Why Levittown didn't revolutionize homebuilding
construction-physics.com
construction-physics.com
This is a traditional and eminently sensible approach that has been lost in the "McMansion" era.
Simpler roof shapes are not only cheaper to build, but also are far easier to deal and insulate, and therefore more energy efficient.
Instead, simple energy efficient design is today mostly used in some high end custom homes while production homes are often overly complex and inefficient, relying on oversized mechanical equipment to make up for poor design choices.
> rooms were arranged so that plumbing lines could be placed near each other to simplify pipe routing.
There's a simple method to quantify this known as the "hot water rectangle". On the house's overhead view, draw the smallest rectangle that includes all the hot water faucets and the water heater.
The size of the rectangle affects build cost, efficiency, and hot water delivery performance. In many large houses there is no consideration for this at the design stage, so they end up using (wasteful) hot water recirculation pumps.
1. https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/the-hot-water-r...
Probably the closest we'll ever get is to standardization of parts like the 2x4 or some of the insulation panels that exist nowadays, since you can flatpack those into a truck and make adjustments on the fly.
See perhaps this student housing project in Norway:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4N4mVITd5U
Entire bathroom shipped as one unit. The rest is panelized.
> Probably the closest we'll ever get is to standardization of parts like the 2x4 or some of the insulation panels that exist nowadays, since you can flatpack those into a truck and make adjustments on the fly.
NS Builders have a couple of videos on panelized buildings:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeHkVeJO6PE
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3QZVG-18E
Matt Ferrell of Undecided made his home that way:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-RTlbv84T8
One can also do (US) traditional stick building with pre-cut lumber:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2FdAdxjSpw&list=PLDYh81z-Rh...
Simpler is better. Though where I am now every place is a flat-ish roof deck which is simple but comes with its own problems.
Times are changing.
Gen Z will happily take it. What they're looking for is just any housing they can afford at all. If cheap effeciency can make a small detached bungalow with a real yard and a parking space affordable, they'll be happy to put up with minor taste quibbles like that. The alternative is roommate packed apartments, mom's basement, or homes far from any jobs to pay for the homes with.
Because factories for rooms are actually specialized for the actual room, it's not cheap once you consider the startup cost of a factory. All the components of a room are increasingly panelized and mass manufactured anyways, making building large portions of buildings similar to building out of Legos or IKEA flatpack, which is good enough for labor reduction.
Gary Klein, the fellow who thought of it, has been consulting on (hot) water issues for a few decades now, and so has tried to whittle down his advice to the simplest thing that (a) people will understand, (b) be actually implementable. That's generally is: make all the hot faucets as close to the hot water source as possible. The rule is a metric for that.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16540802
[1] http://www.garykleinassociates.com/PDFs/15%20-%20Efficient%2...
And a rectangle only needs four sides; a triangle has non-right angles, and any more complex shape needs more joints.
Kate Wagner (of McMansionHell blog fame) gives a pretty good definition of what a McMansion Is:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68c2M4r9oQg
> Simpler roof shapes are not only cheaper to build, but also are far easier to deal and insulate, and therefore more energy efficient.
And most importantly probably deals with water the best: fewer valleys mean fewer places where water is concentrated. Also, generally speaking, the more that overhangs jut out the better.
It's a shame more houses don't get built with ICF, including the roof. Living in an area that gets hurricanes at least every other year I would happily take a smaller house to get something that could stand up to category 4-5 hurricane.
> But even at its early-50s heyday, while Levitt was an efficient builder, he wasn’t unrivaled. Levitt and Sons sold its early Levittown homes for around $10 per square foot, but many other builders (none of whom operated at Levitt’s scale) sold their homes at similar prices.
As property prices have increased, I doubt that the cost of building the house is even the major cost factor - it's probably mostly property value for the lot.
Edit: It also strikes me that we have something even better today - pre-fab or "mobile" homes that can be delivered by truck to a suitable plot of land. These haven't solved the housing crisis either.
the other issue is a lot of municipalities (United States in particular) mandate and encourage large single family homes with outmoded energy and environmental requirements. suburbs work by siphoning resources from larger cities, sort of like a parasite. in turn they produce and encourage among the worst trends in US homes. acres of irrigated lawns and uninsulated attics and windows arent a concern but a feature of their housing code malaise as the cities subsidize this largesse.
That is the narrative, but it doesn't stand up. Suburbs have existed for over 100 years now, and those older ones have managed to tear out the streetcars (on hindsight a mistake), put in sewer, water, phone, electric, cable tv - most of the above list has been replaced several times. They seem like they must be siphoning from the larger city until you realize that they are not replacing all of that every 20 years and so depreciation is not a clue as to the real long term costs.
There are exurbs where you get acres of land, those are generally surrounded by farms (at least for the first 30 years until the suburbs expand out that far - but then a developer will buy those acres and divide it for more houses) In the suburbs you are looking at more like 10 houses per acre - which is not very dense, but still much denser.
The US has good building codes. There is no place where you can get by with an uninsulated attic - except in the bad parts of big cities where houses from 1880 are still around and not upgraded.
edit: uninsulated attic
Surely you mean “uninsulated attic” here?
Because attics don't appear to be insulated in the bay area. There is usually insulation for the ceiling below though.
It's not an either-or though. If you have a vented attic, you're still getting heat through the roof and walls into the attic, and you're getting much more of it because it's not insulated (because it isn't a conditioned space). And then that heat is going to try and go through the relatively poor insulation of your HVAC ducts. At least in the south, it's common for a vented attic to get even hotter than the ambient outside temperature, going well above 120 degrees or more. Conversely, when you're going with a conditioned attic, you would insulate the ceiling of the attic, blocking as much of the heat from getting in as you can. And then your HVAC ducts only need to insulate against a gradient of maybe 74 to 50 degrees rather than a gradient of 120 to 50 degrees or even more on an especially hot day.
Ultimately what this basically comes down to is that you can insulate the ceiling of your attic to a much higher R value than your ducts are going to be insulated.
> Also, there are other options: you could install a fan to ventilate the attic, so that the temperature isn't higher than ambient outside temperature.
I guess you could do that, but now you’re spending energy running that fan to cool the attic from maybe 120 degrees to 100 degrees, and hoping that your central AC saves enough energy from that to make up for running the fan? I dunno, it sounds pretty marginal to me, especially in terms of whether or not the fan is even going to pay for itself.
Having lived in places with OK (SF) or good streetcar service (Berlin, which is a nice A/B test case with East/West Berlin) I am a huge fan of streetcars.
But my understanding is that in general the streetcars never made money in suburban developments. What I remember reading (on HN first!) was that they were deployed in early (post WWII) suburbs to entice urban people to move to a suburbs, but were operated at a loss. When the town eventually had to take them over they shut them down.
Does the economics really work out when you don't have urban density?
The highways that are present from before that time in the US are tolled, like the turnpikes found in the Northeast.
A single-lane BRT can carry 9000 people, while a single-lane streetcar/tram/LRT can carry 18000:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity
Rail gives you more capacity. Of course if you don't need that capacity then the value proposition is questionable: perhaps better to start with a BRT and try to get things to grow.
The reason why most buses suck to take is because they can never keep to a schedule when they're sharing the same lanes that private cars take, have to wait at the same lights as them, etc.
They're also pretty damn uncomfortable to sit on: bouncing motions, herky-jerky steering motions, etc. Compare that to sitting on a subway car: the subway is FAR more comfortable because it's riding on rails and doesn't bounce around a lot. And if it's really crowded, it's a lot easier to stand up while riding a subway than a bus.
No, the streetcar suburbs were ALL pre-war. Pre-WWI, mostly. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb ) And the streetcar companies were generally private companies that operated at a profit -- until they had to compete with cars for both riders and space. And this is key, nobody loved the streetcar companies, because they had a history of gouging commuters. So when those companies got in trouble, there was no political will for any kind of bailout.
Absolutely this.
Back in 2018, mum got dementia and her old home was not one the rest of us could really move back into due to commutes, so we sold it and bought a new one in a better location. The new one wasn't quite big enough, so we converted the existing garage into a granny annex with its own mini-kitchen and shower.
That took about 6 months.
-
I've also recently had one kitchen installed (4m^2 for an apartment I let out), and ordered a second (6 m^2, for a house I'm about to move into), and despite both being tiny and already having the water and electrical connections, they were both in the £€ 10k range.
To be fair there are lots of ways to save money when doing a kitchen or bath remodel, but if you're doing the remodel in the first place you aren't opting for the linoleum floors, plastic countertops, and "builder grade" appliances.
Linoleum floors are amazingly durable and water resistant (some were recovered intact from the Titanic), made from a renewable source (linseed oil), and quite attractive these days.
Perhaps you are thinking of vinyl flooring, which is petroleum derived, and the among cheapest types of flooring.
[citation needed]
Kitchen remodels that I've seen pretty much always opt for some form of tile, which adds considerably to the cost.
"Attractive" is my opinion, not a fact to be cited, but by all means, please form your own:
https://www.forbo.com/flooring/en-us/products/marmoleum/marm...
> Kitchen remodels that I've seen pretty much always opt for some form of tile, which adds considerably to the cost.
Not sure what you are answering on my comment. My point is that linoleum isn't a cheap, builder grade material, whether in tile or sheet form. So I think we agree?
There’s a reason that this narrative, the Strong Towns narrative, comes from an organization with “Towns” in the name. It was originally noticed in small rural American cities (county seats in the rural US and the like), and applies fairly well there, since the trend is to build suburbs in unincorporated land surrounding the main city to avoid city taxes. Suburbs surrounding large American cities tend to be incorporated cities of their own, so they raise their own taxes and don’t steal from the main city.
One major advantage cities used to have in the US but no longer do is that it used to be necessary to be annexed to a city to get access to things like their water system. That was a major driver of cities growing pre-WWII. However, as the US got richer and governmental structures became more sophisticated, things like water districts not coterminous with a city became common. Now there was little reason to become annexed to the city in most cases, unless your city or county ran into budget troubles, in which case the central city probably doesn’t want to pay for you either. Lots of suburbs remain separate specifically to avoid being subject to the city school system as well.
New Jersey has pretty much resigned itself to this situation and gets funding via property tax.
Aside from New York, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Delaware, and Nebraska have the same rule. If you work for a company headquartered in any of those states you probably should be paying nonresident income taxes there just in case. My personal opinion is that "convenience of the employer" should only apply to people who regularly travel to and from the state for work, but last time I looked this up, some guy in Connecticut sued NYS and lost over that exact issue.
For the record, the tax credit isn't part of the agreement, it's a constitutional mandate. SCOTUS prohibits two states taxing the same income, they have to divide it up, so every state has a "taxes paid to another state" credit. Though, funnily enough, that credit is taxable, ASK ME HOW I KNOW.
If you wanna see some real double-tax bullshit, wait until you hear about how Americans have to pay both American and Japanese income tax if they live and work in Tokyo...
[0] i.e. it's not at the convenience of the employer
Sorry, no. I live in Tokyo, but I only pay tax in Japan. I still have to file my taxes in the US, which is a real PITA, but Americans living and working abroad get to exclude most/all of their income (unless they earn a really huge amount), and/or get a tax credit for any foreign taxes paid. Generally, an American living abroad won't pay any US taxes unless they 1) make a ton of money and 2) live in a country where the tax rate is lower than in the US.
What truly sucks about the system is just the filing requirement. Doing your taxes in a better-run country is really easy for a normal wage-earner company employee. Here in Japan, the employer generally does your taxes for you. If you have some adjustment to make, you can do that pretty easily before the filing deadline, but otherwise you don't have to do squat. In the US, everyone has to go to a lot of trouble to file their own taxes, even though the IRS usually already has all their information, basically because Intuit has bribed Congress to make it illegal for the IRS to be run as efficiently and conveniently as the tax collection agencies in Japan or Europe. A lot of Americans end up renouncing their citizenship simply because the tax-filing requirement is such a PITA.
There are so many things you can do with garage space other than park cars in it though.
See also why small cars aren't proportionately less expensive.
I'm not so sure. Looking at my property tax assessment my 1/5th my 1400 sq ft house + 400 sq ft detached garage has an accessed value of about 3.5 times that of my 1/5th acre lot.
Accessed values here are based on market values and are reasonably close to what I see when I compare to recent sales on Redfin or Zillow, so it looks like the total is close. And the accessed value of the building is reasonably close to what my insurance company says it would cost to rebuild them.
Checking Zillow for lots for sale, it looks like my assessed value is reasonable.
I'm in a relatively low density area though. As a check I looked at a nearby significant city, Seattle. Comparing lots for sale there to nearby similar lots that have houses on them it looks like it is similar to where I am in some places and very different in others.
It looks like if the lot is zoned for commercial use or for tall buildings the price if very high. I saw one that was something like 0.38 acres for nearly $7 million. But for lots in single family house areas it looked pretty similar to what I'm seeing at my place. The lot is around 1/4th or 1/5th the value of the property.
But I'm guessing that is not a common situation across the country.
More like 10-20% depending on a lot of different factors like location, cost of house, and size of lot.
Where I live (Baltimore) your second sentence is certainly true. There are boundaries across which the vacancy rate is basically discontinuous. In connected regions surrounded by such boundaries I think the original contention pretty much holds, though. There are a couple variables (nbeds, nbaths, sqft, parking space) that pretty much determine the value of the home and going HAM on any improvements they don't capture is probably negative ROI.
This is certainly the case here in the UK - but I suspect it depends on your local laws.
I looked into building my own house and essentially when you found a plot of land where you could legally construct a house - if a high quality house in that location would be worth £400k and cost £150k to construct, then the landowner would want £250k.
I do sometimes wonder if it could be politically advantageous to separate out the business of physically constructing houses from the business of capital management, land investment, risk management and house price speculation.
If a council knew they could construct 20 families worth of good quality social housing for £100k per house, with no risk of cost over-runs or late delivery, and they just had to provide the land? That could give them the motivation to find the land.
That is how it mostly works in the US. The developer buys a large plot of land and puts in roads, utilities then sells the lots to several home builders who build houses on it. The home builders contract out the foundation, framing, plumbing... to separate companies. while it is common to be in more than one part of this, only the smallest developments are all one builder (and even then plumbing is contracted out).
Is that wrong?
If the house+location is worth 400, and the house alone is 150, why isn't the location worth 250?
Assuming you’re building a family sized building of 2k+ square feet, building costs definitely exceed land costs.
Anecdotally, all the new construction in my neighborhood is top of market - builders are selling large houses at $1.3M+ when a typical existing house sells for more like $700k. Smaller homes would sell faster, but the economics seem to only pencil out for larger/higher end.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-makes-housing-so...
tl;dr: For new developments, land is only about 20% of the total sale price of the home, and this share has been dropping since 2005.
However, he also notes an important selection bias to this stat: new homes do not get constructed in areas where land is expensive, unless it's a custom build for a specific wealthy buyer, because developers cannot make a profit building SFHs if they spend a majority of the purchase price just buying the land. He notes that in wealthy areas like eg. Silicon Valley, 80% of the purchase price is land value, but developers are not building homes there, which is part of why the purchase price is so high.
And sure enough, if you go out to Mountain House or Discovery Bay, prices are like 25% of what they are in Silicon Valley. But then you have to commute from Mountain House. America's housing problem is as much a commuting or job distribution problem as housing, but those problems are even harder to fix than housing.
This author did a series about that as well: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
NIMBYs have always existed it seems, but we don’t have the lax land use laws that result in screwing over young families less than we do now.
Maybe housing policy is the great filter.
I mean that's just America. Every group trying to fuck over the group below them for an extra step up the proverbial ladder, usually without even knowing it.
It's fuck or be fucked around here. And the poorer you are, the more people you've got in line to fuck you.
Anyone bitching about home aesthetics is at or near the top of Maslow's hierarchy and really needs to shut up.
How does it have to be one or the other though?
Economies of scale. It’s cheaper to build lots of identical things.
On the secondary market, relative demand: an ugly house will be cheaper.
Yeah, just have them build lots of nice-looking identical things.
If it doesn’t make them more expensive, sure. Even then, the fact that it’s repeated will make it ugly to many.
That's fair actually, a lot of people find novelty attractive.
Of course, as they want to be attractive to as many potential buyers as possible, the results do turn out kinda neutral.
It is important to note what parts the identical is important and what you can vary. You can buy cars in many colors because it turns out black is no longer an advantage, manufactures can change paint quickly. (the reason you only get about 6 choices is sales wants to keep each color in stock so you can drive it home, there is no savings in manufacturing to have 6 colors choices as opposed to 60,000)
In the case of houses the identical thing is 8 or 9 foot tall walls with mostly 90 degree angles. You have a lot of options to make walls longer or shorter as you desire and so houses get great scale factors despite not being very identical.
Those systems and inventory still add to cost. Most consumers just don’t care about that marginal cost when buying a car.
> have a lot of options to make walls longer or shorter as you desire and so houses get great scale factors despite not being very identical
This is still more expensive than having them be identical. Fundamentally, uniqueness and cost are related due to economies of scale.
The above is why pre-fab never took off. Sure you can build a house in a factory, but transport costs are much harder than bringing the materials and factory to the house site. The wall height matters because most of the boards in the wall are pre-cut in a factory already and that is something your factory built house cannot improve on (unless you want a weird wall height)
But one is still cheaper!
> why pre-fab never took off
Same reason we have more car colors. It’s more expensive. But we value variety more than that marginal cost. That doesn’t change that producing one costs more than the other.
(There is also a massive difference between consolidating fabrication and consolidating construction. Developments work because you have one team doing a similar set of tasks at the same location repeatedly.)
I'm not in the industry, but I could imagine there's some possibility for pre-fabbed wall panels, but I don't know how much that really saves, because I wouldn't think you want to pre-hang the drywall, it'll get damaged in shipping. Maybe you could prehang exterior sheathing. But it's a big increasing in shipping volume to save only a little bit of time and have a much less flexible layout.
This isn't really true. At the peak of car customizability an OEM had an astronomic number (something like 10^180) of possible configuration combinations for a single model, with very few cars having actually identical configurations and like 80% being unique configurations. Adds a huge amount of complexity to the supply chain and shop floor management. There's a reason why OEMs have been greatly reducing the number of individual options since then.
Yes less different models does save a little but of cost, but it isn't that much overall.
Understanding more about home-building now, when I look at what's available in new builds and renovations these days I see a lot of suspect aesthetics and they are usually accompanied by (if not directly representing) poor design decisions.
Declining birth rates are often blamed on many things, but the negative birth rates in the western world are probably most caused by housing policy. Housing affects everything. Have to have two incomes to buy a home for kids. Probably 50+ hour week jobs, so no time to care for kids. But child care is too expensive… because rent is so high it’s driven labor cost up. Have to own two cars because the sort of family friendly density to live car free is illegal in most places. That’s another 10-30% of a families income. People who didn’t buy an home when interest rates were low and homes cheap own homes are essentially locked out; both of home ownership and having families.
We know the richest Americans and (Swedes according to a recent study) are more fertile than the middle class. So maybe it’s not a filter for the earth, but it probably will ultimately destroy the western world as we know it. Ultimately, the childless middle of the fertility U will disappear with immigration being used to replace the gaps in the workforce. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just the outcome of generations of people voting (at the municipal level) in their best interests without care for future generations.
There might be a correlation with urbanization in general rather than housing policy specifically. Ever since antiquity, cities have been demographic black holes while most population growth occurred in rural areas.
I now live in a neighborhood with about 200 homes all built right after WWII, all 3 bed/1 bath 1,200 sq. ft. with minor variations[0]. No sidewalks! Pedestrian-friendly access is not cheap.
[0]by now, many have been modified to add a bath/bedroom
Is it common to mention why certain codes and policies were implemented (documentation, essentially)? Because that would make it a lot easier to understand if planning dogma was reasonable ("When we didn't have this, people died a lot") or not ("We now have mitigation strategies for the reasons people died a lot that allow us to step back rigor in this area.").
Next to me is a rich town with no sidewalks and a more country ambience except for the even bigger McMansions.
[0]by now, many have been torn down and replaced with two story McMansions, to the extent they can fit on the lot.
It's all tradeoffs, I guess...
Having worked over the years on multiple tract-home projects doing labor, framing, stacking (installing the prefab truss packages), and layout (snapping lines on slabs marking out where everything goes) I can affirm that this IS how its done with variance per-project and usually with several floorplans to scratch that "novelty" itch for buyers. The homes go up fast with each crew sweeping through a few units at a time doing their respective parts. It's efficient that way.
> keeping construction on track meant a steady, uninterrupted stream of material that arrived at the jobsite exactly when needed.
A lot of the materials (especially lumber) are queued up ahead of each project starting to ensure that daily flow happens. On jobs I worked on as labor my job was to hand deliver any lumber resupply requests that were below some efficiency threshold for using the heavy off road forklift -- if memory serves me correctly, 20 pieces.
The windows and trusses were all pre-fabricated and delivered in bundled packages for each floorplan.
* https://www.newhomesource.com/learn/custom-or-production-bui...
* https://www.foxridgehomesbc.com/news-feed/the-differences-be...
* https://www.nahb.org/other/consumer-resources/types-of-home-...
This is in contrast to a "spec" (speculation) home where a smaller builder buys land themselves and builds a (single?) house and then sells it after (no buyer is lined up before hand).
Someone could also go with a "custom" home, where the eventual resident themselves have some land and hire someone (general contract (GC)) to build it (or they act a GC themselves and hire all the subs (sub-contractors) themselves).
A "production builder" is probably the closest thing to 'factory line' assembly/construction. Generally this is what is happening when a sub-division is built up; usually a certain percentage of the units have a signed purchased agreement and a deposit.
95% (every developer is different, but this is a good number for discussion) of the lots are sold by the developer to a builder. They will have a dozen builders and know what each wants and so 95% of the lots they know who will buy the lot before they can legally talk to the builder who will buy it (if the builder is on vacation that week they will wait for them to come back). The last 5% is for the few people who think they want a custom house with their own builder. The builders will sell the majority of houses on their lots as one of their designs (often all, but they will custom build on their lot if you ask - it costs only a little more), most houses are sold before they are completed, but often they are started before they have a purchase agreement.
Two weeks of earth moving. Then prep. Do the foundation in a week. Then prep. Framing in a week and a half. Now endless jobs of plumbing, electrical, windows, this and that, on and on for weeks.
For factory built homes to really be a win, then need a very high level of integration. An easy to snap together frame doesn't actually save much time or effort. But if there's really finished walls with utilities built-in (and also accessible for future maintenance) then I can see the effort being potentially useful.
the result of the above is four bedroom apartments have too much space with no purpose. Try to draw any apartment and you will quickly see.
Since you're talking about this you probably know this already, but Europe largely does not follow this rule, and doesn't really suffer from horrible fires.
You can't ctrl-c (Western) European designs and regulations into North America because the context is fairly different.
A lot of Europeans underestimate the cultural and legal differences between North America and Western Europe.
Mine isn't dark. Pick good ones. "X is bad because the bad Xs are bad" is not an argument. Demand good Xs then.
Horizontal suffers from (1) far less freedom. You can never tear your house down and build a different one. You can't build an addition in your yard. You can't build on an extra story or turn your roof into a balcony (2) Far harder to abate noise
Most are dark. It's a simple matter of the design, if you're not an end unit. If units are to be a solution to housing issues, someone has to live in the "bad" ones. If you're making new units, might as as well build ones without townhouses' weaknesses.
You can't tear down a single townhouse, they're structurally-reliant on their neighbors; you can't build on extra stories, that's also a structural issue and might break HOA rules. These hypothetical horizontal units can have yard space. Noise abatement is the same.
You're ignoring the main issue: getting people out of SFH, because they take up too much space. The point is to keep as many aspects of SFH as possible. SFH have access to light from at least 3 sides, so you have to have that. They tend to have only 2 flights of stairs for ~2000 sqft units; having 3 or more is often a dealbreaker. However, many SFH have detached garages; detached storage/private yard space is probably fine. So, I think this is a solution. If townhomes were the correct answer, they'd be more successful, and not just what people are settling for because they can't afford SFH.
Whether the construction costs, infrastructure costs, financing costs, etc. are affordable and worth paying is a matter that properly should only be answered by the specific individuals and organizations involved, with aggregated metrics only being relevant to analyzing results. If considerations involving those costs are directly involving people outside the local context, something is seriously broken.
All of these costs should ultimately be the responsibility of the home buyer, directly or indirectly.
And there is no meaningful social context that encompasses everyone, everywhere without regard for the specifics of their individual circumstances. Trying to approach complex social questions by using a Katamari-Damacy-style blob of everything rolled together as your unit of analysis is a sure-fire way of making those questions incomprehensible and intractable.
Rowhouses are a really, really good sweet spot for affordable yet private as long as they have the good noise eliminating party wall, so I would support the government just mandating them being built this way (it doesn't cost that much more, but over time by driving out bad rowhouses, it would improve their reputation).
Rowhouses enable a density similar to apartment buildings while allowing privacy quiet, ownership of a yard and roof deck, the ability to tear down and build any way you like, and pretty much all the accoutrements of suburban living but just a little smaller. It's great to own the land under your feet and have no one below or above you.
It made sense for this structure. It was about 30 rooms across 3 stories. Enough for repetition to make sense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38057265
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/thomas-edisons-concrete-...
I'm reminded of the next computer, which had a very expensive factory that just failed. The IDEA of highly-automated assembly of a computer is just so compelling, but getting it from automated to highly-automated wrecks the economics of things.
The other thing I think about is tesla - they have been working very hard to remove complexity from each generation of their cars. But they keep going and don't know where to stop, removing the dashboard, buttons, sensors (radar and sonar) and control stalks. In the end, the car might have marched right past "elegant minimalism" to "cheap dangerous nobody wants"
Many time the realization of the idea the important thing. Apple didn't win the personal computer market, but its ideas defined the personal computer. Levitt may not have become a billionaire, but his idea that houses were for everyone won.
The figure in computing history I'd analogize Levitt to here would be Gary Kildall. Kildall pioneered the concept of an open architecture with products from many competing vendors all implementing compatible standards and running the same OS. Ultimately, Microsoft stole his thunder, his company failed, and he died in relative obscurity, without the recognition he deserves for pioneering the modern industry.
What is this bs? Whoever wrote this has no knowledge of the soviet bloc & the "house factories". Come on.
The Wikipedia has more.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown
But then I read this and it trashed everything I thought of him-
“William J. Levitt refused to sell Levittown houses to non-Caucasians.”
I feel much less bad about him dying penniless now.
"The FHA, upon authorizing loans for the construction of Levittown, included racial covenants in each deed, making each Levittown a segregated community."
That is, the FHA included the covenants, not Levitt.