workers by 2028 to meet building targets but in 2023, more people left the industry than joined.
One micro-factory can produce the panels for a typical house in about a day — a process which, according to Claypool, would take a normal timber framing crew four weeks — and is able to produce framing for buildings up to seven stories tall... She says their service is 30% cheaper than a standard timber framing crew, and up to 15% cheaper than buying panels from large factories and shipping them to a site... She adds that the precision of the micro-factories means that the panels fit together tightly, reducing the heat loss of the final home, making them more energy efficient.
AUAR currently has three micro-factories operating in the US and EU, with five more set to be delivered this year... AUAR has raised £7.7 million ($10.3 million) to date, and is expanding into the US, where a lack of housing and preference for using wood makes it a large potential market.
There's other companies producing wooden or modular housing components, the article points out. But despite the automation, the company's co-founder insists to CNN that "Automation isn't replacing jobs. Automation is filling the gap." The UK's Construction Industry Training Board found that the country will need 250,000 more workers by 2028 to meet building targets but in 2023, more people left the industry than joined.
Probably not (Score:5, Informative)
It's mostly about the terrains and houses being "boomer NFTs", rather than the cost of building new ones.
Re:Probably not (Score:4, Insightful)
It's mostly about the terrains and houses being "boomer NFTs", rather than the cost of building new ones.
Don’t forget blocking all residential density improvements to keep supply low. Also blocking all affordable housing.
Reading the article (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.cnn.com/world/home... [cnn.com]
Home-building robots could help fix the housing crisis - Sam Peters - CNN - Mar 6, 2026
- Start the alarm statement to get readers - "Many parts of the world are experiencing a housing crisis"
- No future workers, right? - ""an aging population of builders....there is a need for more construction workers"
Note: CNN's reporter moved the "mention the company being advertised" from the typical paragraph 4 to paragraph 3. Mentioning the "savior company or product" after a "state the problem in dire terms" in the first paragraph is common with "news" articles cribbed / regurgitated from the press release of the company being promoted in the article.
- The saving angel company - paragraph 3 - "UK technology company Automated Architecture...believes it has a solution"
- The 1 line product description subheading - "It makes portable micro-factories that can produce the wooden framing of a house"
Note: They already have these pre-fab panels, they are called SIP (Structural Insulated Panels) and can be up to 2 wood framed house in height.
- The appeal to emotion - "Claypool insists she is not trying to put anyone out of work"
Costs are rarely mentioned and comparative costs are omitted to keep consumers on the product being discussed -
- "AUAR charges a developer by the square foot"
Appeal to technology progress:
- "The micro-factory fits into a shipping container which is sent to the building site along with an operator. Inside the factory, a robotic arm measures, cuts and nails the timber into panel"
- "One micro-factory can produce the panels for a typical house in about a day"
Improvements in delivery time
"would take a normal timber framing crew four weeks"
Cost is marginally better than buying pre-fabricated panel built off site - Notice the "up to 15%"
"is 30% cheaper than a standard timber framing crew"
- "up to 15% cheaper than buying panels from large factories and shipping them to a site.
Appeal to eco-friendliness which traditional framing crews and pre-fab off site do anyway
- It is also more environmentally friendly... The micro-factory responds to flaws in the wood and calculates how best to work with the available material, reducing wasted wood.
Again no comparative difference between the product being discussed, competing pre-fab products or build by hand on-site framing
- She adds that the precision of the micro-factories means that the panels fit together tightly, reducing the heat loss of the final home, making them more energy efficient.
Promoting the product as eco-friendly and omitting the lifetime costs including length of usable life
- Building a timber framed home produces 20% less greenhouse gases compared to brick, according to an assessment by Bangor University, in Wales.
Some interesting metrics - Note the "only" lead as if less wood framed homes is a disappointment which reinforces the value of the product being discussed.
- Only 9% of houses built in England in 2019 were timber framed, compared to 92% in Scotland, where Philps says there is a tradition of using wood to build houses.
And missing the many elephants in the room,
1) land lot sizes, preventing smaller sized homes from being built, keeping prices high and preventing entry level houses from being purchased
2) fixed cost per home of getting utilities permitted and connected, making building ever larger homes more profitable for builders (at least in the US)
3) Private equity, investment banks, and corporations buying large amounts of single family homes, turning more people into renters
4) The cohort of parties with deep interests in ever higher cost homes, realtors, local government tax revenue offices, politicians, mortgage lenders, wall street, private equity, bankers
For #4, it is much less profitable to securitize a small, $40,000 mortgage than a $4
Re: Probably not (Score:2)
Add to it that prices increases due to real estate agent fees and the wish to make a profit from a sale.
Re: Probably not (Score:2)
Yeah, no. The big impediment to low-cost home ownership isn't the cost of laborers, it's the zoning regulations that limit density, multi-unit structures, etc.
You can't build a Levittown type community [wikipedia.org] anymore - and something like that is what's likely needed.
Re: Probably not (Score:2)
We probably need density more than that in a lot of places too.
Re:Probably not (Score:5, Insightful)
This, construction labor costs are only one of the smallest parts of the housing affordability problem. The bulk of the problem is artificially restricted supply (especially of high-density low-cost housing) due to zoning laws.
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Zoning laws that favour urban sprawl with single use areas are a cause of high costs of houses in USA, but in other countries there are other causes. In Italy for instance there are very low investments on social housing project compared to the ones that were made in the '70s, either with rent, or lease to buy, and a lot of empty apartments that are kept as investments, but they aren't rentable because th
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Also the social stigma of manufactured homes has the entire industry stuck in the 1800s.
Re:Probably not (Score:4, Insightful)
Manufactured housing loses value as it ages. Frame housing does not.
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Maybe if you mean mobile homes. But prefabs keep their value pretty well (at least in Europe).
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I mean multi storey concrete prefabs.
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We have prefabs in the states made from the same materials as mobile homes, just bigger, aaaaaand they don't age well.
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I meant multi storey concrete prefabs.
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Losing value with age isn't a bad thing. Japan is one of the few places where it happens, and it keeps prices down, building up, and the stock they do have tends to be more modern. Most of it is detached too.
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We have the same effect in the US, albeit under much longer periods of time, and the houses that get bought out are usually older, smaller ones that are torn down and replaced by larger houses. Prefabs in the US start to fall apart after 15-20 years depending on the builder and how often you move them around.
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The kind of pre-fabs we are talking about are high quality, durable houses that are made in a factory and assembled on-site.
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Okay, but at that point the builder is just going to charge based on the market rather than compete on price. There will be no cost reduction for the buyer, at least not until the next real estate bust cycle when everything goes on discount (see: 2008-2009).
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As I live in a house built in 1957 I assure you the price should be and likely is going down. Four bedrooms, one bath, most of the house ungrounded electrically, 2 X 4 walls so inadequate insulation in the walls by current standards, etc.
Repairing the place to bring it to Code would cost more than tearing it down and starting over.
The good news is the old place keeps the property taxes down.
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I live in a 1966 house that is fairly up to date and the estimated (take that with a grain of salt) value has doubled in the past ~10 years. We used to live in basically the same house as you, same age, ungrounded outlets, one more bathroom, that house has an estimated value that has gone up 3x in the past 10 years. Our current house is on the edge of the city and country, a few minutes further from everything, a much quieter area where we prefer to live. The previous house is in the middle of the suburbs
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Frame housing loses value as it ages, but you can't easily detach its value from the land like you can with a modern manufactured home.
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Whether that's relevant depends if your using housing as a store of value or as a place to live.
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My house is offended. It's a balloon framed stick house!
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It's mostly about the terrains and houses being "boomer NFTs", rather than the cost of building new ones.
That's different from previous generations how?
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The average real price of residential housing didn't really increase until about 2000. Records in the US go back to the 1700s. This idea of your house being your retirement plan is a new one. It's also a dumb one because nobody actually wants to move out of their house when they're old.
Re: Probably not (Score:2)
Most people who have kids do. I bought a big house so the kids and I wouldn't be bumping into each other all the time. Now that they are gone, I don't need to keep money sunk into this house, which has now doubled in value. I can buy a small house for my wife and I and enjoy the money.
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Most people who have kids do. I bought a big house so the kids and I wouldn't be bumping into each other all the time. Now that they are gone, I don't need to keep money sunk into this house, which has now doubled in value. I can buy a small house for my wife and I and enjoy the money.
This is my plan: A small house with a big shop for me to putter around in :-)
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Then good luck with it just being "you" in there.
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Then good luck with it just being "you" in there.
My wife isn't interested in my shop. She has her craft room.
Re: Probably not (Score:2)
No kids? Well yeah then I guess you don't need a big house anyway.
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Most people don't actually do that. Boomers staying in houses that are too big for them is a huge problem. Yes, lots of people say they're going to do it, not many do. People get settled.
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I would add that there is so much more than just the structure in having a "home". A lot of it has to do with your social networks, even after kids have grown etc. My parents have stayed in the same home town they were born in, and have spent the past 3 decades of their lives in the same house. Friends of theirs who moved out to smaller, less maintenance-heavy condos quickly found that a beautiful, fancy condo with all the amenities like pools, rec rooms, etc did not make up for the loss of the soci
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Yup. Everything that's wrapped up with "the family home."
The problem is not boomers treating their houses like hedge funds. It's them treating their houses like pension funds. It's not their fault, they were told by their parents that owning a house was a good investment. It gets worse though. They all told their kids the same thing, and many of those kids have never really known a housing market that has not appreciated. Some of them have gone and bought two or three houses because of AirBnB and influencer
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This idea of your house being your retirement plan is a new one.
It's really not. Real estate, including your home, as wealth is a truly ancient idea. It's existed basically ever since the invention of agriculture. The notion of home ownership as a path to financial security was clearly behind the structure of US public policy since the 1930s; that was the idea behind the creation of the FHA and the 30-year fixed mortgage. Those were explicitly designed to build middle class wealth through home ownership.
The need to actively view your home as a retirement investmen
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Wealth, yes. Real estate has always been though as a store of wealth, and it always has been. The problem today is that it's thought of as an investment, i.e. a generator of more wealth.
It's very simple: if the real price of anything goes up by x% per year, in y number of years nobody will be able to afford it. The power of compound interest, in reverse.
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That's different from previous generations how?
There are fewer unbuilt lots available, and even if you get a lot it costs spectacularly more to have a house built now than it did when the boomers did it. These are well-known and obvious factors.
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That's different from previous generations how?
There are fewer unbuilt lots available
This varies tremendously by location, and always has. Perhaps the biggest factor is that Americans are far less willing to relocate than they used to be.
and even if you get a lot it costs spectacularly more to have a house built now than it did when the boomers did it. These are well-known and obvious factors.
To the degree that's true, labor cost is a significant part of any difference, which makes robots potentially helpful. Honestly, the bigger difference is that houses today are so much larger. If you look at house prices over the last century in terms of real cost per square foot, they haven't gone up that much. If you can find a way to factor in that the
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This varies tremendously by location, and always has.
Oh yeah? Where are there more unbuilt zoned lots available than there used to be?
Perhaps the biggest factor is that Americans are far less willing to relocate than they used to be.
They aren't. They're less able to afford it. The spirit is willing, the wallet is weak.
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The cost of housing is truly one of those issues that is multi-faceted. You are 100% correct that houses are bigger and the number of persons per household is smaller. Also worthwhile to remember that many of the places that are desirable to live today either didn't exist at all or were unsatisfactory decades ago. Easy example is Levittown NY where they massed produced small (750-1000 sqft) single family homes, on small lots for relatively little money starting in 1948
Before it was built, this was just
Re:Probably not (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that it isn't *just* shelter, it's a shelter and also an "NFT" (since it's an investment that's expected and supposed to endlessly appreciate for "reasons"). The resulting problem being that you can't get the shelter without the "NFT" so shelter costs are peak-Bored-Ape stupid even if you just want a shelter.
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Yep: The fundamental problem here is that the US has spent a long time with the values "housing is a luxury good; home ownership is an investment." In my opinion, a more appropriate set of values is "housing is an absolute necessity; home ownership is a luxury good."
The funny thing is that even with current very owner-friendly policy, home ownership is not actually a particularly good investment.
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in a growth based economy with inflation the "endlessly appreciate for "reasons"" the reason is obvious.
I thought the housing crisis was about greed (Score:5, Insightful)
...of humans, and private equity buying up land.
How are micro-factories going to help with that?
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...of humans, and private equity buying up land.
How are micro-factories going to help with that?
By firing all the laborers through robotics and using AI to fire all the white collar workers not only can real estate prices be driven higher, but none of the filth get their poor little hands on so much as a crumb. Like 5 people can own the world.
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Re: (Score:2, Informative)
That's not how it works. You can't just buy a tract of land. You have to buy the land, jump through hoops to get permits to build, defeat NIMBY lawsuits, get the local municipality to run services, defeat more NIMBY lawsuits, get new permits from a new municipality administration, then finally break ground on construction.
NIMBYs of all stripes throw up roadblocks during the permitting process and will then sue to get an injunction. If you defeat those lawsuits they'll go after the municipalities suing that
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Ironically factory towns would actually be better.
In a factory town, the housing is a recruitment incentive and benefit (that ironically keeps you trapped because the non-factory town alternative is so much more expensive). But at least then the objective is to keep the housing affordable and accessible to employees of the company, and the ecosystem that keeps them happy. Whereas it seems like everywhere else in the US (and in highly desirable places internationally) people have decided that a place to li
Re: I thought the housing crisis was about greed (Score:1)
Really? The military offers "factory housing," is that really a big recruitment incentive for them?
Re: (Score:2)
But at least then the objective is to keep the housing affordable and accessible to employees of the company
hahaAHAHahAHHAhahAHahaHAHAHHAhAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
No. Just No. (Score:3)
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However, even if you start with all the permits and land in place, the actual building of the shell of a house isn't the slow or expensive part of it. You Americans like to build your houses out of cardboard, so the outer shell goes up *really* fast. Here in Europe where we use bricks and blockwork, it still goes up super quick. It likely takes longer to render it properly than it does to lay the blocks. Hell, in the 60s, we used to get brickies to lay bricks and we'd then just go around and buzz-saw out th
Housing issues are about LAND. (Score:3)
This systems helps to build more houses. But you can only build more houses if there is a place to build them. It doesn't matter how cheaply and quickly you can build the house if you can't find a reasonable place to build it.
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And this scarcity of land is mostly artificial. San Francisco has land, they simply have zoning rules that prevent developers for building things like apartment complexes.
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Counterpoint citation: https://osf.io/preprints/socar... [osf.io]
Abstract: A popular view holds that declining housing affordability stems from regulations that restrict new supply, and that deregulation will spur sufficient market-rate construction to meaningfully improve affordability. We argue that this ‘deregulationist’ view rests upon flawed assumptions. Through empirical simulation, we show that even a dramatic, deregulation-driven supply expansion would take decades to generate widespread afforda
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Empirical simulation? Huh?
Empirical definition: "based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic."
Simulation, which is *not* observation, is by definition *not* empirical. He created a model and ran the numbers to get his outcomes. The key to the validity of any model is the specific data points and assumptions made. If you want a model to agree with your foregone conclusions, you can certainly make a model that will back you up.
But let's take this guy's
It's not about building a better mousetrap (Score:3)
If you think the housing crisis is caused by not enough wealth, or needing robots because you can't hire enough people who want to do the job, you are grossly misunderstanding the problem.
It ain't the cost of the house (Score:2)
Jimmy Carter robot (Score:1)
Invest in our snake oil while you can! (Score:2)
If Mormons can build a barn in a day, a house should also be doable.
Enough illegal immigrants that would be willing to help out.
Re:Invest in our snake oil while you can! (Score:5, Funny)
Now imagine a Beowulf cluster of illegal Mormons.
Re: Invest in our snake oil while you can! (Score:2)
Not Mormons, you mean mennonites, quakers, etc. not Mormons.
A key part of a barn raising is that it is a housing unit, no inspections, no plumbing, no wiring, and very, very few windows, doors, or even walls.
Every year a company builds a small home in a day at a construction industry event - the key is have everything needed on a truck, idling on the street in front of the house, along with each trade represented on-site for the duration of the project.
The delays in home construction is delivery time and su
No. The cost of building already isn't the issue. (Score:2)
The housing crisis, in the US at least but many other places too, only exists because existing home owners hold legal power. It's an incumbency problem.
We have to somehow make housing cheaper, while not reducing anyone's property values.
It's absurd. Until we reconcile that, robots don't matter. People will vote down any effort to put up cheaper housing that actually drives prices down, whether it's built by robots, humans, or trained squirrels has nothing to do with it.
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People will vote down any effort to put up cheaper housing that actually drives prices down
If the value of my house goes down I would never even know it because I don't borrow against it and I'm not looking to sell it.
So why would I care if it's easier for other people to afford a house too? The people who think that way are not homeowners, they're investors. And they're assholes.
Re: No. The cost of building already isn't the iss (Score:1)
You care because your property taxes will go thru the roof.
If your house is assessed at X, and everyone else in town has a house half as big as yours, but on average they run as many kids thru the school as you do, your taxes go up because the tax rate for less expensive homes needs to me higher to cover the costs of services provided.
Also, the fact that you never plan to sell or borrow against your home makes you a bit of an outlier, most people probably consider buying a bigger house as their family expsn
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your taxes go up because the tax rate for less expensive homes needs to me higher to cover the costs of services provided.
Services are not higher for less expensive homes. Cost to the homeowner for maintenance might be, but that's on the homeowner. Not the municipality.
Trying to extract funds for schools by targeting people who have less house value per kid with higher rates will get you voted out of office fast.
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your taxes go up because the tax rate for less expensive homes needs to me higher to cover the costs of services provided.
Services are not higher for less expensive homes. Cost to the homeowner for maintenance might be, but that's on the homeowner. Not the municipality.
Trying to extract funds for schools by targeting people who have less house value per kid with higher rates will get you voted out of office fast.
I think the grandparent post awkwardly worded something that is accurate. I'm going to make up an imperfect example to illustrate what I think they meant. Suppose half the houses have one school-age kid, and schools cost $10k per student, all funded by property taxes. If houses are valued at $500K, your annual property tax rate is (10*0.5)/500 = 1% or $5K.
Now suppose instead that you still have a $500K home, but the 25 homes around you are half the size and just under half the price, $240K. Average hous
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Re: No. The cost of building already isn't the iss (Score:2)
If the value of my house goes down I would never even know it because I don't borrow against it and I'm not looking to sell it.
You don't borrow but plenty of other people are mortgaged.
In your country it might be different but here in the UK when there were serious market crashes, some people were contacted by their mortgage provider demanding a top up of guarantee.
Ie: if your loan is against a property evaluated at 300k and right now it's worth 270k, the bank can demand you do something about it.
no, corporate American doesn't work that way (Score:1)
We have plenty of people to build houses (Score:3)
I'm so tired of seeing people trying to come up with technological problems to social issues. You can have all the technology in the world and it doesn't do any good if you aren't allowed to use it to make people's lives better.
Re: We have plenty of people to build houses (Score:1)
How will a robot change zoning laws?
No more than... (Score:2)
No more than robots could save the US auto industry by eliminating workers in competition with the Japanese in the 1980s.
A civil engineering professor in college once said if built homes but used Lego-like elements, less labor, and more homes constructed quickly. Perhaps we should go back to the concrete houses of Thomas Edison.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/p... [atlasobscura.com]
--JoshK.
No (Score:2)
But we have to keep asking because we'll try anything before actually giving humans jobs.
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You uh
seen what those junkies do when you give them someplace to live? It doesn't always work out so well.
We will NOT LET the cost of housing go down. (Score:1)
There are COUNTLESS technologies and policies that could reduce the price of housing.
The issue is that we won't apply them. Or if we do apply them, we will do something else, to keep the price of homes up.
That's because:
* 65% of US householders are homeowners.
* 58% of homeowners vote. (contrast: 37% of renters vote.)
About 70-75% of people who cast a ballot are homeowners.
And they do NOT want the price of their house to go down.
Now on https://x.com/BoringBiz_/statu... [x.com] you can see Donald Trump declaring to
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Bollocks, most homeowners don't even think in those terms. Developers and zoning officials/local government officials often collude to keep property values high. That leads to higher margins for builders/developers and a larger tax base. What most homeowners don't want is increased traffic congestion and other lower QoL standards in their neighborhood (also don't want backed up sewers, flooding from poorly-planned developments, and brownouts).
There are strata of properties of different sizes that allow f
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No (Score:2)
The housing crisis is caused by the billionaire class wanting everybody else to be poor. This is not a tech problem.
Re: No (Score:2)
No, it's neighbors voting in zoning regulations that prevent high-density, multi-unit dwellings being built in their city.
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If so, there would be quite a few local exceptions where things still work. Can you point out any?
my money in on (Score:2)
Traveling sex bots. She can walk down into your basement and rock your socks off. For a few dollars more she can bring you Cheetos, Pizza, and Mt Dew.
Cheap houses are already here (Score:2)
They're called modular houses. Modern ones don't even look like trailer park trash - they can look almost identical to a stick built home. The only difference is you can go from a plot of empty land to a fully erected house in a week - and most of the time is simply digging out the ground and pouring the foundation. The actual house erection takes about a day and another day to join all the seams together and do all the necessary finishing (hooking up utilities, etc).
Because the modules are built indoors th
Four weeks? (Score:1)
One micro-factory can produce the panels for a typical house in about a day â" a process which, according to Claypool, would take a normal timber framing crew four weeks
You guys must be really slow. Nearly forty years ago I was building house frames with a carpenter during my uni breaks. Just the two of us would usually have only one or two days between us to cut, nail and erect all of the exterior and interior house walls before the prefab roof trusses arrived with a crane to hoist them.
The answer is...no (Score:2)
This kind of staged demo looks cool but construction in the real world is hard, really hard
I suspect that the problem will be solved in the far future, but today's tech falls short
Rough framing is easy (Score:2)
The expensive parts of homes are those where multiple trades need to work. Rough framing is relatively inexpensive and easy in that regard. If you want to reduce the cost of housing, go with composting toilets, finish materials that are structural, and prefabricated kitchens and bathroom modules that are fully finished.
Seems like more farming to fix hunger in the 80s (Score:2)
To me, this sounds like proposing more automated farming in the 1980s as a solution to world hunger. When, by that point, most world hunger was politics and transportation, not raw food production capability.
I mean, it couldn't hurt, but we need to fix the political barriers in building increased housing first.
Different issue (Score:2)
The actual issue is about NIMBYs, filthy corrupt politicians and global bloodregimes parking their blood-drenched money in your real estate, directly and indirectly thru all those hedgefonds.
So what? (Score:2)
It doesn't work (Score:2)
The structure is the easiest part of building a house (and also the easies to automate).
All the other tiny little details take most of the time: electrical, plumbing, drywall, painting, flooring, etc.
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Anyone who's watched a house go up has marveled at how quickly the framing goes up, then how long it takes everything else to get done.
Framing is about 1/l4 of the build time for a house. The *labor* for framing is less than 10% of the build cost. If the machine cost *nothing*, and framed the building *instantaneously*, those are hard limits on how much faster and cheaper the house building robot could make the process: about 25% faster with about a 10% cost reduction. But the machine wouldn't work insta
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As well...
If a "timber" framing crew took four weeks to "produce panels" for a "typical" house in the US, that crew would never be hired by the contractor again. In fact at the end of the second day when the lack of progress was evident, they would probably be told not to come back.
Also much of the labor, albeit the lowest skilled, in the fra
Costs (Score:2)
Let's see, take decent jobs away from people, and... what's the cost, and how much does the maintenance cost, of these "mobile factories"? How long will they last, and how long will the OEM support them? Will you have to buy another one in five years, and not be allowed to repair them yourself due to anti-circumvention laws?
framing small part of build (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. Framing isn't the bottleneck for build times.
My local Habitat For Humanity affiliate can frame a house and have it ready for roofers in 5 days. That's 5 days with volunteers with minimal skills being lead by moderately skilled staff working for 7 hours a day.
Automation will solve the housing issues as well as automation on farms solved hunger issues.
Re: No (Score:1)
Wrong. They like building low-cost houses, but when land is zoned for 1/2, 3/4, or greater minimum buildable lot size, it doesn't make sense to build an 1,800 sq ft house, the land becomes more than 50% of the price.
Re: (Score:3)
60 years ago, there were builders that would put 1000 sq ft houses on half acre lots. They won't do it anymore. There are some aging duplexes around here on half acre lots that are smaller than your typical McMansion.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: No, (Score:2)
By that you mean they participate in capitalism.
Re: (Score:2)
We have data points where we add houses to the market and we do not see the prices go down.
To understand the price, you have to look at supply and demand. If you add three houses, but four new people want houses, then the price will still go up.
Look at supply and demand, not just demand.