It is for nerds. I am a recently retired residential remodeling contractor, every job is different than the previous. Something we did once 10 years ago we might do today or maybe in another 5 years or maybe never. The only way we can be efficient is to do it right the first time and keep employees as long as possible. To that end our do overs are minimal and a guy with 10 years is considered a new guy.
Five years ago I purchased and rehabbed a duplex here in fly-over country. Because I moved a bathtub that was blocking a doorway by 10" that was installed during a previous rehab I had to tear out the entire drainage plumbing system down to the basement floor and pay a plumber to rebuild to current plumbing code. The charge was $1500 for each toilet, sink, and bathtub. In total it was $15,000 to tear out and replace a perfectly functioning plumbing system.
People often cite zoning, building codes and other forms of regulation in attributing increased construction costs. Our homes are constructed to higher standards and better engineered than they were decades ago, and this comes at a higher upfront cost. We are dealing with older housing infrastructure with issues not easily remedied as things were often underbuilt. It winds up shifting a higher cost towards repairing something old and already of lower value. People like to look at old growth wood in homes and slap their knee and say they don't build them like they used to, and they are right - we build them much better now and with less material! All in all you pay now or pay later - there are no free rides.
"Much better" is debatable. Everything wasn't universally built better in the "old days," that's for sure. That said, there's plenty of slapped together, junk houses out there today.
Better in many ways isn’t always a better value. Seems to me housing hasn’t improved in value. That’s the real issue. There are many, many reasons, but I don’t think the builders themselves are the reason because it’s a competitive field with many of the same issues it’s always had.
@@jacobbielanski9692 Everything costs more, a box of screws for which I paid $1.99 30 years ago is now $8.99. Codes do cost more but the home is better built and safer. The dirt the home is built on costs more.
Hey there, thanks for the great podcasts (and books)! I wanted to let you know about a minor omission in most of your UA-cam "video" descriptions - your "FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS" lists don't include 'The Economics of Everyday Things'; only PIMA episodes have been including the link, while all others, including EET episodes themselves, have not. Furthermore, the contact e-mails at the bottom are not specialized, including for PIMA. I'm not sure if this is intended.
a big problem in mobile/manufactured/fab housing is the need to tow it down the road, which limits each module to 14' wide- that leads to the 'trailer effect' in which a hallway down the axis of a mobile home takes up alot of the floor space. Every single wide ever made has a long hallway.
@@Rashnak66Add weight and height and we wind up with smaller less sturdy homes which attract tornadoes. They don’t actually attract tornadoes they are usually located in flat open areas.
Zoning laws mean you can't put mobile homes in areas where investment in higher quality has a positive return. Building codes often don't apply to mobile homes, since they're not attached to the land, so builders are allowed to cut corners and that ends up in a race to the bottom.
@@Senthiuz I'm well aware of that but nowadays there is very little difference between a traditional mobile home that isn't very mobile at all and volumetric modular contruction.
Mobile homes do not gain value like stick built for whatever reason. They loose value every year. Especially if you dont own the land, because of the risk they jack up your lot rent.
I am from the greater Boston area My sister has been trying to build a house on 13 acres in Carlisle but we're almost 9 years There is a little tiny stream that runs by the right away that flows a little bit in the springtime in the town board calls that a wetland and won't let them build a driveway so they can't even build a single family home on 13 acres lol they've spent two and a half million dollars on the land over $100,000 on the design and now a few hundred thousand on fighting this and $400,000 on having workers manually take off invasive species off the trees manually on 13 acres because it's technically a wetland so they couldn't have any equipment there. Absolutely absurd.
@X9523-z3v why can't we expect to keep some of the better, more impactful protections of these types of regulations and try and minimize some of the ridiculous outcomes we all know exist?
@@chickenfishhybrid44 Seems to me mostly it's due to two reasons, 1) That many people do not want more buildings or development this anything that stops development is good and the other is many people then hear environmental deregulation and freak out. In America environmental deregulation is pretty unpopular and most of the talking heads are very against any even reasonable deregulation even if objectively the regulation is not helping the environment and is causing all sorts of problems. Since the early 1970s are politics have mostly gone from being reasonable, pragmatic and maybe less idealistic to things that sound good but don't actually work. The vast amount of people that can articulate a good story and emotional argument in places that regular people listen to are going to be pro environmental regulation and they'll make it sound very reasonable in logical and they will give you some extreme case about how if you remove even a little bit of it suddenly the rivers will set on fire again in corporations will pollute like they did 150 years ago. Which is just nonsense when people become rich anywhere in the world doesn't matter how much or how little regulation you have you never get more pollution in a dirtier environment people value of clean environment. The only exception is in very left-leaning cities homeless encampments are allowed to break environmental laws.
You cannot just gloss over regulation as a cause. As a rehabbed I can tell you regulation is the greatest contributor. Literally hundreds of thousands of pages of building acodes and regulation need to be followed that add thousands of dollars of cost to prevent even the slightest inconvenience for the home owner or renters. During a rehab five years ago I moved a bathtub that was installed blocking a doorway during a previous rehab. Since I disturbed 1 drain of 1 bathtub I had to pay someone to tear out the entire functioning plumbing system and rebuild it to the tune of $1500 for each toilet, sink, and bathtub. It came to a needless $15,000 expense for just the pipes. This represents 6 months of gross rent for the entire building and is just 1 item in the myriad of required pointless expenses.
You can still buy kit houses - though obviously not out of the Sears catalog. The problem is that in order to build something like that you need both skills in multiple building trades and also the ability to deal with all the BS that the government throws at you. In many cities you'd have to be a licensed carpenter, licensed plumber, licensed electrician, licensed mason and also have knowledge of the permitting and zoning process that normally only a GC would have. On top of that the city will likely require a site plan that you're probably going to have to hire a licensed surveyor for. Years ago it was possible for ordinary guys to build houses as sort of a side job. That would be tough to do today in most places. Also, as far this being mostly a local issue so the federal government should just throw up their hands - I don't buy that at all. The federal government has a ton of leverage here by virtue of the fact that they spend so much money on housing (mostly through tax expenditures). Take away the mortgage interest deduction, capital gains exclusion, and Fannie Mae eligibility for any home within a growth boundary and growth boundaries will quickly become dead as disco. Same with community reviews, single family zoning, or whatever other restrictive nonsense you want to get rid of.
The places where you need that licensing is because they are trying to make sure the contractors have valid social security numbers. They then surcharge you to get another unlicensed contractor who doesn't have a social to actually do the work. That licensee will have multiple jobsites they don't have any skin in the game beside loosing their license which is practically impossible. But in the end why do people need a license to do trades? Does drywall need to be licensed? How about painting? Tape and bed? A licensed pea trap replacer? Licensed toilet wax ring installer? Apparently they seem to think so.
1. Try buying an empty single lot. 2. Modern homes have many more systems than Craftsman catalog homes. Air Conditioning and electrical being the primary differences. Improperly installed air conditioning causes condensation, condensation causes rot. A 2020s home uses many times the kilowatts of a 1920s home, the more power you put through a house the more risk there is. Washing machines, dryers, hot water heaters, refrigerators, dishwashers, garbage disposals all of these are things that a basic 20s house might not have had, but are absolutely standard these days. Each one isn't that complicated, but it's more and more for one person.
The cost of building an new house is insane due to all cuts. Every step someone is taking a huge cut, so all the pay off combine are way more than the cost of the land, labor, and material put together.
Building houses is completely political. Once a family owns a home in the suburbs, they are then opposed to any more construction or NIMBY. Local governments are absolutely inept at planning for home construction, infrastructure development and growth. Home building is boom, bust and incredibly risky. Builders are incentivised to build big profitable custom homes, in order to have a chance of staying in business. There is no formal training that I've found anywhere, to learn to build homes, it's just haphazard apprenticeship. I could go on and on...
This is an extremely important issue especially someone like myself trying to build a new house. I'm in the dairy farm industry in America for example the average cow is $252% more productive now in 2023 than they were in 1970 It's actually a bit more than that if you go by the more industry standard energy corrected milk but that's getting into the weeds lol If you actually look at all the different industries they've really mostly stagnated since 1970 information technology fracking mining and agriculture are the standouts that really increased marginal productivity.
There are extreme environmentalists in California who will use the courts to tie up any project for years no matter what the merits for the sole purpose of making it prohibitively expensive to build anything. Exhibit A is the 164 mile stretch of California light rail from Merced to Bakersfield..the cheap part going through the central valley..that using california's own cost estimates will cost $38,000 per foot. Exhibit B will be the Sites reservoir fuslrst conceived in the 1950s, in the planning stage for 40 years, and will be completed until the 2030s at the earliest.
The problem is you cant override personal property rights. People have the right to sell if they like, and at what price they like. In capitalism, that is sacrosanct.
Construction is expensive because the physical labor is work that most of us are not willing to do and the skilled physical labor requires talent that most are not willing to make the effort to learn and recruiting and organizing labor crews is difficult. Construction is expensive because it is difficult to get talented engineers, architects and designers and project planners and organizers. Construction is expensive because the planning and approval processes required with the federal, state local municipal government authorities is long and difficult and it is difficult to get talented lawyers and legal staff that are knowledgeable with government rules and regulations. Construction is expensive because the raw materials, and products needed for construction are expensive.
If you think building in the US is expensive, just take a look at NZ building costs... Average buildung costs in NZ running st $400/ft², roughly DOUBLE the US cost...
Every decline in America correlates with the rise of the civil rights movement I know correlation is not causation but geez, sometimes you stop and wonder We made a lot of progress on the social front thank God, however it didn’t necessarily translate into more prosperity and productivity
You guys are making it seem like the construction industry is lazy and doesnt inovate. Its an industry that can only benefit so much from from modern tech. This is always going to be laobr intensive work with expensive materials. Even prefab is only going to help so much. There is only so cheap you make a product that ways 100k pounds. There is no big mystery here
By adopting strict building codes municipalities can make building low-cost homes untenable and instead cater to a more affluent demographic that will use fewer governmental services and pay more in taxes.
@chickenfishhybrid44 I can not say what goes on in foreign countries without knowing more specifics. All I can speak on is my personal experience as a rehabber and having to spend $10's of thousands of dollars to meet new building codes. Some of it I can see the benefit of and I have no-issue with making my buildings safe and actually do more than I am required to such as hardwiring in smoke alarms. But as far as I can tell it was written without cost-benefit analysis meaning if it prevented even the slightest inconvenience to a future inhabitant years down the road it was included without consideration as to what it cost.
@@nunyabidness117hopefully there's way more "strict" codes that increase the cost for you to build a home than just having to hardwire in smoking alarms. My home is in a rural area and over 30 yrs old, and was considered a starter home back when it was built, and it has the smoking alarms hardwired..
@The-D-Hoyt I usually hardwire smoke/co alarms even if I don't have to. I'm talking about things like having to add and pay a monthly bill for a house electric account for a duplex just so I could always have a working light above the breaker box in the unlikely event that a breaker would have to be reset and the panel was illuminated by a bulb fed by the other circuit whose power had been shut off. This completely ignores that everyone has been carrying around a flashlight on their phone for the last 15 years. The inspector finally agreed to let me have two bulbs above the breaker boxes, each fed by a different circuit.
Municipalities adopt the national building code that add thousands of dollars of expense for little gains as far as safety. The end effect is to make affordable low-end housing all but impossible to build. The truth is no municipality wants low end-housing that attracts low-end citizens when they can force up the prices of housing that will attract more affluent owners that pay more in taxes and use fewer governmental services.
You already said this last week. Chill. Yes, building codes can absolutely be a factor, but land prices, deed restrictions (e.g., min lot sizes), and restrictive (R-1) zoning are likely larger cost factors than building codes. The IRC/IBC is used ubiquitously throughout the US so it’s hard to claim it’s a driving factor when affordable housing is occurring in many cities that use it. Also the cost of construction is not the same cost of housing… it doesn’t take $400k to build an average US house. Affordable housing’s primary hurdle is not basic building codes.
@archinomics Glad you are paying attention You are correct. Lot size, setbacks, parking space requirements, and -over-regulation on general are all issues. At the same time I have performed rehabs on many older houses and see what was perfectly acceptable not all that long ago completely unacceotable now. As a quick example..waste plumbing. If any part of the plumbing is disturbed the entire plumbing system needs to be brought up to current code which almost always means rebuilding it from the stack up. In 2020 here in flyover country the going rate was $1500 for each sink, toilet,tub and laundry hiokup. A 2 family rehab ran $18,000 for just the pipes. No fixtures. Just pipes. And the irony is if I would have left the tub sticking 10" into the doorway it would have been fine. Everything is like this. Everything adds cost that quickly adds up. At some point the decision is made to put in granite countertops and stainless appliances and gear to an upscale market. This with the restrictions you mentioned there is no money in low-end housing.
For the same reason the whole country is out of reach: there's a drain at the top. If you raise the bottom line, you raise the whole. Raise the top, and you tear it in half. Congratulations, hustlers, you win, and we all lose, yourself included, but you're too short-sighted to see it.
That 30 percent you don't have data from is the profit margin. The idea for contractors is to get half the bids you put in. If you get too many your too low. So small companies worried about riding prices make sure to get less than half and that means they are doing time plus labor at 100%^ profit. There's the data. Consider that profit used to be 20 to 40 before COVID.
Its way way way over priced and these trade workers think far to highly of themselves. I replumbed my own home on a weekend costed 600 in copper the naibor with a smaller home paid 20k that equates to 1k per hour nope youre not a doctor youre a plumber
How in Gods name does this podcast not have more subs and views?
I mean I didn't even know they put stuff up on youtube
It is for nerds. I am a recently retired residential remodeling contractor, every job is different than the previous. Something we did once 10 years ago we might do today or maybe in another 5 years or maybe never. The only way we can be efficient is to do it right the first time and keep employees as long as possible. To that end our do overs are minimal and a guy with 10 years is considered a new guy.
People can't stand too much reality
Five years ago I purchased and rehabbed a duplex here in fly-over country. Because I moved a bathtub that was blocking a doorway by 10" that was installed during a previous rehab I had to tear out the entire drainage plumbing system down to the basement floor and pay a plumber to rebuild to current plumbing code. The charge was $1500 for each toilet, sink, and bathtub. In total it was $15,000 to tear out and replace a perfectly functioning plumbing system.
whoops. gotta learn the codes and rules first
Do you just come back every 3 weeks and comment the same thing?
@joshshilney9390 No, you just obsessively reread everything I write. Get a life.
People often cite zoning, building codes and other forms of regulation in attributing increased construction costs. Our homes are constructed to higher standards and better engineered than they were decades ago, and this comes at a higher upfront cost. We are dealing with older housing infrastructure with issues not easily remedied as things were often underbuilt. It winds up shifting a higher cost towards repairing something old and already of lower value. People like to look at old growth wood in homes and slap their knee and say they don't build them like they used to, and they are right - we build them much better now and with less material! All in all you pay now or pay later - there are no free rides.
"Much better" is debatable. Everything wasn't universally built better in the "old days," that's for sure. That said, there's plenty of slapped together, junk houses out there today.
Better in many ways isn’t always a better value. Seems to me housing hasn’t improved in value. That’s the real issue. There are many, many reasons, but I don’t think the builders themselves are the reason because it’s a competitive field with many of the same issues it’s always had.
@@jacobbielanski9692 Everything costs more, a box of screws for which I paid $1.99 30 years ago is now $8.99. Codes do cost more but the home is better built and safer. The dirt the home is built on costs more.
Hey there, thanks for the great podcasts (and books)!
I wanted to let you know about a minor omission in most of your UA-cam "video" descriptions - your "FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS" lists don't include 'The Economics of Everyday Things'; only PIMA episodes have been including the link, while all others, including EET episodes themselves, have not.
Furthermore, the contact e-mails at the bottom are not specialized, including for PIMA. I'm not sure if this is intended.
We already build mobile homes in factories and we've been doing it profitably for decades. Why can't we simply design them better?
a big problem in mobile/manufactured/fab housing is the need to tow it down the road, which limits each module to 14' wide- that leads to the 'trailer effect' in which a hallway down the axis of a mobile home takes up alot of the floor space. Every single wide ever made has a long hallway.
@@Rashnak66Add weight and height and we wind up with smaller less sturdy homes which attract tornadoes. They don’t actually attract tornadoes they are usually located in flat open areas.
Zoning laws mean you can't put mobile homes in areas where investment in higher quality has a positive return. Building codes often don't apply to mobile homes, since they're not attached to the land, so builders are allowed to cut corners and that ends up in a race to the bottom.
@@Senthiuz I'm well aware of that but nowadays there is very little difference between a traditional mobile home that isn't very mobile at all and volumetric modular contruction.
Mobile homes do not gain value like stick built for whatever reason. They loose value every year. Especially if you dont own the land, because of the risk they jack up your lot rent.
I am from the greater Boston area My sister has been trying to build a house on 13 acres in Carlisle but we're almost 9 years There is a little tiny stream that runs by the right away that flows a little bit in the springtime in the town board calls that a wetland and won't let them build a driveway so they can't even build a single family home on 13 acres lol they've spent two and a half million dollars on the land over $100,000 on the design and now a few hundred thousand on fighting this and $400,000 on having workers manually take off invasive species off the trees manually on 13 acres because it's technically a wetland so they couldn't have any equipment there. Absolutely absurd.
Move someplace else, ya got millions, not you, them
This is unfortunate. But regulations like this help overall, and I'm happy to pay for the oversight
@X9523-z3v why can't we expect to keep some of the better, more impactful protections of these types of regulations and try and minimize some of the ridiculous outcomes we all know exist?
@chickenfishhybrid44 Unfortunately, it's more about piracy than the community or a good environment. practicality isn't on the menu.
@@chickenfishhybrid44 Seems to me mostly it's due to two reasons, 1) That many people do not want more buildings or development this anything that stops development is good and the other is many people then hear environmental deregulation and freak out. In America environmental deregulation is pretty unpopular and most of the talking heads are very against any even reasonable deregulation even if objectively the regulation is not helping the environment and is causing all sorts of problems. Since the early 1970s are politics have mostly gone from being reasonable, pragmatic and maybe less idealistic to things that sound good but don't actually work. The vast amount of people that can articulate a good story and emotional argument in places that regular people listen to are going to be pro environmental regulation and they'll make it sound very reasonable in logical and they will give you some extreme case about how if you remove even a little bit of it suddenly the rivers will set on fire again in corporations will pollute like they did 150 years ago. Which is just nonsense when people become rich anywhere in the world doesn't matter how much or how little regulation you have you never get more pollution in a dirtier environment people value of clean environment. The only exception is in very left-leaning cities homeless encampments are allowed to break environmental laws.
You cannot just gloss over regulation as a cause. As a rehabbed I can tell you regulation is the greatest contributor. Literally hundreds of thousands of pages of building acodes and regulation need to be followed that add thousands of dollars of cost to prevent even the slightest inconvenience for the home owner or renters.
During a rehab five years ago I moved a bathtub that was installed blocking a doorway during a previous rehab. Since I disturbed 1 drain of 1 bathtub I had to pay someone to tear out the entire functioning plumbing system and rebuild it to the tune of $1500 for each toilet, sink, and bathtub. It came to a needless $15,000 expense for just the pipes. This represents 6 months of gross rent for the entire building and is just 1 item in the myriad of required pointless expenses.
You can still buy kit houses - though obviously not out of the Sears catalog. The problem is that in order to build something like that you need both skills in multiple building trades and also the ability to deal with all the BS that the government throws at you. In many cities you'd have to be a licensed carpenter, licensed plumber, licensed electrician, licensed mason and also have knowledge of the permitting and zoning process that normally only a GC would have. On top of that the city will likely require a site plan that you're probably going to have to hire a licensed surveyor for. Years ago it was possible for ordinary guys to build houses as sort of a side job. That would be tough to do today in most places.
Also, as far this being mostly a local issue so the federal government should just throw up their hands - I don't buy that at all. The federal government has a ton of leverage here by virtue of the fact that they spend so much money on housing (mostly through tax expenditures). Take away the mortgage interest deduction, capital gains exclusion, and Fannie Mae eligibility for any home within a growth boundary and growth boundaries will quickly become dead as disco. Same with community reviews, single family zoning, or whatever other restrictive nonsense you want to get rid of.
The places where you need that licensing is because they are trying to make sure the contractors have valid social security numbers. They then surcharge you to get another unlicensed contractor who doesn't have a social to actually do the work. That licensee will have multiple jobsites they don't have any skin in the game beside loosing their license which is practically impossible. But in the end why do people need a license to do trades? Does drywall need to be licensed? How about painting? Tape and bed? A licensed pea trap replacer? Licensed toilet wax ring installer? Apparently they seem to think so.
1. Try buying an empty single lot.
2. Modern homes have many more systems than Craftsman catalog homes.
Air Conditioning and electrical being the primary differences. Improperly installed air conditioning causes condensation, condensation causes rot. A 2020s home uses many times the kilowatts of a 1920s home, the more power you put through a house the more risk there is.
Washing machines, dryers, hot water heaters, refrigerators, dishwashers, garbage disposals all of these are things that a basic 20s house might not have had, but are absolutely standard these days. Each one isn't that complicated, but it's more and more for one person.
Spot on!
The cost of building an new house is insane due to all cuts. Every step someone is taking a huge cut, so all the pay off combine are way more than the cost of the land, labor, and material put together.
Building houses is completely political. Once a family owns a home in the suburbs, they are then opposed to any more construction or NIMBY. Local governments are absolutely inept at planning for home construction, infrastructure development and growth. Home building is boom, bust and incredibly risky. Builders are incentivised to build big profitable custom homes, in order to have a chance of staying in business. There is no formal training that I've found anywhere, to learn to build homes, it's just haphazard apprenticeship. I could go on and on...
Material costs went up alot
This is an extremely important issue especially someone like myself trying to build a new house. I'm in the dairy farm industry in America for example the average cow is $252% more productive now in 2023 than they were in 1970 It's actually a bit more than that if you go by the more industry standard energy corrected milk but that's getting into the weeds lol If you actually look at all the different industries they've really mostly stagnated since 1970 information technology fracking mining and agriculture are the standouts that really increased marginal productivity.
There are extreme environmentalists in California who will use the courts to tie up any project for years no matter what the merits for the sole purpose of making it prohibitively expensive to build anything. Exhibit A is the 164 mile stretch of California light rail from Merced to Bakersfield..the cheap part going through the central valley..that using california's own cost estimates will cost $38,000 per foot. Exhibit B will be the Sites reservoir fuslrst conceived in the 1950s, in the planning stage for 40 years, and will be completed until the 2030s at the earliest.
UA-cam keeps replaying this video.
Productivity accounts for off shoring how do you off shore construction?
Building codes for small-medium sized multi-family buildings need serious re-thinking.
The problem is you cant override personal property rights. People have the right to sell if they like, and at what price they like. In capitalism, that is sacrosanct.
Construction is expensive because the physical labor is work that most of us are not willing to do and the skilled physical labor requires talent that most are not willing to make the effort to learn and recruiting and organizing labor crews is difficult.
Construction is expensive because it is difficult to get talented engineers, architects and designers and project planners and organizers.
Construction is expensive because the planning and approval processes required with the federal, state local municipal government authorities is long and difficult and it is difficult to get talented lawyers and legal staff that are knowledgeable with government rules and regulations.
Construction is expensive because the raw materials, and products needed for construction are expensive.
Talk to someone outside of Booth School please.. JFC
What industry is the populace going to work in, that weare trying to house? That's why Construction is an economic indicator.
If you think building in the US is expensive, just take a look at NZ building costs...
Average buildung costs in NZ running st $400/ft², roughly DOUBLE the US cost...
Every decline in America correlates with the rise of the civil rights movement
I know correlation is not causation but geez, sometimes you stop and wonder
We made a lot of progress on the social front thank God, however it didn’t necessarily translate into more prosperity and productivity
This a country wide wage disparity problem. If we were all making fair wages, this would be a moot issue
No.
@@chickenfishhybrid44 OH, bravo. Great rebuttal
You guys are making it seem like the construction industry is lazy and doesnt inovate.
Its an industry that can only benefit so much from from modern tech. This is always going to be laobr intensive work with expensive materials. Even prefab is only going to help so much. There is only so cheap you make a product that ways 100k pounds. There is no big mystery here
By adopting strict building codes municipalities can make building low-cost homes untenable and instead cater to a more affluent demographic that will use fewer governmental services and pay more in taxes.
Homes at 1 million dollars.
Other countries have as strict and in many cases stricter building codes as the US. Do you think they have the same motivations?
@chickenfishhybrid44 I can not say what goes on in foreign countries without knowing more specifics. All I can speak on is my personal experience as a rehabber and having to spend $10's of thousands of dollars to meet new building codes. Some of it I can see the benefit of and I have no-issue with making my buildings safe and actually do more than I am required to such as hardwiring in smoke alarms. But as far as I can tell it was written without cost-benefit analysis meaning if it prevented even the slightest inconvenience to a future inhabitant years down the road it was included without consideration as to what it cost.
@@nunyabidness117hopefully there's way more "strict" codes that increase the cost for you to build a home than just having to hardwire in smoking alarms.
My home is in a rural area and over 30 yrs old, and was considered a starter home back when it was built, and it has the smoking alarms hardwired..
@The-D-Hoyt I usually hardwire smoke/co alarms even if I don't have to. I'm talking about things like having to add and pay a monthly bill for a house electric account for a duplex just so I could always have a working light above the breaker box in the unlikely event that a breaker would have to be reset and the panel was illuminated by a bulb fed by the other circuit whose power had been shut off. This completely ignores that everyone has been carrying around a flashlight on their phone for the last 15 years. The inspector finally agreed to let me have two bulbs above the breaker boxes, each fed by a different circuit.
Modular construction is NOT cheaper. Maybe one day it will be and I hope it is. But the numbers don’t make sense vs traditional building methods
Ita cheaper where I is
Municipalities adopt the national building code that add thousands of dollars of expense for little gains as far as safety. The end effect is to make affordable low-end housing all but impossible to build. The truth is no municipality wants low end-housing that attracts low-end citizens when they can force up the prices of housing that will attract more affluent owners that pay more in taxes and use fewer governmental services.
You already said this last week. Chill.
Yes, building codes can absolutely be a factor, but land prices, deed restrictions (e.g., min lot sizes), and restrictive (R-1) zoning are likely larger cost factors than building codes. The IRC/IBC is used ubiquitously throughout the US so it’s hard to claim it’s a driving factor when affordable housing is occurring in many cities that use it.
Also the cost of construction is not the same cost of housing… it doesn’t take $400k to build an average US house. Affordable housing’s primary hurdle is not basic building codes.
@archinomics I didn't realize I had commented earlier. Not sure why I get fed the same stories every week.
@archinomics
Glad you are paying attention
You are correct. Lot size, setbacks, parking space requirements, and -over-regulation on general are all issues. At the same time I have performed rehabs on many older houses and see what was perfectly acceptable not all that long ago completely unacceotable now.
As a quick example..waste plumbing. If any part of the plumbing is disturbed the entire plumbing system needs to be brought up to current code which almost always means rebuilding it from the stack up. In 2020 here in flyover country the going rate was $1500 for each sink, toilet,tub and laundry hiokup. A 2 family rehab ran $18,000 for just the pipes. No fixtures. Just pipes. And the irony is if I would have left the tub sticking 10" into the doorway it would have been fine. Everything is like this. Everything adds cost that quickly adds up. At some point the decision is made to put in granite countertops and stainless appliances and gear to an upscale market. This with the restrictions you mentioned there is no money in low-end housing.
lol. I don’t think new houses are priced for quality. They are priced based on the highest profit margin.
Why are windows so expensive?
Amen. I recently got a bid for replacing my windows that was half the price I paid for the house.
@@rincewind-v7d And they might not even be quality stuff! If you want low-e coating, triple glaze, low sound transmission, oh boy
For the same reason the whole country is out of reach: there's a drain at the top. If you raise the bottom line, you raise the whole. Raise the top, and you tear it in half. Congratulations, hustlers, you win, and we all lose, yourself included, but you're too short-sighted to see it.
That 30 percent you don't have data from is the profit margin. The idea for contractors is to get half the bids you put in. If you get too many your too low. So small companies worried about riding prices make sure to get less than half and that means they are doing time plus labor at 100%^ profit. There's the data. Consider that profit used to be 20 to 40 before COVID.
I'd like to see the year by year declining chart in comparison with the falling testosterone levels.
Can’t build my own house in your factory.
I don’t think the focus here is on custom homes. Most people don’t have a custom home built for them. They buy some generic home that already exists
simple: too many baccalas in construction! 🤣
Its way way way over priced and these trade workers think far to highly of themselves. I replumbed my own home on a weekend costed 600 in copper the naibor with a smaller home paid 20k that equates to 1k per hour nope youre not a doctor youre a plumber
This video is not valid or creditable. Just a failed actor reading a narrative?
Do you mean credible?