Why we can’t buy Chinese houses for $20K at walmart
Though it’s over a year old, I just came across a post where Phil Greenspun asks Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Why can’t we buy a Chinese house at Walmart?
I respect Phil a lot and his long article on why he publishes his book online is a great read, as are many of the things he write. Generally speaking, he is about 14 to 19 times more interesting to read than me. Being in the throes of home building though, I think his article is way off. Basically, he says that a few decades ago it cost only 20x as much to build a home as it did to buy a TV, but now that ration is 1000:1 and, he says, this could be fixed if we simply built our homes in China and shipped them here.
I have to say that I ended up at his site because I thought from the title that the post was about the wildflower named Chinese Houses (a beautiful flower from the pea family and of which I got some excellent photos on Friday out in Hite’s Cove near Yosemite). Anyway, after my initial disappointment and realizing that the article really was about houses that you live in, not flowers… I had some reactions.
First off, the comparison of TVs to houses is not appropriate. The main reason that the price of televisions has dropped is because instead of large pieces of hand-crafted furniture with huge an expensive vacuum tubes that are hand soldered to complicated circuit boards, we now have televisions that are essentially pounded out as integrated circuits using transistor technology of some sort, either to drive a CRT or an LCD. In other words, technology has revolutionized TV manufacturing in much the same way that it has changed computers and stereos. The correct comparison would be to something like furniture or cars or skis, which are all now produced abroad in some proportion and whose price has perhaps fallen relative to the price of a house, but not so dramatically as items that have gone from tube technology to transistor/semi-conductor and integrated circuit technology.
As it turns out, we are in the process of building a house and drawing near the end. We did look at a number of systems that would allow more of the process to take place off-site. Most pre-fab kits did not meet code for the snow loads we have in our area (120psf). The component systems really don’t save you that much labor anyway. Most of the labor is in attaching the walls and roof to each other, for example, rather than in building the walls. A good framing crew will put up walls to enclose a 1000sf storey in just a matter of hours. Doors and windows are perhaps one more day. Insulation another. Drywall another. So it’s hard to actually save a lot of money by moving your labor to China, especially when many of the same tasks have to get done onsite anyway and shipping from China remains quite expensive.
What is needed, in order to make housing more affordable for average people (we can only afford to build a house because we plan to rent it out to vacationers while we live in employee housing at our company and, eventually, a downstairs appartment when we get that finished off). The housing industry is still waiting for the equivlent of a semiconductor to replace the vacuum tube. There are systems that people are proposing. Ultimately the solution will look less like the solution for skis (make ‘em in China, as K2 now does) and more like the Whole House Machine which will simply build you a house, on-site, in a day, using inkjet technology. I’m not saying that this is the solution that will win, but it will be something more like this. Like furniture, this will create a segmented market where some people buy furniture that works, but is emotionally unsatisfying being made of melamine and partical board, while a few people will still buy fine, solid wood, hand-crafted furniture for a dramatically higher price. I don’t think the inkjet resin house will feel that much better or worse than the stick-built drywall house, but it will not have the feel of a beautifully-finished timberframe, which now seems like a luxury, but will seem much more so when true custom, onsite manufactured houses hit the market.
That said, a house is still complex, and that only puts of the shell, which the bank tells me is only 40% of a house (and of that 20% is the foundation). So there is still the other 60% of the house (electrical, plumbing, flooring, cabinets, painting, heating, AC, trim, etc etc) and that can’t ever effectively be sent to China or done by a robot without dramatically changing the feel of our houses. That may not sound like a big deal, but anyone who has read the work of Christopher Alexander (A Pattern Language or The Timeless Way of Building) will know that just because we might be able to create robots that can build houses doesn’t mean we should or will. Our environment, both constructed and natural, have a lot to do with how we feel and what we think. Ultimately, we need to meet the shelter needs of people of lesser means, but at the same time, we need to make that shelter emotionally satisfying. That doesn’t mean luxurious, but it does mean “homey” and that will almost certainly require a lot of onsite work.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Add to: 
del.icio.us •
furl •
reddit
•
digg •
technorati cosmos
