[HN Gopher] WikiHouse - Open source, modular, wood based, zero c... ___________________________________________________________________ WikiHouse - Open source, modular, wood based, zero carbon housing Author : xor99 Score : 435 points Date : 2022-09-07 09:50 UTC (13 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.wikihouse.cc) (TXT) w3m dump (www.wikihouse.cc) | greenie_beans wrote: | how is this zero carbon? logging is very carbon intensive. and, | i'm not an expert, but from what i've read as a layperson, | doesn't removing trees cause a loss of the carbon that's stored | in the soil? | cookieswumchorr wrote: | the wood will usually be replanted, if they do it properly. But | the basement it stands on- it still cement. | X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: | Is it? The first study I found showed some extra carbon | storage, but the 95 CI includes 0 | | https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339956316_The_lifec... | greenie_beans wrote: | that's interesting, i'll take a deeper look later. if only i | had bookmarked all the studies i've come across. i have an | interest in woodland so i've been curious to learn about this | and my (layperson) takeway is that logging adds a lot of | carbon to the atmosphere. also, the soil stores a lot of | carbon, and when you log trees, you degrade the soil and | cause loss of stored carbon. (but i'm far from a scientist, | just waiting for somebody who knows what they're talking | about to chime in.) | X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: | Looking further it seems like there's a lot of logging | practices that are worse than performing no action | (assuming that the biomass provided doesn't offset | something else, e.g. prevents coal from being burnt) | Ndymium wrote: | Isn't the majority of carbon in a tree coming from the air, not | soil? I could imagine it removes nutrients though. | dang wrote: | Related: | | _Facit Homes, Wikihouse, and the Plywood Frame_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27666320 - June 2021 (33 | comments) | | _WikiHouse - Open source buildings and interiors for self-build_ | - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13856917 - March 2017 (53 | comments) | | _The WikiHouse chassis system [pdf]_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13029982 - Nov 2016 (1 | comment) | | _WikiHouse 's DIY kits are the open-source way to build a house_ | - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5768030 - May 2013 (3 | comments) | jbu wrote: | One of these went up near me. Pretty cool. | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfTkW87vmUQ | oblio wrote: | I don't see any toilets, kitchen, electrical stuff in that | time-lapse. It looks more like a shed than a house :-) | skylanh wrote: | The resources I could find that reference this indicate that | they needed 30k PS to finish the interior--the same page | indicates they were fund-raising 190k PS, and the charity that | operates on about ~214k PS a year. | | Do you have any inductions on the cost of this building? | goatcode wrote: | You forgot "ridiculously expensive." I got excited by this | project several years ago, but like most of its sort: it's | completely inaccessible for what it is. | troymc wrote: | It's open source; I wonder if competition and innovation will | bring the cost down over time. | | One obvious way to do that is to build one, or a few, giant | centralized plants that pump out a zillion of these each year, | i.e. economies of scale. Like Honda Civic cars or Lego blocks | (which also are machined with tight tolerances). | | Yes, I know that the founders _want_ these to be manufactured | in a decentralized way, all over the world, but that 's not how | economies of scale work. Systems that _can_ be run | decentralized (e.g. email, Bitcoin mining) often end up | becoming centralized anyway. | peatmoss wrote: | Framing out a house with construction lumber is "open source" | too. Vastly simpler and cheaper than lock-together blocks | made out of relatively complex materials like sheet goods. In | a pinch, you can fell trees and process them with hand tools | using methods refined over many, many generations. | | In other words, stick construction has been public domain for | so long that it would be impossible to even acknowledge its | creator and significant contributors. | debacle wrote: | Stick based construction is already incredibly time, resource, | and labor efficient. | | SIPs are neat (https://www.sips.org/what-are-sips), but even they | are an added cost. | | Dirt-based construction is an intriguing idea, but generally you | are trading materials cost (which is already relatively low) for | quite a bit of labor cost. | | A system that cheaply allows for enduring dirt-based construction | would be an interesting advancement, but I'm not sure how | universal that system would be. | mellavora wrote: | > cheaply allows for enduring dirt-based construction would be | an interesting advancement, | | you wouldn't mean clay brick, would you? I see some of the | advantages, but want to be pendantic about calling a 10K old | technology an 'advancement' | debacle wrote: | Unfired clay brick production is incredibly labor intensive, | and generally you'll want to produce those bricks on-site | because they don't transport well. | upsidesinclude wrote: | This is basically available, but no one offers the service. | | https://www.opensourceecology.org/ | | There is just too much labor involved for the material savings | unless you are in the third world. | | Bagged earth construction is similarly cost effective given a | cheap labor force. | debacle wrote: | Bagged earth construction is great, however you are adding a | TON of labor. So much so that in a developed country you | might as well just use brick construction because it will be | cheaper. | | In addition, in my area I would have to have my dirt amended | because we have very sandy soil, but I don't know by how much | because a few feet down that sandy soil turns to clay. | | They have some mobile dirt brick factory machines, but those | seem to be home-built prototypes for the most part. | jkestner wrote: | This is a neat project from a design/engineering viewpoint, but | it seems it's addressing the 'problem' of "houses look hard to | make; how can it look like something I can do?" Same reason I'm | skeptical of 3D printed houses. | | We had looked into SIPs for our relatively fancy house, but | budget won out. There are lots of neat building solutions that | cost too much. If you think labor costs are high, wait til you | try to find someone who will learn a new system. | | Construction cost is not the reason that housing supply is | tight--but engineers don't have as much fun fighting for better | zoning policy. | int0x2e wrote: | If I was designing this, I would only have a small set of "SKUs" | with minimal customization, and then go all out on economies of | scale. | | If 10% of houses switched to a single "system" with a small set | of SKUs, such that everything is optmized for manufacturing, | shipping and assembly - you could reduce the cost of construction | significantly. This is basically an extension of the IKEA model | for the house itself instead of just the furniture. | phantomathkg wrote: | Genuine question, other than the cover hero image title, where | does it explain how come this is zero carbon? | maxehmookau wrote: | So we used WikiHouse construction to build a community centre in | our local park. You can see a timelapse here: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfTkW87vmUQ | | Took 4 people 6 days to build it. Slotted together like lego, it | was quite something to watch. | corwinstephen wrote: | The physical world is headed in the same direction as the | internet. In 20 years, the built environment is going to be | entirely comprised of identical materials and trademarked by a | tiny handful of monopoly companies. | shafyy wrote: | The use of "Carbon negative" really grinds my gears. Carbon | negative would mean that by building this house, you actually | remove carbon from the atmosphere. No, you don't remove CO2 from | the atmosphere by buliding this house. | | Yes, trees remove carbon, but now you've just cut them down and | released a bunch of carbon in that process (plus all the CO2 you | emit, you know, building the actual house). | | Edit: Ok, looking more through their website I came across this: | https://www.wikihouse.cc/product They say that the upfront carbon | cost of building a WikiHouse is - 17T CO2, compared to a normal | house of + 30T CO2. This is so fucking misleading, I've just lost | all respect for the makers of this. I think it's a great project, | but once you start bullshitting like this, you can get the hell | out. | insane_dreamer wrote: | "carbon negative" isn't BS: since the CO2 already sequestered | in the wood remains there (mostly), while the trees cut down | for that wood are replanted eventually capturing more CO2, thus | ultimately removing more CO2 from the atmosphere than was | released through the sourcing of the wood. Now considering | everything involved in the building process, the house as a | whole is probably not "carbon negative" -- and perhaps that's | your objection -- but when it comes to the primary material | (wood vs concrete/steel) it _can be_ carbon negative. | shafyy wrote: | There are few wrong assumptions with your statement: | | 1) The wood the house is built with will not be there | forever, some day the house will be torn down and the wood | burned or rotten | | 2) Cutting down trees and planting new ones is not a good way | of carbon sequestration. Otherwise, why not cut down all | trees and just plant new ones? Bam, carbon negative, climate | problem solved. | | People need to understand that trees should not be seen as a | renewable resource in the context of climate change. Not for | building, not for burning as fuel. | [deleted] | marcus_holmes wrote: | The carbon sequestered by the trees is now in the building | materials. The space the trees were in will now have more trees | grown in them. | | The carbon from the trees is now not in the atmosphere, it's in | the wood components, and won't be in the atmosphere until the | wood components reach end of life and are | burned/rotted/whatever. | | So yes, carbon has been removed from the atmosphere. I don't | understand the objection. | falcolas wrote: | By "sequestering" the carbon in building materials, we're | merely kicking the can down the road by 20-30 years. At which | point the house is torn down and goes off to the dump to rot | away as normal. | | And we're already doing this for centuries - using wood for | making buildings - so we're merely continuing the status quo, | not magically putting more carbon away suddenly. | tejohnso wrote: | > The carbon sequestered by the trees is now in the building | materials. | | If X amount of carbon was in the trees, X amount of carbon is | now in the building materials (at best). There's no further | removal of carbon from the atmosphere by this alone. And all | of the future carbon the trees would have sequestered is now | not going to be sequestered by those trees. So more likely | carbon positive than negative. | | > The space the trees were in will now have more trees grown | in them. | | That's an assumption. And even if it were true, those trees | would take years to begin to sequester the same amount of | carbon that the previously existing trees did. And even then, | it's not obvious that those new trees would sequester more | carbon than the previous trees would have had they been | allowed to continue growing. | | Plus if you're going to say that building with blocks is | carbon negative, you're going to have to talk about how those | trees get turned into blocks, and how the overall process | including that, is somehow carbon negative. | quixoticelixer- wrote: | > That's an assumption. And even if it were true, those | trees would take years to begin to sequester the same | amount of carbon that the previously existing trees did. | And even then, it's not obvious that those new trees would | sequester more carbon than the previous trees would have | had they been allowed to continue growing. | | It's a very safe assumption | nordsieck wrote: | > And even if it were true, those trees would take years to | begin to sequester the same amount of carbon that the | previously existing trees did. | | It sounds like you might be making a stock vs flow error | here. Or I could be misunderstanding you. | | > And even then, it's not obvious that those new trees | would sequester more carbon than the previous trees would | have had they been allowed to continue growing. | | 1. Trees slow as they grow (after a certain point). | | 2. Commercial tree farms exist to grow trees. If they | weren't growing trees for consumption, something else would | be done with that land. | shafyy wrote: | > _Commercial tree farms exist to grow trees. If they | weren 't growing trees for consumption, something else | would be done with that land_ | | Yes, for example let the natural vegetation take over, | increase biodiversity, and sequester more carbon thanks | to the increased biodiversity and better soil than | fucking tree farms. | quixoticelixer- wrote: | - Plantations aren't worse for the soil than native | vegetation most of the time. Sometimes they can be better | for it. | | - A lot of the time plantations are planted on less | productive farmland. - Not all plantations will naturally | regenerate quickly back to native vegetation. | | - Those trees were planted for a reason and a lot of | plantations are planted on degraded farmland or | scrubland. | c22 wrote: | My understanding is that older trees have accelerated | carbon uptake (because of more surface area to do | photosynthesis), but younger trees can be grown more | closely together, increasing the total efficiency. It | does seem be to unclear which approach is ultimately " | _better_ ". | musingsole wrote: | > The carbon sequestered by the trees is now in the building | materials | | You're ignoring material waste. This process doesn't consume | 100% of the tree; only a portion of the tree's carbon is | sequestered into the building. The rest is rotting. | | > The space the trees were in will now have more trees grown | in them. | | Trees are renewable, but it's not quite "copy&paste". | Further, the harvesting of the trees was certain to be carbon | intensive. | | So, on the whole, you can trust this process IS NOT CARBON | NEGATIVE. | | What it may be is LESS CARBON INTENSIVE than a traditional | process. They are VERY FAR from crossing the neutral line and | yet are trying to claim carbon negative? That's pretty brash. | | Does the objection make more sense now? | WastingMyTime89 wrote: | Despite the all caps, your objections still don't make that | much sense. | | > You're ignoring material waste. This process doesn't | consume 100% of the tree; only a portion of the tree's | carbon is sequestered into the building. The rest is | rotting. | | It's ply. Apart from the root system, it's quite close to | 100% indeed. | | > Trees are renewable, but it's not quite "copy&paste". | Further, the harvesting of the trees was certain to be | carbon intensive. | | Tree harvesting is pretty much fine. Transport is what | pollutes the most here. The new growing trees are carbon | sinks. It's not a question of renewability. It's just that | you used to have CO2 in the air and now it's a house. | Processing will mostly use electricity so it depends of how | your local electricity is produced of course. | | > They are VERY FAR from crossing the neutral line | | They are probably not very far. It's not an heavily | mechanised project. Assembly is mostly done by hand. | Considering the amount they sequester, being neutral is not | that far fetched. | musingsole wrote: | > It's just that you used to have CO2 in the air and now | it's a house. | | I disagree on your accounting (largely because the house | is torn down one day and further a CNC throws wood dust | everywhere and this project requires one front and | center), but none of that matters. Carbon negative is a | strong claim that requires strong evidence. Of which, | none has been offered. | shafyy wrote: | Well put. If they just would say "less carbon intensive | than using concrete or bricks", I would buy it. But carbon | negative is just a straight up lie. | woeh wrote: | While I very much doubt if the entire process is going to | be carbon negative, "straight up lie" is very strongly | worded. In essence, by building wooden structures you can | store CO2 in urban environments that are currently | dominated by concrete. To be sure, to be carbon negative | the whole process needs proper thought; the trees for the | wood of course needs to be replanted and the energy used | in milling, construction and transportation need to be | sourced durable, I get that. | | But I mean, if we want anything to be carbon negative we | need to capture carbon from the atmosphere and put it | _somewhere_ ; e.g. reclaiming land for forests or putting | carbon back into the ground where we got it from, but | putting carbon in constructions as part of the solution, | why not? For dealing with climate change, the important | part is getting it out of the atmosphere. | shafyy wrote: | The problem is that people believe this type of | greenwashing (as can be seen by other comments on this | thread). Building a house is never going to be carbon | negative. Carbon neutral at best, but even that is going | to be almost impossible to achieve. | s8s8discourse wrote: | > "The rest is rotting" | | Is it, though? Because operations I've been to use every | last available ounce of the tree. Trunk and limbs are sawn, | small limbs, branches, bark, and offcuts are ground for | biomass heating. Yes, it's burnt, but releasing no more | carbon than it captured in its lifecycle and to provide a | tangible end result that would otherwise be achieved with | fossil fuels. | | Root stumps rot, yes, but providing a breeding ground for | insects and hence birds and small mammals and hence | predators. They also fix soil beneficial bacteria and | fungi, and having spent all their energy breaking up the | soil and then breaking down they prepare the best soil bed | for the new tree to take its place and sequester more | carbon. | | It's not the perfect process, by any means, but wood as a | building material is infinitely more sustainable than | concrete, gypsum and stone. | musingsole wrote: | > It's not the perfect process, by any means, but wood as | a building material is infinitely more sustainable than | concrete, gypsum and stone. | | Cool, show me the part where any of that means this | company has a right to claim carbon negative? | | Onus isn't on me here. | kitd wrote: | _They say that the upfront carbon cost of building a WikiHouse | is - 17T CO2, compared to a normal house of + 30T CO2. This is | so fucking misleading, I 've just lost all respect for the | makers of this._ | | I'm not sure what "upfront" means here, but it makes sense if | talking about overall net CO2 usage. The amount of CO2 in the | atmosphere after building would be 17T less than before the | tree started growing. Ie the tree absorbs 17T more during its | growth than is emitted during harvesting, transport and | construction. Whereas an equivalent brick building puts 30T | more into the atmosphere than the (unharvested) tree absorbs. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | I wouldn't outright call it bullshit, but the cost and effort | involved make it only a marginal improvement over traditional | buildings. Plus it doesn't scale as good as the US based 2x4 | wood system, which can be mass-produced / prefabricated much | easier. | rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: | >I wouldn't outright call it bullshit | | But it is. | matthewmacleod wrote: | You've just asserted that this is bullshit without explaining | why. Could you explain why you feel this is misleading? | forgetfreeman wrote: | I am also deeply skeptical of the net-negative claim, mostly | because of the outsized role plywood appears to play in the | building productions demonstrated. There are several energy- | intensive steps required to manufacture plywood that are not | present with standard lumber production. Additionally, | transport overhead is higher due to the comparative rarity of | the specialized mills used to create plywood. Unfortunately I | haven't been able to find any kind of real numbers comparing | the carbon footprint of lumber vs plywood to demonstrate | exactly how much more carbon it takes to manufacture plywood | vs lumber. | falcolas wrote: | FWIW, plywood (OSB, chip board, etc) are already heavily | used in house building. Floors, roofs, sheathing, etc. | jeltz wrote: | I am also skeptical but I would not call the claim | bullshit. Building from wood could in theory be carbon | negative. Unclear though if this process is. | | Another thing worth considering is that building small | houses uses a lot of land, land which might have had | forests. That needs to be considered too. | shafyy wrote: | I've explained why pretty clearly. Trees are not a renewable | resource in the context of climate change. They take dozens | of years to grow, they are part of an biodiverse ecosystem, | and just cutting down forests has a much bigger effect on the | ecosystem and its carbon sequestration capacity than the tree | alone. And don't get me started with tree farms. | | This carbon negative claim taken to the extreme would mean, | that we should just cut down all trees and plant new ones. I | think you can see why this is ridiculous? | kgran wrote: | Says zero-carbon, proceeds to show single-family detached homes | in a suburban setting, mostly accessible by car only. | | P.S. The concrete foundations look far from zero-carbon. | [deleted] | MontyCarloHall wrote: | Put solar panels on the roof and an electric car in the | driveway. | | The main strike against suburban lifestyles today is that | they're energy intensive and thus carbon-heavy. There is | nothing wrong with a energy intensive suburban life if that | energy is carbon neutral. | | (And yes, as other posters point out, there are some additional | environmental externalities associated with suburban versus | urban lifestyles. It's not clear to me how severe these | externalities are, and thus whether they are worth the tradeoff | of increased quality of life for the many people who love | living in the suburbs. As an extreme example, living a pre- | industrial lifestyle would be much more environmentally | friendly, but it isn't remotely worth the quality of life | tradeoff.) | tremon wrote: | The main strike against suburban lifestyles is that the | maintenance cost per square meter (water, sewage, electrics, | roads, communications) is much higher than the area generates | in taxes. | MontyCarloHall wrote: | That's a separate issue from suburbs' environmental impact. | I'm all for raising property taxes in suburbs to make their | residents pay their fair share for infrastructure. | starkd wrote: | A lot of people don't like to live in cities. | nemo44x wrote: | You have to remember a lot of people on this site are | young people without families that prioritize social | lives. They haven't related yet that people with kids and | careers, etc. are simply not interested in what cities | have to offer and that the quality of life in a city is | terrible if you have a family compared to what you can | get outside of a city in a nice town. Unless you're | really rich and can get a huge apartment or condo and can | afford to pay for parking or have a driver, etc. | | Just look at NYC to find the typical pattern: Young | person lives with multiple people in an area like the | Lower East Side or Williamsburg (yay social life!), then | begins to settle down in a place like Park Slope (just | married!) and has a kid (dedicated to urban living) and | then another kid comes along and/or the reality of urban | living (the schools are awful, it's cramped and | expensive, the city offers you nearly nothing since you | don't go out like you used to) and the brownstone is sold | for a tidy profit and they're off to the NYC suburbs to | get more space and a better quality of life to raise a | family in. The city is a short commute away still. | criddell wrote: | I've heard that before and believe it to be true, but then | it makes me wonder why cities are often so eager to annex | suburban developments? If a suburb isn't paying it's fair | share, why don't cities raise taxes or un-annex them? (is | there a word for un-annex?) | adrianN wrote: | https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ | Cities need to grow new developments to pay for the | existing developments. | criddell wrote: | Presumably when the infrastructure needs to be replaced | local governments will finance with bonds (which I think | makes a lot of sense). If the bonds are paid for by | suburban taxes, do you think the suburbs will get to be | as expensive as the city or maybe even more expensive? | | The Strong Towns ideology is attractive (especially for | northern US cities), but I think if self driving cars | come into existence, the ideas might not get very far in | most places. Self driving cars are going to encourage | sprawl like no other force ever has. I know I'd move | further out if I had a self-driving car. | [deleted] | adrianN wrote: | Suburbia also encroaches on wildlife habitat, reduces ground | water replenishment, requires expensive infrastructure, and | is material (not just energy) intensive. | kgran wrote: | Electric cars are as zero-carbon as the cost-equivalent space | of a freshly paved asphalt concrete highway or parking space. | If not more than that due to the more special materials | required to make them. | | Also note that, due to much heavier weight of electric cars, | asphalt concrete surfaces will be damaged a lot faster. The | relationship between vehicle weight and its damage to the | road surface is exponential, not linear. | oblio wrote: | You still need to drive places, which is the least efficient | method of mass transportation. An entire infrastructure needs | to be built and maintained for cars, which is super wasteful | and in almost every country is pushing everyone into debt | that is just punted into the future. | | Sure, convenient for individuals but absolutely not | sustainable for society, nor the planet. Even with electric | cars and green energy. | | The insane cost of cars: | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ztHZj6QNlkM | | The hard truth is that if we don't want to abandon our | comfortable modern lifestyles, 80-90% of us will have to live | in dense cities and use mass transportation 95% of the time. | mrcartmeneses wrote: | Which is great. Living in cities in Europe is fantastic. | Even the towns are great in some countries with great rail | and tram connections | nemo44x wrote: | Who wants to use a train/tram to haul kids and their | things around? Do you really think it's possible to haul | an infant, a toddler, and a 4 year-old around and all | their things using a train that will only get you so | close and now you have to walk another 4 blocks? Who | wants to do that? | | A home with space and a nice sized yard and an automobile | to travel around in is great. It's nice to have a local | train too to get into the adjacent metropolis, etc. | starkd wrote: | He just proposed a housing solution. Now you are | complaining because he hasn't produced a transportation | solution as well? | oblio wrote: | Those are tied. | | It's impossible to service low density housing | efficiently. | goodpoint wrote: | That's not the point. Proposing a housing solution that | encourage unsustainable transportation is not | sustainable. | nlittlepoole wrote: | I agree with you but I think one thing that might help | people fear this change less is reiterating that the | density necessary isn't Manhattan or Downtown Chicago. | There are a lot of ways to make an efficient urban area | without being a massive megalopolis. Neighborhoods like | Park Slope in Brooklyn or Sunset in SF are good examples. | Multifamily housing doesn't have to mean high rises. | | People also don't have to live in what we think of as | cities at all. Rural living is fine if people live closer | together in those areas. Such that they live in walkable | towns that don't require driving and can be easily | connected to other towns and cities via a bus or train. | Europe is much better at this but you see vestiges in New | England. It's just nobody should really be living beyond | walking or biking distance of core services (transport, | shopping, etc). The benefit for those who love nature is | more untampered natural beauty in the surrounding areas. If | anyone has ever been to a place like Banff it's lovely when | fine right. | oblio wrote: | Someone posted here that the maximum density with this | type of housing is 3 stories, 75 dwellings per hectare, | so about 7500 dwellings per square kilometer. At 3 | stories, that has to be at least 6 people per dwelling, | so about 45k people per square kilometer. Let's cut that | to 5k people per square kilometer to account for | infrastructure, shops, schools, etc, it still seems | reasonable. | | We don't even need more than that on average, we don't | need Hong Kongs everywhere. "Brownstones" will do :-) | mrcartmeneses wrote: | Other than the air pollution from your tyres, the pollution | and murder from getting the materials for your car batteries | and the taxes that poorer residents in the inner cities have | to pay to subsidise the high cost of services and low tax | intake from the suburbs | leecarraher wrote: | my guess is they will buy carbon offsets to cover manufacturing | energy and transportation costs, a system which has its own | shortcomings and critiques. | ElijahLynn wrote: | MMM, I might just have to build a home office away from the house | with WikiHouse! I've been dreaming of something like this! | skylanh wrote: | I see. | | Another wood-house project created by civil engineering or | building material science graduates (Leeds Beckett | University)--similar to the last one. | | Build costs similar to brick (ouch!), requires a specific CNC | operator to build panels (supply chain ouch!), and creates an | integrated house (ouch! to any renovations using conventional | materials; ouch! to system longevity). | | I hate these as they're basically the results of a couple of | graduate students operating under a innovation grant. | | The practical results of this are that someone is going to find a | local CNC operator (within 320km based on the study), find out | the costs of buying 300 sheets of quality 7-layer plywood and | running a custom project with the CNC operator, find a local | engineer willing to sign off on the project (for insurance, | mortgage, and to maintain the 10 year defect free period), and | then have to find a local labour contractor willing to use their | building materials as the structure. | | After all that legwork, they're going to go with a traditional | building contractor. | [deleted] | [deleted] | SamBam wrote: | > requires a specific CNC operator to build panels (supply | chain ouch!) | | Unsure what this means. The CNC files are open source, and | there are millions of CNC machines in the world. What specific | CNC operator? | | In general, I'd say your comments are valid for a random | homeowner that decides they want to try this out. If you think | in terms of a contractor who wanted to start specializing in | this in their region, it seems quite doable. They could have | their own engineer that has seen many of these, and a stable | source of plywood/OSB and access to a CNC shop. | emilfihlman wrote: | They mean that it requires a cnc operator, and that it's not | usually required in building houses, which is a pretty huge | added cost. | kitd wrote: | From which you can subtract the cost of the | brick/cement/block manufacturer. | throwaway4aday wrote: | Wouldn't that be equivalent to the plywood manufacturer? | This still adds an additional processing step where you | take a mass produced construction material and make a | specialized product out of it which you then use to build | the house instead of just going straight from material to | construction. | forgetfreeman wrote: | I think it may be worth pointing out that this system as | demonstrated exacerbates the two largest problems contractors | face: materials costs and sourcing labor. | | The specialized manufacturing requirements for modules makes | sourcing materials from traditional suppliers functionally | impossible, adds additional (highly specialized) | manufacturing overhead, and drives up the cost of materials. | | The wildly non-standard construction methods mean | subcontractors will have to train on using the system, and | projects will start from a functional zero-prior-experience | knowledge base, which invites a diversity of headaches and | potential safety issues. | | On an unrelated note, insurers are likely to be deeply | skeptical of unproven construction methods in general, and | plywood-heavy construction methods in particular given their | propensity to fail catastrophically from even relatively | minor moisture-related insults. Insurance premiums are likely | to reflect that. | monkeydust wrote: | So this happened. I looked at wikihouse many years ago for a | project. | | I really liked the idea and team but (at least at the time) it | was still very new. | | Too much risk to take on for individual homeowner and it was | cheaper for me to get a local contractor who had experience in | developing what I was after. | Spooky23 wrote: | I agree. | | Folks love to knock on traditional "stick built" buildings. I | don't get it. I live in a frame house built in 1927. It's not | going anywhere so long as the owners are stewards of the | property. | | Watching similar houses get built, it's a fairly efficient | process. I don't think the costs of homes are really driven by | framing. | | Super conservative code requirements like electric socket | requirements (my kitchen remodel required the addition of *5 | dedicated circuits with arc fault breakers in most cases), fire | sprinklers, etc and others drive costs. | | A frame house with a thoughtful architecture that incorporates | passive heating/cooling, etc will cost less, be easier to bike | and require less fiddling. | Thlom wrote: | The plot next to us is being built now, and when they finally | started erecting the house it took a couple of weeks. They | spent months with excavators and explosives first. That's | what you get for building on porous rock I guess. | ShredKazoo wrote: | On the other hand, if you're a CNC operator and you already | have spare capacity, this could allow you to cheaply branch | into home construction by hiring a few more employees... | throwaway4aday wrote: | I think this is overly complicating the process. If you want an | open source DIY method of building a home, just learn basic | framing and construction. It's not hard, lots of people have | built their own homes, you just need some common sense and a | willingness to learn. | | If you want to go all in on modular, wood based, zero carbon | housing then learn how to build a timber frame house. If you | really want zero carbon you can use only hand tools and harvest | your own trees. | | Wikihouse seems more for people who want to buy something off the | shelf, pretty much a kit house. That's not a bad thing since it | takes a lot of effort to build something as big as a house and | lots of people don't want to do that. But I don't think this | should be sold as a solution for DIYers since the existing | methods already satisfy the listed requirements. | wizofaus wrote: | > If you really want zero carbon you can use only hand tools | and harvest your own trees. | | Why on earth can't power tools run off renewables? And even | hand tools/nails/ bolts etc. have embedded CO2 emissions. | throwaway4aday wrote: | They can but can you guarantee it? Hand tools have a much | smaller footprint compared to the mix of metals and plastic | that go into power tools. You can buy 100 year old hand tools | that work just as well as new ones too so they've got the | whole recycle thing going for them. | calvinmorrison wrote: | If you want to see a cool DIY property - the guy behind | woodgears.ca lived on the property while his dad built a | retreat/summer camp. | | https://woodgears.ca/cottage/index.html | mavhc wrote: | The existing methods of building houses are terrible though. | It's stupidly expensive to edit a house, they're designed and | built as if it's still 1800. | | Why does adding a socket into a wall cost more than $50? Should | be able to just open the wall panel, plug in an extra cable, | close panel, done. | sigstoat wrote: | > Why does adding a socket into a wall cost more than $50? | Should be able to just open the wall panel, plug in an extra | cable, close panel, done. | | what are you envisioning? using cheap consumer power cables | inside of walls, and paying extra to have unused sockets | hidden away inside of walls for years/decades, just so that | it's fast to add an outlet? | | we use screw terminals inside of the wall because they're | cheaper and more reliable than the socketed connections. and | we use heavy gauge cable with thick jackets for safety. | throwaway4aday wrote: | It still would in this system, the website states that you | still need to add "plaster panels" or drywall if you're in | the US which means everything will be taped, mudded and | painted. | | If you want easily accessible utilities then there are ways | to build to code where all of that is visible and accessible, | it just won't be pretty. Aesthetics or utility, pick one. | benj111 wrote: | Because people want nice plastered, painted and wallpapered | walls? | | Adding a socket is the easy bit. It's the putting everything | back to how it was that's hard. | | If you want plain panelled walls you could install that now. | And have your $50 socket. Most people probably don't like | that tradeoff. | kderbyma wrote: | well if they had more easily removable wall panels you | could still decorate and access the inner wall | hpkuarg wrote: | Seems strange that we'd optimize for making modifications | easier, when such modifications are much fewer and | farther between than the everyday living that fills the | time between, during which people value a solid wall with | no gaps or seams. | | Of course, not everyone values the same things to the | same degree, and a homeowner could cut a 4x8 piece of | drywall into smaller pieces and have more easily | removable panels like you're imagining. | andirk wrote: | We see the divergence from aesthetics in wood shops, auto | shops, and other building shops. Moveable panels, exposed | circuitry/plumbing/gas lines. A home typically hides its | utility parts behind solid objects (i.e. a wall) that need | invasive cutting to reach. Even still, an electrician adds an | outlet in the exact process you mention, but it's a little | messier and costs $150. | albrewer wrote: | I used to work as a framer during the summer when I was going | to college. | | What you're glossing over here is that about 10-15% of the | timber you buy to frame a site-built house is wasted (ad-hoc | cuts, bracing, jigs, etc.) and thrown into a dumpster. | | If a house is pre-planned, you can use a machine that cuts each | board to length, and join the ends of each board using basic | joinery processes that aren't practical when building a site- | built home. You can pre-fabricate things like trusses and wall | segments so you (or your workers) aren't driving 100k fasteners | to fabricate something a robot could build in 1/10th the time. | sigstoat wrote: | > If a house is pre-planned, you can use a machine that cuts | each board to length, and join the ends of each board using | basic joinery processes that aren't practical when building a | site-built home. You can pre-fabricate things like trusses | and wall segments | | aren't prefab trusses readily available these days? i feel | like i've seen plenty of trailers hauling stacks of 10 timber | trusses down the road. | | we've also got prefab homes (not mobile/trailer/whatever | homes), with modules assembled in factories and brought | together at the site. unfortunately they seem to carry class | connotations here in the US. | kristov wrote: | A mate of mine used to work in a place that manufactured | segments of regular wood framed houses. They had painted | outlines on the floor, so they could cut and assemble 2x4 | frames at great speed. I think you would need to make a | truly massive number of these before a robot would be more | cost effective. I also think that 2x4 construction would | create less waste than parts CNC cut from ply sheet. | monknomo wrote: | yeah, prefrab trusses, prefab sip panels, modular houses, | trailers and prefab houses divided up into rooms that can | be trailered and joined onsite all exist | bombcar wrote: | They exist and they can be designed to take advantage of | things like making sure each room is designed to use full | board lengths, no cuts (8 foot stud walls, for example). | throwaway4aday wrote: | I'm not sure recouping some of that wastage is worth the | switch. You wouldn't eliminate all waste since there will | always be some on site modification. I'd like to see the | comparison in time spent assembling all of these individual | segments vs framing a wall with an air gun. The segments look | a lot more fiddly to me compared to laying out pieces on the | deck and banging them together with a gun and then just | standing the wall up. From their guide on the site: | | > A typical WALL block weighs around 40-60kg and can | generally be carried by two people. | | They're a little light on detail about how these wall | segments join and seal to each other so that could be a bunch | more work. All this is considering you'd be able to get pre- | manufactured blocks from somewhere, if you had to CNC and | assemble them yourself then the labor is off the chart. | kashkhan wrote: | For envelope (floor, walls roof) key metric is $ per sq ft. Its | possible to do <$10 per sq ft in most of USA. So for a 100 sq | ft room it works out to 6 sq ft envelope per sq ft of floor so | $60 per sq ft of floor area. | | for a 500 sq ft studio that works out to $30k. | simmanian wrote: | any resource you'd recommend for learning framing and | construction? | hpkuarg wrote: | Larry Haun's book The Very Efficient Carpenter. Comes with | companion videos that you can find on YouTube, as well. | throwaway4aday wrote: | There's tons of material out there, you can buy a book from | Amazon[0] or watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials[1]. It's best | to learn by doing though so you could always volunteer[2] or | take a local course. | | [0] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=house+framing&crid=ZT0KPA5JG1E | Y&s... [1] | https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=house+framing | [2] https://www.habitat.org/volunteer/near-you | throw0101c wrote: | There are also lots of folks: building their own places | (search "homesteading"), commercial builders | documenting/advertising their build process (Perkins | Builder Brothers is decent), and pointing out small details | that are easy to miss (Matt Risinger, who has a building | science lean to things). | haroldp wrote: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4L_aJ1rV4&list=PLRZePj70B4. | .. | aaronax wrote: | https://www.shelterinstitute.com/ (timber framing especially) | is one that I am aware of from a few sources over time-- | perhaps most notably from YouTube channel Pure Living For | Life, who failed to finish building their house. | CobrastanJorji wrote: | I mostly agree with you, but I like the idea of being able to | give reasonably smart but unskilled people a bunch of these | boxes and an Ikea-style "how to assemble this house" and | telling them to get to work. Seems like it'd scale very well | for situations where you have a bunch of volunteers and need to | build several houses but maybe don't have many experienced | builders around. | ArtemZ wrote: | I moved to U.S from a country where there are barely any | construction regulations and brought log cabin construction | skills with me. They are useless though because no municipality | would allow me to do it myself without a contractor and a log | house won't pass any modern construction codes. | jaegerpicker wrote: | I'm not sure where you are located but in Northern New | England this is very untrue. Maine, New Hampsire, and Vermont | all have a LARGE number of diy log cabins built. I've stayed | in several and I'm in the early planning of building a house | (not log cabin, it's a long house with builtin green | house/barn sections similar to the long house on the Apple TV | show home). There are many places in the US that allow you to | DIY your own home, though the majority are very rural which | is a MASSIVE benefit IMO. | t-3 wrote: | Many areas will have relaxed codes for cabins that are only | used part-time. The hard thing is that all this stuff is | state-by-state and locality-by-locality, so you have to dig | to find lax areas. Louisiana is particularly open for | residential construction IIRC. | kderbyma wrote: | land of the free.....:/ | andirk wrote: | Free is subjective, and since there are variations of the | regulations by municipality, you can choose from the | spectrum of lax laws + dangerous to strict laws + safe. | Your preferred location, however, may not align with your | preferred regulations. Or you can do like we do here in | Berkeley and build whatever you want because your neighbors | also have illegal additions so they're not gonna squeal. | ClassicOrgin wrote: | Very true. Where I live you need a building permit and an | certified engineer to sign off plans for something as basic | as a pergola. | tengbretson wrote: | This looks neat, but having to submit a structural engineer's | inspection report before they sell you the materials is absurd. | cdot2 wrote: | That seems specific to how mortgages work in the UK | huetius wrote: | The responses here are critical --- some useful, some not so | useful. | | I'm happy to see this project and would like to see more like it, | even if this is not quite ready for show time. The possibility of | using advances in technology and open source methods to allow | people to make more stuff for themselves and their communities in | a way that is efficient and feasible is exciting to me. | [deleted] | dagw wrote: | I guess the real question is does this actually solve a real | problem people are having? An acquaintance of mine recently | built a house, and constructing the outer 'shell' was by far | the quickest and easiest part of the whole process. | falcolas wrote: | > does this actually solve a real problem people are having? | | And does it solve it at a price point that makes it practical | in comparison to other high efficiency house building | technologies? | huetius wrote: | Depends what you mean by "this." This exact project is, I | think, not ready for prime time, as I said in my post. If by | "this" you mean "ways to make more of our own stuff on a | smaller scale," I am currently in my fourth month of waiting | for a proprietary part for my tractor, when if I had an | economical and legal way to either machine the part myself, | or have it machined by a competent neighbor, then I wouldn't | have this problem. In a time when we are experiencing the | consequences of over-specialized, over-connected, over- | optimized supply chains, I think that a more fractal, scale- | invariant, redundant approach to production has real value. | | (It also, in general, makes humans feel good to make and then | use something). | forgetfreeman wrote: | Are construction methods the bottleneck though? Habitat For | Humanity is an excellent example of communities building things | for themselves and others. What problem do you see systems like | this solving? | cuttysnark wrote: | > Are construction methods the bottleneck though? | | Perhaps when compared to this CAD/CNC approach. In the | traditional stick-built house you need wood and other | materials, tools of all sorts, and specialized workers who | know the steps in order. If some critical material hasn't | been delivered yet, workers have to pivot to a different task | or simply stop working. | | With this other method, 100% of the material is cut/delivered | to the site, and the workers need only to follow the | instructions. Their tools are fewer, too--hammers, nails, | hand-crank lift. | | In the future, anyone who likes putting together IKEA | furniture may consider an exciting new career in home | construction. I say that half in jest, half in hope. | forgetfreeman wrote: | I see how the material presented on the website could lead | someone who is unfamiliar with construction to the | impression that this system simplifies the process but that | is not the case in any meaningful way. | | Framing, cladding, and insulating a structure, which is all | that is represented here, are the simplest, least tool- | intensive tasks involved. Additionally this style of | construction can seamlessly cope when a foundation is | poured a couple inches out of dimension or a few degrees | off square. By comparison I shudder to think what flavor of | chaos would kick off on a DIY Ikea house project when the | assembly team has to cope with similar issues with only | pre-fab components to draw from. | | Standard building methods expect all of the material for | each phase of construction to be trucked in in one bundle, | identical to a pre-fabbed system, but with the added | benefit that if any material is found to be sub-standard, | or if there are errors with the delivery materials to make | up the difference can be trivially sourced from any lumber | yard or big box home improvement store. | | Long story short, framing a house isn't particularly | complicated. Folks that are intimidated by the process | don't have enough experience in the industry to know first- | hand that there isn't a single task involved that isn't | routinely completed by individuals who have little prior | experience, are high out of their mind, or both. | design-of-homes wrote: | My first impressions are favourable. There are contraints though, | as the design guide acknowledges: | | > WikiHouse is intended for buildings of up to 3 storeys. This | covers 95% of all buildings, and allows gentle density | neighbourhoods of up to around 75 dwellings per hectare. | | > The main constraint on height is not gravity, but wind. In high | winds, lightweight structures are more prone to slight lateral | flexing, which is not allowed within most building codes. Further | structural research and testing is ongoing. | actually_a_dog wrote: | I'm kinda curious about this. Under the International Building | Code, you can build wood frame buildings up to 6 storeys tall | [0]. Granted, this is not actually wood _frame_ construction, | but I don 't see why a building built this way would be any | less structurally sound than a traditionally built wood frame | building. | | --- | | [0]: https://seagatemasstimber.com/how-tall-are-tall-wood- | buildin... | criddell wrote: | Maybe it has to do with lack of bracing? When my home was | being built I noticed lots of metal straps going between | studs in an X-formation. I wonder if that was to make lots of | triangles to add rigidity? | redtexture wrote: | Yes. | | This can also be provided by sheet materials like plywood, | securely attached, providing diagonal structure preventing | racking of the frame. | | In older houses, sheathed with one inch by eight or ten or | twelve inch boards, diagonal wood bracing was cut into the | two by four inch wall studs for diagonal bracing and | structure. | quixoticelixer- wrote: | You can built wood frame buildings much taller. And wood | framing is stiffer especially if you are using mass timber. | fareesh wrote: | How do these hold up in stormy weather? | nemo44x wrote: | It's funny you mention it because in the part regarding | foundations they mention that the foundation for these homes | not only has to help keep the home up but also stop it from | flying away. | throwaway787544 wrote: | Frame is just a small part of the cost and complexity of building | a house. Considering you still need the CNC, and expensive | materials, and a contractor, this doesn't seem like a win. | | On the contrary, I'd rather see more open designs for modern | post-frame homes. They're lighter, cheaper, simpler, faster, and | provide some design benefits. The only real downside is zoning | needs to catch up. | theptip wrote: | This is cool. The model of distributed local fabrication is one | that I think we'll see more of in future as automation becomes | more capable and cheaper. | | This seems to fix one of the big problems with pre-fab houses, | that they are expensive to ship long distances, and therefore | can't benefit from economy-of-scale centralized manufacturing. | parkersweb wrote: | Does anyone know of a similar project for garden offices? | [deleted] | turtlebits wrote: | Tuff sheds (no affiliation) are inexpensive. My 12'x16' cost | ~$6k a few years ago. Hire a contractor to finish the interior. | fasteddie31003 wrote: | Just buy some 2x4's and plywood and start building. It's not that | hard. Building does not have to be this complicated. The building | systems and products out today make it incredibly easy and | (before the ridiculously low interest rates) pretty cheap. | [deleted] | LegitShady wrote: | >Just buy some 2x4's and plywood and start building. It's not | that hard. | | I mean sure, if you live somewhere without building codes, | don't need a foundation, and don't care how long something | lasts or how safe it is. Just chuck it together. Just some 2x4s | and plywood is all you need for a treehouse. Maybe. | turtlebits wrote: | The linked project/product does not include foundation, and | most likely also needs engineering work to pass | codes/inspection. | | Stick framing is cheap and simple- 2x4s are abundant. And you | can do it yourself solo with minimal tools. | | Also, using plywood is way more prone to water issues than | solid wood. | LegitShady wrote: | disclaimer - I work in civil/structural engineering but | typically much larger structures than houses and mostly | concrete and wood and haven't done wood design since | school. the following does not constitute engineering | advice and should not be relied upon for design or | construction purposes. This is merely discussion. | | I wouldn't build most houses today out of 2x4s, simply | because its not a big enough insulation cavity for a modern | home. Stick framing being cheap does not substitute for | planning. As you say - you need to design a structure and | that includes hiring an engineer for more than just | 'passing codes/inspection' but also for structural design | of your home. | | It's unlikely you'll be able to design a roof out of 2x4s | without making major sacrifices to the design of the house, | and you're probably not qualified to judge the worst case | loading in your area or capacity of a 2x4 roof (or else you | wouldn't even mention 2x4s). | | The linked site includes several guides including an | engineering guide most non engineers would struggle to | understand. https://www.wikihouse.cc/guides | | Plywood is not particularly prone to water issues, and | isn't used in the same way as solid wood would be. In | situations where plywood would be having water issues, so | would solid wood. You might be confusing plywood and OSB. | Structurally, plywood sheathing is primarily used for shear | capacity to let structures handle lateral (sideways) loads | to resist racking, and to have somewhere to attach the | exterior materials of the structure to. | | The linked engineering guide provides structural testing | numbers of their panels for various capacities that a | structural engineer understands. Like proper stick framing, | it requires planning and design, rather than grabbing some | 2x4s and letting er rip. | yosito wrote: | If wood-based housing can be considered "zero carbon", I must be | confused about the definition of "zero carbon". | WillAdams wrote: | I'm still surprised that no one has made a CNC specifically | designed to be: | | - carried on a truck - used while in place on the truck or is | easily removed from it and then set up - which has an interface | suited to a job site in terms of setting up a design and cutting | | The Shapr3D seems to get some jobsite use, and there is at least | one digital saw where one plugs in a dimension and the stop moves | to the correct position for the cut --- the Yeti SmartBench seems | like it might be a contender in this space, but still not seeing | the CAD/CAM interface which would make it workable. | | Really miss Saltire's SketchRight and FutureWave's SmartSketch | for quick jobsite sketches. | dieselgate wrote: | This isn't my field but I'm assuming there are size/width | constraints to the "carried on a truck" CNC machine. Of course | it's possible but the width for a trailerable load is around | 10' which may be quite limiting for residential structures. At | that limit prefab units may seem more practical? I find the CNC | housing idea interesting but similar to EVs (in the past) it | needs to catch on | riskable wrote: | > the width for a trailerable load is around 10' | | Ahh but the maximum _height_ is 14 '! Well, on most roads and | Federal highways anyway (plan your route!). | | Also, the maximum trailer width is actually 12' with a | realistic payload for non-flatbed of around 11'. The maximum | width that'll fit in the bed in your typical American pickup | truck is around 5-5.5'. | leoedin wrote: | Do sheet materials ever come in larger sizes than 4' x 8'? | The CNC wouldn't need to be much larger than the largest | sheet it could cut. | dieselgate wrote: | I believe metals can or do - thicker gauge can't be rolled | up but assume it's oriented vertically for shipping | aaronax wrote: | Drywall is commonly available at any home center in 4'x12', | and available in 4'x16' sizes. | leoedin wrote: | OK - but the shorter side is still 4'. The width of a | truck is unlikely to be an issue there. | WillAdams wrote: | Baltic Birch is 5'x5' (but it's more typically used for | furniture) | jrgd wrote: | I remember a friend mentioning a client of his with a cnc | mounted in a container to work on site (for building projects, | similar if not wikihouse). Container could go anywhere the | truck would. | gertrunde wrote: | There was a "Grand Designs" episode (UK TV show) where they | used exactly that. | | A bit of search turns up this link: https://www.facit- | homes.com/post/we-re-back-on-site-manufact... | riskable wrote: | This is something I'm _really_ hoping will take off when | electrified trucks become more common. With an electric truck | you have an enormous amount of power ready to go for having | something like a bed-mounted CNC in the back. | | The next phase for something like this--to bring more utility-- | is to make a CNC with an automatic feeder and ejector. That way | you could put a stack of 4x8ft plywood in one side and get | finished parts out the other end. Presumably at the speed at | which a worker can take the finished part, install it, and come | back for the next one. | | The first use I'd imagine for something like that would be | custom crown molding, drywall with electrical and plumbing | holes pre-cut, perfectly-sized shims and frames for anything | and everything, turning regular floor boards into snap-lock | flooring, shelving and cabinetry, and other housing materials | that _could_ be made on-site if it were not for the complexity | /detail. | throwabro515 wrote: | bardworx wrote: | Festool bought Shapr and their TS saw sounds like what you're | describing. Both can be used but that's really finish | carpentry. | | One reason I can think of why they're not used during regular | carpentry/building a home is the time it takes to setup. It's | much faster to measure, mark, cut vs setting up a CNC | equivalent. | hedgehog wrote: | This is interesting. The Walter Segal self-build method is | another approach that aims to use common materials (lumber, | plywood, insulation) with little cutting so as to reduce labor | and allow for later disassembly+reuse. | | https://theprepared.org/features-feed/segal-method | | With many of these less common methods it's more work to show | safety, code compliance, etc. For example the Segal method | doesn't really allow for modern levels of air sealing and | insulation. | xor99 wrote: | Seagal's designs are fantastic. His approach is more convincing | in terms of fab methods/cost and looks a little less | standardised compared to wikihouse imo. | hedgehog wrote: | His approach is pretty well proven in that some of the | buildings have been standing over 40 years which seems long | enough to find most of the issues. Insulation/sealing and | permitting are the two I know about, at least at house scale, | but If I needed a temporary storage shed it would be a great | way to build & be able to dismantle later. | samwillis wrote: | I really like the concept of this, it's basically a step further | on from SIPs (structural insulated panels) by having standard | composable blocks. The things I think are particularly good: | | - Standardising on screw pile foundations. Standard concrete | foundations are often be about 30% of the build cost, with the | quantity of earth removed and cement used it's a massive part of | the carbon footprint of a home. For a "light weight" timber | construction, screw piles are the future. | | - Having services recesses and notches built into the panels, and | there is no need to batten the internal walls for boarding. this | will increase the speed of construction significantly. | | - Being an "Open" standard allows any timber frame or prefab | construction company to adopt it. | | My one concern (I wouldn't go as far as criticism) is that the | panels have a somewhat complex manufacturing process by having to | be CNC machined. Realisticly they almost always will be, but I | would have liked to see the panels designed to be constructed a | little more simply - you will always have to make changes on | site. | | I wander why they went with ply over OSB, they have similar | structural properties but OSB can be cheeper. | kupfer wrote: | From their FAQs: | | >Which material is better, ply or OSB? | | >Ply is lighter and generally better structurally but more | expensive. OSB is cheaper but heavier. With the recent research | on WikiHouse Skylark we did test both materials, but in terms | of the full spanning floor beams it's clear ply offers | advantages in terms of strength but also because it's lighter | it's easier to move and carry. A hybrid approach is also a | possibility. | LegitShady wrote: | He's talking about the moisture resistance property of | plywood over OSB. OSB absorbs moisture readily and turns into | mush. | forgetfreeman wrote: | Mold abatement & home restoration contractor here. OSB should | not be considered code-compliant material, full-stop. Imagine | your home has been constructed with slabs of sponge that have | are purpose-engineered to provide optimal growing conditions | for fungi when moisture is introduced. Now consider that over | the lifetime of a structure some combination of exterior | cladding failure, roof leaks, ground moisture issues, and | plumbing fails are not only likely, but basically guaranteed. | | My biggest concern with this system is given this system's | "tightness" to water vapor (similar to SIPs), all of the same | issues with mold and related air quality are inherited. If | structures don't breathe they rot. i | signaturefish wrote: | It is indeed a concern, and I suspect that's why they're | recommending any wikihous project include a full-house MVHR | system (see About=>Product, the bent arrow near the middle of | the image map). MVHR is the solution I've settled on for my | house retrofit project - it should allow the house to breathe | in a controlled manner, without leaking warm air in winter. | throw0101c wrote: | > _OSB should not be considered code-compliant material, | full-stop._ | | OSB is a fine air barrier, and most water vapour volume | happens through air leaks. Vapour diffusion tends to be a | smaller percentage: | | * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXXgjvOJcYI | | The main place that vapour concentration really becomes a | problem is at the highest point of the house (e.g., ridge): | | * https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/building- | science-i... | | The main point is to not have your condensing surface on the | inside of your structure: | | * https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001- | t... | | Which is why so many jurisdictions are encouraging / | mandating external insulation. When the sheathing is the | coldest surface, of course there's going to be condensation, | but if it's the same temperature as the inside air how would | moisture accumulate. | | > _If structures don 't breathe they rot._ | | If structures don't _dry_ they rot. There are plenty of of | <1.0 ACH@50 structures that do not "breathe" that have no | moisture/rot issues because they take care of water | mechanically, e.g., ERV/HRV and (whole house) dehumidifiers. | | * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIcrXut_EFA | forgetfreeman wrote: | OSB is absolutely a fine air barrier assuming <60% humidity | at all times. That does not make it a sane choice for | sheathing/flooring material given the likelihood of | moisture ingress. Every form of seam sealant known to man | bites it at some point due to thermal expansion cycles, uv | damage, etc. and that's assuming perfect installation of | all layers of the moisture control stack. It isn't even a | good choice for cabinetry due to it's propensity to devolve | into Nature Valley Granola when put in proximity to a sink, | dishwasher, or refrigerator (if a cold water line is part | of the install). | | _In theory_ vapor accumulation is only really problematic | in the overhead plenum spaces. In actual practice (setting | aside acute water ingress) 100% of the time moisture | problems start in the crawl space and then spread to the | plenum. | | Yes absolutely it is possible to design complex | interlocking systems that at least in theory both provide | high efficiency sealed construction and control moisture. | In practice the complexity of these systems is sufficient | that even top-end contractors frequently run into issues | that lead to full blown abatement projects. There is also | the minor issue of what happens if all of these systems | aren't subjected to aggressive inspection regimes and/or a | structure goes a significant amount of time unoccupied. The | one thing all of these super high-efficiency sealed systems | have in common is they quite literally tear themselves | apart if neglected or the power gets turned off for any | meaningful amount of time. | | The statement "If structures don't dry they rot" is | absolutely true, but only in the context of traditional | lumber products that are comparatively resistant to rot in | the first place and are capable of weathering swell/shrink | cycles without falling apart. Highly engineered products | degrade aggressively just by getting damp in the first | place as swelling wood fibers break down bonds with the | adhesive that's holding the material together. | | I absolutely stand by my original statement that OSB | shouldn't be code-compliant and with the exception of | shitty flat-pack furniture has no business anywhere in a | home. | bombcar wrote: | The reason OSB wins so much is that the average house is | built to last just about as long as OSB does in normal | conditions (even _with_ water damage). | | Shit is wack yo. Perfectly usable houses are remodeled | all the time. | wpietri wrote: | I appreciate all of your comments here, but let me just | pause for a moment to appreciate the perfection of the | name "Nature Valley Granola" for that failure mode. | That's spot on for texture and appearance. And given the | crumbly, dry vagueness that is a Nature Valley Granola | bar, possibly for taste as well. | toomuchtodo wrote: | All excellent points, and why moisture vapour transmission | direction/rate must be taken into account during a build. If | you live somewhere where AC is the primary mode of interior | conditioning, you will build to where the AC will pull | moisture in from the structure for removal via the condensate | line. If you live somewhere not so tropics, you're going to | build where the moisture is pulled out of the home by the | natural environment. | | Building sciences are both fun and fraught with peril. I'm | somewhat excited and cautiously optimistic about Boxabl from | a housing manufacturing perspective. | turtlebits wrote: | OSB is fine with a proper WRB, vapor control and venting. | Things like rainscreen/strapping under siding and roofing go | a long way of letting your house dry out when water gets in. | hedgehog wrote: | Do you see that in modern construction? As long as there is | adequate insulation and the vapor retarding layer is in the | right place (per code) the OSB shouldn't ever be more than | damp for any extended amount of time. | forgetfreeman wrote: | I've seen catastrophic moisture damage in every form of | home construction utilized in North America from the 1850s | to present day. Anecdotally the most common failure modes | break down roughly thus: | | 1850s-1960s: Termite damage followed by rot. This time | frame is notable for ready availability of dense, tightly | grained building materials. Lumber from this time period | shrugs off all but the most egregious wetting cycles. So | what happens is high humidity attracts termites which break | down the structure. This in turn gives rot a plate to | establish a foothold and spread (slowly). | | 1970s-1990s: This period is notable for a steady decline in | quality of building materials and introduction of first and | second generation engineered products. First-to-market | siding products, condensation issues due to the aluminum | craze in the 80s, and material adhesives edging out toward | the end of their life expectancy all contribute to problems | with mold/rot. Looser grained building materials also mean | that when a problem is present it will quickly spread to | larger areas of the structure than older materials would | permit under similar conditions. | | 2000-2010: Easily the absolute nadir of home building in | the US. The industry saw a massive influx of "budget" | engineered materials, with no substantive changes to code | to address the deficiencies of these materials. My personal | favorite from this era include OSB siding that turned into | a kitchen sponge whenever the paint layer was breached. | | 2010-present: same as it ever was. The market is still | flooded with engineered materials that have a fraction of | the life expectancy of more traditional materials. Building | codes have largely caught up with the obvious limitations | of these materials, however now the biggest issue is as a | nation we are short two full generations of trained | craftspeople in the construction industry and as such | installation errors are rampant. This leads to more and | bigger issues, bigger abatement projects, and in | significantly newer homes. Case in point: a pinhole leak in | a caulk seam on a window surround that resulted in all of | the structural members surrounding that window, the wall | cladding, the sill beam, a section of the floor, and | several joists rotting out in short order. Root cause: | didn't use plywood. Engineered sheathing acted like an | enormous sponge both retaining and broadcasting moisture to | all of the surrounding materials. | | So yeah, you're not wrong inasmuch as according to theory | and per code it is within the realm of possibility to use | these construction methods and materials successfully. In | practice, however, the least competent subcontractor on any | given jobsite presents a hard ceiling to what one can get | away with. You design a fault-intolerant system that has | any flavor of complexity to it's installation and odds are | good someone's going to screw something up. The Achilles | Heel of modern vapor tight building systems is the fact | that houses leak. Either through incompetence during the | initial build or breakdown of materials over time all | houses leak. Whereas older construction methods would | tolerate this to varying degrees, newer systems do not. | wpietri wrote: | This is fascinating stuff. So what would you do if you | were building a house today? | forgetfreeman wrote: | Assuming I was building in the Southeast where I live, | that someone handed me a blank check, and without | drilling down to specific products? | | - Hardwood timber framing | | - Stone or masonry curtain wall from the foundation to | the bottom of the window sills. | | - Fully sealed crawlspace with inline registers | broadcasting conditioned air into the space | | - Insulate the curtain wall instead of the interstitial | space between floor joists | | - Standard soffit-to-peak venting in the attic space | | - Two layers of plywood subfloor separated by a layer of | tar paper | | - Double layered sheetrock on all interior walls | | - Wall-to-wall sheet vinyl floor treatments in all of the | rooms where water is a thing. | | - 3/4" hardwood flooring everywhere water isn't a thing. | | - Passive/active solar combo meal on the roof to offset | any efficiency losses incurred by "loose" construction | methods | | - Temperature & humidity sensors in the crawl space & | plenum | | - Wood window frames and sills. Modern plastic window | frames and sills are _excellent_ at hiding a problem | until it 's turned into a $50k project (see also: | aluminum siding). By comparsion wood trim acts as a | bellwether. I'd much rather have to scrape, recaulk, and | paint a window than be looking at deconstructing an | exterior wall that's rotted to the foundation. | hedgehog wrote: | Fascinating, I understand most of it but why vented attic | vs conditioned? | the_other wrote: | > Realisticly they almost always will be, but I would have | liked to see the panels designed to be constructed a little | more simply - you will always have to make changes on site. | | I feel this way about the current trend in plant-based meat | replacements. I'll trust the hype about lower carbon footprint, | but they take food production further into industrialisation | and profit motive territory which was, in part, how we got into | this environmental crisis in the first place. | Jeff_Brown wrote: | I live in Colombia, where ag tech is a lot farther behind. | The profit motive for farmers here is as strong as anywhere. | They wouldn't farm if it wasn't for the money. But the lack | of industrializacion means that more people are invested in | the activity, producing less output, and living in poverty. | merlinran wrote: | Industrialized agriculture would push most people out of | land (no longer need that many people), and if the people | can't find alternative for living they would be even | poorer. If there are better alternatives, peasant farmers | will chase them anyway. | | There are also better ways for agriculture which can | regenerate soil, maintain biodiversity while at the same | time harvest more. | Jeff_Brown wrote: | > Industrialized agriculture would push most people out | of land (no longer need that many people), and if the | people can't find alternative for living they would be | even poorer. | | The places where industrial agriculture has taken off, | that seems not to be the story. Grandparents in China are | thrilled to see their children working city jobs. It's a | hard life still, but much easier than they had. | | > regenerate soil, maintain biodiversity while at the | same time harvest more. | | I very much want those things. And corporations do | sometimes make stupid decisions. But it's hard for me to | believe there are such free lunches on a large scale. If | there were, some enterprising soul ought to go start a | business exploiting them, make a killing, put Monsanto | out of business, etc. | ClumsyPilot wrote: | biodiversity doesnt make you money | | Also there are many potential biotech revolutions - like | China developing rice that can use salt water - if our | crops could use seawater like the mangroves, that wouod | be huge. | | Another massive thing, is perrenial crops - meaning you | dont have to plant them every year. There are perrenial | cousins of our staple foods like wheat, but firstly they | are harder to automatically harvest/manage, secondly they | do not benefit from thousands of years of selective | breeding. So we gave to invest massive amounts of money | to ger their yields up, and even if you do, there is no | guarantee consumers will eat them - they taste a bit | different | Jeff_Brown wrote: | If they're productive enough, they'll be cheap enough | that consumers will accept a little taste difference. | | Fun fact: Italians hated tomatoes for centuries. | | https://lithub.com/unhealthy-smelly-and-strange-why- | italians... | hpkuarg wrote: | One man's environmental crisis is another man being lifted | out of crushing poverty by the abundant energy and wealth | produced by that same industrialization and profit motive. | | Unless you think cavemen shouldn't have burned sticks for | warmth out of concern for CO2 emissions, the way out for | humanity will be through (further technological gains | enabling more energy expended per capita, hopefully cleanly), | not backwards. | wizofaus wrote: | Burning sticks isn't increasing the amount of carbon in the | natural cycle (unlike digging up fossil fuels and burning | them). Though obviously if enough people burn them faster | than nature can regrow them it's still a problem, such that | 8 billion of us returning to trees as our primary source of | fuel would be pretty catastrophic. | baggy_trough wrote: | How do plant-based meats take food production "further into | .. profit motive territory"? | nemo44x wrote: | OSB is a really risky thing to use, especially in environments | (like England) that are constantly damp. One leak and the panel | is ruined. Plywood can dry out and retain its structural | integrity. Plywood is generally considered the better material | for home construction for all uses, walls, roofs, subfloors. I | think the majority of homes are built with OSB today and I | consider it the most glaring sign that the construction is | cheap and to be avoided. | dr_dshiv wrote: | I have questions on fire safety. I lost some close friends | recently to a fire. I had never thought about it before. | ruined wrote: | most buildings in america today are wood frame, this is likely | no better or worse. it is more important to consider what you | put in the building, have a good electrician do the wiring, and | design your layout and exits to fire code compliance. | 542458 wrote: | All wood frame is not equivalent. Modern stick framing is | designed to slow the spread of flame both with how the wood | is used (see modern stick framing vs balloon framing) and the | other materials chosen (drywall is fairly nonflammable, | whereas this seems to use plywood walls). I'm not saying this | is better or worse (it might be that all the insulation | significantly slows the spread of flame?), but they haven't | really discussed the fire safety implications of their design | that I can see. | kupfer wrote: | To quote their FAQs: | | >Is it firesafe? | | >WikiHouse is not really any different from most kinds of | 1-3 storey buildings with timber roof, floors, or internal | walls, in that the building needs to be designed with | adequate means of escape, and the chassis needs to be | reasonably protected from catching fire. This can usually | be achieved either with a plasterboard internal lining, by | using a non-toxic fire protection coating, or by installing | a basic sprinkler system. | | >If you are building several adjacent houses, located close | together in a row, you will usually need to use an external | fire barrier material to prevent fire spreading from one | building to the next. | Schroedingersat wrote: | Doesn't seem incompatible. | pera wrote: | They probably would use fire retardant timber/plywood. There is | a pretty cool office building in Barcelona (still under | construction I believe?) entirely made of wood that uses this | kind of treated wood: https://wittywood.es/en/ | Animatronio wrote: | By the looks of it they also rely on oversizing the columns | and beams to achieve fire retardation. | shagie wrote: | This is known as mass timber. | | https://www.wsj.com/articles/wooden-skyscrapers-are-on- | the-r... | | https://www.thinkwood.com/mass-timber | | https://www.naturallywood.com/topics/mass-timber/ | | https://www.ijpr.org/housing/2022-09-04/oregons-mass- | timber-... | | And regarding fire retardation - Cross Laminated Timber | Fire Testing from the Forest Products Laboratory and US | Forest Service - https://youtu.be/HuVTCOmRGd0 | Animatronio wrote: | yes, you're absolutely right, I couldn't find the right | term for it. unfortunately it works at the cost of 2x or | 3x the raw materials it would normally take. | shagie wrote: | It represents a sequestration of carbon whereas the | cement in a traditional cement framework building | represents significant portion of the carbon footprint. | | As to the cost - | https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/62676 | | > Based on commercial construction cost data from the | RSMeans database, a mass timber building design is | estimated to have 26 percent higher front-end costs than | its concrete alternative. | | And from the paper: | | > The resulting TLCCs of the two buildings under these | scenarios are shown in Table 6 and Figure 5. From the | results of these scenarios, it was found that the TLCC | for the mass timber building would have a cost advantage | with its longer life span (100 yr) than the concrete | alternative (75 yr) when other factors are the same (see | Scenario S0 and S4), and the higher front-end cost | (value) showed an even greater advantage of 7.0 percent | difference (Scenario S4). When the life spans of the two | buildings were the same, the end-of-life cost or value of | the mass timber building was not able to be offset by the | higher front-end costs (see Scenario S1 [12%], S2 [6.7%], | and S3 [5.9%]). In this case study, the two buildings | were designed to be functionally equivalent. Thus, we | assumed the same operational utility and maintenance | during the building-use stage. No impact from these parts | were considered in the TLCC calculations on the cost- | performance for the comparison of the two buildings. But | if there are energy savings discovered in the new mass | timber buildings, the LCC analysis would reveal more cost | benefits (Liang et al. 2019). | | I can't find any sources that agree with your cost | assessment... instead: | https://www.bdcnetwork.com/5-myths-about-cross-laminated- | tim... | | > When considering the total in-place value of a CLT | system, it is cost competitive to other plate building | materials. But you also need to consider all the value | added benefits: | | > * More savings can be found in the reduced installation | cost, usually 50% cheaper than installing other plate | materials. | | > * With an earlier project completion date, you are open | for business sometimes months ahead of schedule. | | > * The building structure will weigh less than half the | weight of other construction types, so the foundation | costs less money. | | > * Job site safety is dramatically increased due to the | prefabricated CLT panels and usually the only power tools | are pneumatic drills. | | > The intent of cross laminated timber is not to replace | light-frame construction, but rather to offer a | versatile, low-carbon, and cost-competitive wood-based | solution that complements the existing light frame and | heavy timber options while offering a suitable candidate | for some applications that currently use concrete, | masonry, and steel. | Animatronio wrote: | sorry for my careless reply to OP. I meant that e.g. a | beam that would usually be 10x20" (totally made up | numbers) without taking into consideration fire, would | have to be 15x30" to have the required fire rating (say 1 | hour or whatever it should be). Thus every structural | element has to be larger than it would be when taking | into consideration only earthquakes or wind/snow loads. | shagie wrote: | Regarding mass timber in a seismic area - | http://nheri.ucsd.edu/projects/2017-development- | validation-s... and http://nheritallwood.mines.edu | | And the beam size gets into "don't design a concrete | building and swap in mass timber". | https://www.woodworks.org/resources/creating-efficient- | struc... | | Another aspect to the beams is that the structural | elements are often left bare for aesthetics ( | https://uploads.map- | dynamics.com/0518_Structurlam-U.S.-Mass-... ). | | Table 6 in https://www.structurlam.com/wp- | content/uploads/2019/04/Struc... gets into the snow loads | and I don't know enough engineering to be able to do a | comparison between mass timber and other building | approaches. | | The main thing to consider is this isn't a "it costs 2x" | or "it uses 2x more materials" because they are different | materials with different designs. If comparisons are to | be done, they should be done at the building level ("it | cost X to make a N story building with M square feet per | floor" and "building A had a sustainability rating of P | while building B was rated at Q with a difference in cost | of Z%"). | xor99 wrote: | Sorry to hear that! Valid point ofc, I would like to see if | they have addressed that with the wooden build. BTW the plans | can be made using non-wooden materials or limited wood but this | may change the zero carbon status/ease of fabrication. | rmah wrote: | Two things... | | First, looking through their design guide | (https://www.wikihouse.cc/guides/design), the only thing they | mention is that space (32mm in walls, I guess, and 70mm under | ceilings) is provided. | | Given that the plumbing, electrical, ventilation, appliances, | etc. are the majority of the cost of a home, I find this a bit | odd. A typical American full bathroom costs something like $5k to | $20k (and up... way up) depending on the quality. A kitchen can | cost multiple times more. Sure, you can build them cheaper, but | that's the rub... most people who are in the market to purchase a | home don't want low-end bathrooms and kitchens. Or windows. Or | lighting. Or wall fixtures. Or anything really. | | Second, IMO, the problem with affordable housing is not a | construction cost problem. We can build small, livable (for | various definitions) homes for $50k (or less) today, ignoring | land costs. But the regulatory costs, the land costs, the _market | demands_ all make building such homes a non-profitable endeavor. | Why build 20 $50k homes on the land and make $200k profit when | you can build 10 $500k homes and make $1mil in profit? | | The affordable housing crisis in the America do not have a | technical solution, only a socio-political one. And since nearly | all the power related to zoning, building costs, etc are managed | at the local and state level, that means engaging with local | politics. | frankbreetz wrote: | >> Why build 20 $50k homes on the land and make $200k profit | when you can build 10 $500k homes and make $1mil in profit? | | I don't understand this comment. This is the same profit | margin. You invest 1 million (20 * 50k) and make 20% (200k) or | invest 5 million(10 * 500k) and make 20% (1 million). | | Depending on the amount of initial capitol you want to invest | you may choose one over the other. | kbenson wrote: | Because the constraints are time, getting Landon, getting | permits, etc. Each additional house is more overhead from | regulations you have to meet and permits, as well as area | improvements such as roads that need to be made or improved, | and more houses mean more roads and sidewalks. | | Even if they have the same profit, o ly one of those | strategies scales to allow you to pump more money in and get | more money out without significantly changing the resources | required to accomplish it. | tomcam wrote: | Landon never calls me back either. I should stop blaming | myself for these delays. | archi42 wrote: | As a contractor or manufacturing company that's not what | you're investing into. You build the machines and process and | design the house. So in one case you get 200k out of the | invest, and in the other 1000k. At least that's how I'm | reading this. | | If you, as a single household, plan to build a 50k house on | your land, you might be unable to find someone to build it | for you. | | Of course in larger cities/projects with a single developer | reselling units it's a bit different. | | As I said, that's how I'm reading it. | enragedcacti wrote: | The land is a fixed cost regardless of what you build on it, | so higher return structures will win out even if the margins | in the structures themselves are the same. Also fewer jobs to | manage, fewer customers to sell to, simpler sewage, water, | gas, electrical to deal with. | nine_k wrote: | It almost sounds like building one multi-tenant city | building is more efficient than twenty single-family suburb | homes. | drekk wrote: | Correct, although many municipalities (like Boulder, CO) | have ridiculous zoning laws such that you can't make | multi-story apartment complexes. So the choice for | developers is just single family suburbia | UtopiaPunk wrote: | Single family zoning has become the norm in most of the | United States. It's so broken. Even simple duplexes or | quad-plexes are not allowed in most single-family zones. | | Homeowners benefit because it drives up the prices of | homes, which has become one of the most important | financial investment tools to normal people in this | country. | bzmrgonz wrote: | A burger has small profit margin, a complex meal has a bigger | profit margin. That's what I think he meant. Venture | Capitalist don't like nickel and diming. | robomartin wrote: | > We can build small, livable (for various definitions) homes | for $50k (or less) today | | Not sure I agree with this. If we assume a labor at a rate in | the order of 1 worker-hour per square foot (this is highly | variable, from 0.5 to 2 hr/ft^2), a 2000 sqf home would require | 2000 hours. At minimum wage ($15/hour) that means $30K, just | for labor. This does not include concrete, lumber, stucco, | sheetrock, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, appliances, landscaping, | etc. It also does not include permits and design fees. And of | course, assuming $15 per hour would not be accurate at all. By | the time you get a contractor involved and various trades you | are paying significantly more than that, perhaps closer to $75 | per hour on average. That gets you up to $200K, again, just in | labor costs. | | DIY is a different matter. And yet, it isn't. At some point | opportunity cost comes into the equation. It would be silly for | me to DIY a home until I am retired or unemployed. The loss of | income --opportunity cost-- of devoting thousands of hours to | home-building would be massive. | | If we are talking about building homes at scale, except for | some very specific locations and types (pre-fab?), I am not | sure you could build something for $50K these days. For | example, I have personally had to deal with LA County's | Building for permits and plan-checks for my 13 kW solar array | (yes, I DIY'd that). They easily added $50K, if not more, to my | budget without reason or justification. The most grotesque | example of this is that they made me put in 64,000 lbs of | concrete into the footings for my ground-mount structure. An | architect friend of mine told me I could support a four-story | building with that amount of concrete. Why? Nobody knows. Once | the plan checker made that decision there was no way to reason | with him. Power trip? It was death by a thousand cuts. | bombcar wrote: | "Small, livable" ... 2000 square feet ... | | Low-cost building is something like $85 a square, so 50k gets | you about 600 square. It is totally doable and that's with | "current" setups (these are often built as "cabins" etc. | | But the permits and other things destroy them (which is why | so many "tiny homes" are technically mobile homes because | then you just deal with the DMV). | | And you can buy brand new homes _including land_ around here | for $300k so I suspect that they didn 't cost $200k in labor. | But maybe they do? | ReptileMan wrote: | You are right to a point. But one problem is that everyone is | trying to cram into the same couple of places. Every country in | the world tries to become effectively a city state. The housing | shortage is secondary to this trend. | | You may turn every block into kwaloon walled city and there | will still be housing shortage. | | I am not against density - I am fond of European 6 story | buildings. But you have a fundamental demand problem. The big | cities are bleeding dry the rest of the countries. | dsr_ wrote: | That's very, very incorrect. | | At the population density of Kowloon in 1987, 1,255,000 per | square kilometer, and today's population of 8 billion people, | it would only take 6375 square km to house everyone. | | That's less than five cities the size of Phoenix, Arizona. | | Reasonable urban population density -- the kind where there | is still green space and buildings are mostly just a few | stories high -- would be about 7500 per square km, about 1.1 | million square km for the world population. That sounds like | a lot, but it's only about one tenth the metro area of Paris. | | There is a clean water problem. There is a good sewage | treatment problem. There are energy delivery problems. But | people will happily live in much denser arrangements than | they do on average, and cities make all of the other problems | more efficient to deal with. These are policy problems. | fangorn wrote: | France takes up 643801 km2, so are you sure Paris is in the | 11mln km2 ballpark? | dsr_ wrote: | Thank you, I grabbed the wrong figure from Wikipedia -- | population instead of area. | | 13,024,518 people, 18,940.7 km2 | ReptileMan wrote: | In Europe we also have housing crisis in the capitals and | other desirable places and there thr density already what | the YIMBY want. If you want to solve the housing crisis | don't ask why the rent is so high in NY, SF or London. Ask | why there are so few desirable pleaces for people to live. | nine_k wrote: | The rent is damn high in downtown / midtown Manhattan and | downtown Brooklyn because there is enough business | people, movie stars, stock traders, even software | developers who are willing to pay as much. | | If you step back into southern Brooklyn, Queens, the | Bronx, the prices go down to reasonable, while still | being within < 1 hour commute by public transport from | the downtown area. | dsr_ wrote: | The main thing that makes a place desirable to live in is | good infrastructure: water, climate, education, | healthcare, transportation. A place that has all of those | attracts people; work arises where people want to live; | good work pays for the infrastructure and makes it more | likely that people want to live there. | | It's a chicken-and-egg problem, made worse by people who | want to not pay for the infrastructure and maintenance. | tinco wrote: | This might be true in the US, but because of stringent building | requirements construction cost definitely is a problem for | affordable housing in the UK and in some European countries. | Here in The Netherlands it certainly is not possible to build a | house for $50k (or less) according to commercial developers. | Municipalities have been complaining about developers only | building houses at the $400k or more price point, and | developers have been saying that due to the building | requirements it isn't economically feasible to build houses for | less. | | Also, what's the soil like where you're building those $50k | homes? I've often seen that being spent just on the foundation. | | That said, I'm not sure this construction method is cheaper | than existing similar techniques like for example structural | isolated panels. | xyzzyz wrote: | What you described (strict building requirements) is, in | fact, a sociopolitical problem, not a technical one. We used | to build houses for much less. They were worse houses. Many | people would not like them today. Others would. They are not | allowed to have them, though. | bombcar wrote: | In the US it's even _worse_ - we _have_ those older houses, | but they 're almost always in older parts of the city (duh) | and their valuation is sky-high. | spaniard89277 wrote: | In Europe we have stricter building codes on average but it's | still very much a non-technical problem. Prices of land are | insane in Spain, and I bet in other countries too. | | And taxes, and a myriad of other things that have nothing to | do with actually building the thing. | cookieswumchorr wrote: | even in the US, i'm sure there are places where land is still | cheap. Thinking globally, there's even more of them. That's the | beauty of it being opensource: you can build in any part of the | earth | progre wrote: | It's cheap because noone wants to live there. | dirheist wrote: | Nobody wants to live there because there is no local work. | If you work remote it's an amazing value proposition. | substation13 wrote: | It's not just work though. It's shops, supermarkets, | schools, community groups, cinemas, bars, ... you get the | idea! | cookieswumchorr wrote: | well, schools become irrelevant once kids grow up (that | is, if you have any). A lack of shopping is good for the | wallet, when you grow accustomed to buying in bulk and | stacking food. the rest is all about your lifestyle | preferences | wizofaus wrote: | I thought living in huge estates (or even suburbs) with | none of those things was fairly common in much of the US? | There are examples of it here (Australia) too and there | still seems to be plenty of demand to live in such | places, despite the fact that everybody who does so after | a few months or years starts complaining about it (in | fairness, often such facilities are sold as "coming | soon"). | xyzzyz wrote: | Suburbs in US almost universally have these things, even | suburbs of decaying cities like Detroit or Cleveland | (which often offer more facilities than than the city | cores themselves). | wizofaus wrote: | I certainly got the impression that there were newer | suburban housing developments with many 1000s of houses | and basically nothing else. I gathered Texas was | particularly prone to this so randomly browsing Google | Maps found "Ridglea hills" and suburbs to the south of it | in Fort Worth which appear to house 10s of 1000s of | people without a single supermarket and barely even a | cafe etc. | xyzzyz wrote: | I looked at this neighborhood. It's around 1 mile in | diameter, and there are many restaurants at its north | edge, and a Walmart at the south tip. This means that | residents can reach it in less than 20 minutes walk, or | 2-3 minute drive. This is really rather accessible, and I | can't imagine how you can get much better than that while | still living in a large house with a yard. Seems like a | pretty sweet place to live, if you ask me. | wizofaus wrote: | Yeah I saw the shopping strip at the northern boundary, | which is why I said Ridglea hills and suburbs to the | south of it (not a single supermarket shows up in a 5x5 | km area, though part of the problem is Maps, it seems | quite inconsistent at what scales anything shows up). It | may well not be as barren as it appears on Google maps, | but it certainly doesn't appear "rather" accessible to | me. I'm curious how it compares to the blocks of land in | Florida mentioned a few posts up. | bombcar wrote: | Ridglea Hills has a stinking Walmart heh! The "Acres of | suburbia" usually mean that it's a pain to walk to the | store, not that the store doesn't exist. | | I'd be surprised if there are many suburban areas that | are more than 5/10 miles from "stores" for some value of | store. Taking some central place of Ridglea gets me a 2 | mile walk to Walmart. But there are no sidewalks. | [deleted] | ArtemZ wrote: | There 0.5+ Acre lots that you can buy for something like | 20-30k$ in Cleveland, OH and I'm planning to move there. | ClassicOrgin wrote: | Here in Florida, large parcels were bought up by developers | and then subdivided into .25/.33/.50 acre lots. These were | then sold off to people who eventually wanted to retire | here. The problem is the building codes here are probably | the most stringent in the US. So there are a lot of these | parcels for sale on the cheap ($10k-$25k) but it's still | not worth doing anything with them. | notch656a wrote: | This is the exact issue I've run into. Land in good | location is cheap near me. But only a handful of counties | in the entire nation have building codes loose enough | that let you make use of it affordably. | bombcar wrote: | I've heard that parts (most?) of Wyoming is pretty lax | about requirements. | nine_k wrote: | Would a prefab house (which normally satisfies various | codes' requirements) be worth putting there? | bombcar wrote: | Even with a fully legal prefab house, you're often | looking at anywhere between 20-100k in "other costs" | besides delivery and installation. | | You have to connect to water, sewer, power (or build a | well and septic), you still have to get it permitted and | inspected, etc, etc, etc. | turtlebits wrote: | You may find land that is cheap, but you will only be able to | build a single house on it. This incentivizes building large. | | Your chance of finding a sub-dividable lot in a suburban area | is essentially 0. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-07 23:00 UTC)