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Comment by baltcode | Hacker News Reader

This is where I'd like to see more innovation. The kind of stuff that takes most of the time and money for most people. Housing, cleaning, food storage, plumbing, transport, security. How come cars, homes, wholesome dinners, home repair, car repair costs more or about the same as 20-30 years ago. We have more and more materials to work with, efficiencies of industrial processes and machines has improved and more stuff is automated. How come the little guy/gal is not getting any of it other than the internet?

In many part of, say the Rust Belt, or many innner cities there are tons of abandoned buildings and houses. If only the repairs and maintenance costs decreased, a lot of people could use them.

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>How come cars, homes, wholesome dinners, home repair, car repair costs more or about the same as 20-30 years ago

Cars primarily because cars today have a lot more "stuff" in them--in many cases, safety related. Although I'm not sure given improved reliability that the $/mile cost isn't less

I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of some fresh food has dropped but it's probably not a lot cheaper across the board. Mechanized farming has been around for a long time.

Home and car repair are largely a function of labor. There's relatively little benefit in either case to improved industrial processes. The process of building a house hasn't changed much and manufactured housing has never really taken off for a variety of reasons.

Completely agree baltcode, as amazing as teslas and iphones are homes are the center point for everything else. There is a huge housing crisis and it effects much more of the economy, environment and community than most people realize and I can't help but feel like there is much more innovation to be had on this front!

The problem you run into is that housing (the land, really) is both a useful object and a rather solid investment. It's that dual functionality that makes it a different problem from disposable objects (iPhones and cars, as examples). Very few cars or phones are purchased as investments directly (meaning you see the value appreciate). Housing is almost exclusively an investment, both for finances (whether collecting rent or being able to leverage the value down the road) and for the land it sits on.

A world where most housing becomes disposable (i.e. it is not directly tied to the land it sits on) would be very different from the one we currently live in.

True, though I'd like to understand it on deeper level. For example, how much of a house or condo price due to the land and how much of it construction, maintenance, taxes?

In any case, at least for building straight up, there is scope for improvement even with the land remaining a bottleneck.

It varies enormously although there tends to be some correlation between the size and cost level of the house and the price of the land it's on. Someone's probably not going to buy a million dollar parcel of land and put a shack on it (even if they were allowed to by zoning--which they probably wouldn't be).

The general rule of thumb is $100-200 a square foot for houses so a fairly typical 2,000 square foot house is going to probably cost in the neighborhood of $300K to build. That assumes the land has water, electricity, sewer/septic, etc.

So for fairly typical exurb/suburban locations (i.e. not Bay area, Manhattan, or back of beyond), the house and the land are probably roughly the same value.

"A world where most housing becomes disposable (i.e. it is not directly tied to the land it sits on) would be very different from the one we currently live in."

So basically the trailer park model?

Didn't we have an article on HN talking about Home Depot and how Japan's houses are basically disposable? Still tied to the land, but torn down and new build instead of home improvement.

[edit:] yep, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10303455

That's what I envision, but I like to be optimistic that it wouldn't be that bad.

One variation is the campground model. I have a camper parked at a fairly decent campground, costs are about 2.5K a year (plus electricity and waste disposal). But where I live the camping season is about 5 months. However, it doesn't have the feel of a trailer park -- instead if feels like a resort area.

Yes. In urban areas housing is, almost by definition, not affordable any more. Yet there's still a cultural stigma coming from living in mass-produced housing like trailer parks or high-rise projects like the late unlamented Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago.

Just because le Corbusier's brutalist mid-20th-century vision gave urban manufactured housing a multigenerational bad name doesn't mean the whole project is stupid.

I wonder if Habitat for Humanity or some other experienced org with an ethical core could have something to add to this project.

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