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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.)
Of course, as they want to be attractive to as many potential buyers as possible, the results do turn out kinda neutral.
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.
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 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.