Wait, I'm still struggling with the final number here. So the upshot is that if you could be given free serviced land, and built a 4-plex of 1000 sf units totalling 4000 sf, that would cost $2 million simply to construct, upon the free land.
The blog says labour is about half, so the 4000 sf is a million bucks of materials, and a million bucks of worker-hours, that is, ten worker-years at $100K/year. Which just seems high.
The continued existence of those "build your off grid cabin" kits for a few tens of thousands suggest that the actual materials for construction don't cost a million bucks for 4000 sf, either.
I'm aware that I'm stomping into the most-reviewed and agonized-over area of business and technology, and I don't believe that a million constructors are in a secret conspiracy. But I just can't make the numbers make sense.
So the housing costs are not just about land and permits and so forth. My parents got our 1600 sf house on a serviced lot in Calgary in 1969 for $30,000. That's almost exactly $250,000 today.
And now it costs twice that in labour and materials to build a 1000 sf house, with no land.
Frankly, it goes against all other manufacturing trends that the building alone has gone up so much in price when the relative cost of building, say, furniture has gone down, versus inflation.
Is this that labour has gone up so much, rather than materials? The Buckminister Fuller problem that we "build a car in your driveway", rather than manufacture them. But we've tried about nine ways to make homes in factories, and the price does not go down. Frustrating.
Wait, I'm still struggling with the final number here. So the upshot is that if you could be given free serviced land, and built a 4-plex of 1000 sf units totalling 4000 sf, that would cost $2 million simply to construct, upon the free land.
The blog says labour is about half, so the 4000 sf is a million bucks of materials, and a million bucks of worker-hours, that is, ten worker-years at $100K/year. Which just seems high.
The continued existence of those "build your off grid cabin" kits for a few tens of thousands suggest that the actual materials for construction don't cost a million bucks for 4000 sf, either.
I'm aware that I'm stomping into the most-reviewed and agonized-over area of business and technology, and I don't believe that a million constructors are in a secret conspiracy. But I just can't make the numbers make sense.
So the housing costs are not just about land and permits and so forth. My parents got our 1600 sf house on a serviced lot in Calgary in 1969 for $30,000. That's almost exactly $250,000 today.
And now it costs twice that in labour and materials to build a 1000 sf house, with no land.
Frankly, it goes against all other manufacturing trends that the building alone has gone up so much in price when the relative cost of building, say, furniture has gone down, versus inflation.
Is this that labour has gone up so much, rather than materials? The Buckminister Fuller problem that we "build a car in your driveway", rather than manufacture them. But we've tried about nine ways to make homes in factories, and the price does not go down. Frustrating.
Excellent question. There's an entire blog on the subject of construction productivity, Brian Potter's Construction Physics, which I highly recommend. An overview: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/sketch-of-a-theory-of-construction
That was a very good read, recommended. Alas, the story boils down to the three words: "No, We Can't".
I guess it's down to making labour cheaper. Only 2% of our current mix of immigrants have construction skills. Sounds like we need 20%.