566. Why Is It So Hard (and Expensive) to Build Anything in America? | Freakonomics Radio
Вставка
- Опубліковано 25 вер 2024
- Most industries have become more productive over time. But not construction! We identify the causes - and possible solutions. (Can you say ... “prefab”?)
FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO:
UA-cam: freak.ws/3yIl6dl
Apple Podcasts: freak.ws/3yAvQh0
Spotify: freak.ws/3TsdCmV
ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO:
Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) - from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves.
ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK:
Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things.
FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS:
Freakonomics Radio: freakonomics.c...
No Stupid Questions: freakonomics.c...
People I (Mostly) Admire: freakonomics.c...
The Economics of Everyday Things: freakonomics.c...
Special series: freakonomics.c...
CONNECT WITH US:
radio@freakonomics.com
/ freakonomics
/ freakonomics
/ freakonomics
/ freakonomicsradio
/ freakonomics-media
Subscribe to our newsletter: eepurl.com/bKm0cf
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Spot on!
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.
Material costs went up alot
Productivity accounts for off shoring how do you off shore construction?
This a country wide wage disparity problem. If we were all making fair wages, this would be a moot issue
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.
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.
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
What industry is the populace going to work in, that weare trying to house? That's why Construction is an economic indicator.
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...
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
This video is not valid or creditable. Just a failed actor reading a narrative?
Do you mean credible?