So with the crane and a large crew, you can work faster, but are the total dollars for staff and equipment higher or lower? Other polities can impose costs on your time, i.e. the building permit to interfere with the street can be $100 flat for the whole construction time, or be $100/day. Or $1000/day. Raise the cost of time, and spending more to be quick makes sense.
The real sad thing from my youth, is that we figured Buckminster Fuller's belief that factory manufactured homes taken to a site would have to be way cheaper, dated to the 1930s and by the 1960s, we thought for sure the price of building a house would plummet soon: Fuller was everywhere with his domes, and new experiments like "Man and his World" in Montreal....and we're still framing on the site. "Manufactured homes" is a synonym for "poor and crappy".
And I'm not imagining conspiracy or anything; apparently it's a Real Hard Problem.
Because of labour shortages, we may see more assembly taking place off-site (e.g. prefab panels) - it's easier for people to work indoors than outdoors! The big challenges with offsite construction are that (a) you need volume to justify the fixed costs, and (b) apparently it's not that much more efficient than traditional construction.
Planet Money episode (which talks about Buckminster Fuller as well as mobile homes and current attempts to make construction more efficient):
I find this talk about housing in Japan really weird. The Japanese population is shrinking and it has been shrinking for years. It is not having enough children to replace the population and it is very resistant to immigration.
If Canada were in the same situation, Canada would not be having a housing crisis either.
Japan is unusual because it builds so much housing. An earlier post on Tokyo vs. New York, London, and Paris: https://morehousing.ca/tokyo
A friend wrote up a zoning proposal for Vancouver inspired by Japan's national zoning code, with a greater emphasis on green space and permeable surfaces. It's on my list of things to write up at some point. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
In the last several decades both Canada and Japan have grown their populations by tens of millions of people [1]. Japan's population decline has been a relatively recent thing (since 2010) but their housing being affordable has been a trend that's been going on for several decades (despite massive population growth) [2]. Meanwhile Canada's housing prices have ballooned [3].
I looked at all your graphs, and it looks like the inflection point for both population growth, and, cost of housing in both Canada and Japan is around 2000---so I'm not totally convinced and I suspect others won't be either. I don't want to quibble with you, though, as I too am interested in the idea that our building codes have something to do with ballooning housing costs. I just found the idea that population demographics are irrelevant startling, since I've heard so much talk about the economic sky falling in Japan because of demographic trends.
So with the crane and a large crew, you can work faster, but are the total dollars for staff and equipment higher or lower? Other polities can impose costs on your time, i.e. the building permit to interfere with the street can be $100 flat for the whole construction time, or be $100/day. Or $1000/day. Raise the cost of time, and spending more to be quick makes sense.
The real sad thing from my youth, is that we figured Buckminster Fuller's belief that factory manufactured homes taken to a site would have to be way cheaper, dated to the 1930s and by the 1960s, we thought for sure the price of building a house would plummet soon: Fuller was everywhere with his domes, and new experiments like "Man and his World" in Montreal....and we're still framing on the site. "Manufactured homes" is a synonym for "poor and crappy".
And I'm not imagining conspiracy or anything; apparently it's a Real Hard Problem.
There's an entire newsletter on this subject, Brian Potter's Construction Physics. https://www.construction-physics.com/
Because of labour shortages, we may see more assembly taking place off-site (e.g. prefab panels) - it's easier for people to work indoors than outdoors! The big challenges with offsite construction are that (a) you need volume to justify the fixed costs, and (b) apparently it's not that much more efficient than traditional construction.
Planet Money episode (which talks about Buckminster Fuller as well as mobile homes and current attempts to make construction more efficient):
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1171364556
Brian Potter on creating a platform which decouples construction from supplying larger components:
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-prefab-pivot
Dan Fumano profile of Mitsui Home Canada, which does prefab construction. There's an apartment building at Kingsway and King Edward built by Mitsui.
https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/bc-looks-to-build-faster-cheaper-rental-homes-with-prefabricated-units
I find this talk about housing in Japan really weird. The Japanese population is shrinking and it has been shrinking for years. It is not having enough children to replace the population and it is very resistant to immigration.
If Canada were in the same situation, Canada would not be having a housing crisis either.
Am I missing something?
Japan is unusual because it builds so much housing. An earlier post on Tokyo vs. New York, London, and Paris: https://morehousing.ca/tokyo
A friend wrote up a zoning proposal for Vancouver inspired by Japan's national zoning code, with a greater emphasis on green space and permeable surfaces. It's on my list of things to write up at some point. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
In the last several decades both Canada and Japan have grown their populations by tens of millions of people [1]. Japan's population decline has been a relatively recent thing (since 2010) but their housing being affordable has been a trend that's been going on for several decades (despite massive population growth) [2]. Meanwhile Canada's housing prices have ballooned [3].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/population-and-demography?facet=none&country=JPN~CAN&hideControls=false&Metric=Population&Sex=Both+sexes&Age+group=Total&Projection+Scenario=None
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QJPR368BIS
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QCAR628BIS
I looked at all your graphs, and it looks like the inflection point for both population growth, and, cost of housing in both Canada and Japan is around 2000---so I'm not totally convinced and I suspect others won't be either. I don't want to quibble with you, though, as I too am interested in the idea that our building codes have something to do with ballooning housing costs. I just found the idea that population demographics are irrelevant startling, since I've heard so much talk about the economic sky falling in Japan because of demographic trends.