Re-INVENTING THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY TO CREATE NEW HOUSING

Source https://brenthull.com/article/old-growth-wood

We need to take a hard look at what is actually causing the relative lack of new housing here and around the country. Zoning per se is not the problem. If it were City Council would have voted to allow multi-family housing in every neighborhood long ago as many of us have asked them to do. Instead, the problem is both deeper and more widespread. We need go no further than a October 31, 2024 Technology Review article titled “The Surprising Barrier that Keeps us from Building All the Housing we Need” by Albert Saiz, an urban economics and real estate professor at MIT. He has observed that  “…construction costs account for more than two-thirds of the price of a new house in much of the country, including the Southwest and West, where much of the building is happening.
 
Even in places like California and New England, where land is extremely expensive, construction accounts for 40% to 60% of value of a new home….” He turns to a recent paper by University of Chicago economists titled “The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the US Construction Sector,” who point out “…that productivity growth in US construction came to a halt beginning around 1970.” They “…calculated it in one of the key parts of the construction business: housing. They found that the number of houses or total square footage (houses are getting bigger) built per employee each year was flat or even falling over the last 50 years.” The lack of progress in terms of output pales in comparison to many other industries such as car manufacturing. In construction, it was largely cost overruns, work quality concerns, and messy production factors that were core ongoing problems. Among other things in play are “…the ‘misaligned incentives’ of the various players, who often make more money the longer a project takes.’” Far better results come with the use of new digital technologies, more standardized processing procedures, and better more efficient business practices.”

In a place such as Cambridge where land costs contribute most significantly to the cost of new housing, and construction costs add another 40-60% to costs, it is clear where the problems lie. In addition to the acquisition of critically needed housing by venture capitalists and others (jacking up housing costs beyond the means of most residents), it is also clear that inefficiencies in building processes themselves that add to the time. Good design via design review and oversight are not the problem, nor is zoning per se. The problem for housing in Cambridge is misstated priorities, and the politicization of the process itself for political and financial gain. The “housing crisis” here as with disaster capitalism is largely an issue of how some individuals and groups has sought to take advantage of the situation while offering nothing that will maintain or improve the situation for many who are seeking help. If cities like Minneapolis are the model, let’s follow that route, allow several units on the same property, and build higher on the main avenues.
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In the above cited October 31, 2024 Technology Review article we learn that "[w]hen Jit Kee Chin joined Suffolk Construction as its chief data officer in 2017, the title was unique in the industry. But Chin, armed with a PhD in experimental physics from MIT and a 10-year stint at McKinsey, brought to the large Boston-based firm the kind of technical and management expertise often missing from construction companies. And she recognized that large construction projects—including the high-rise apartment buildings and sprawling data centers that Suffolk often builds—generate vast amounts of useful data. At the time, much of the data was siloed; information on the progress of a project was in one place, scheduling in another, and safety data and reports in yet another. 'The systems didn’t talk to each other, and it was very difficult to cross-correlate,' says Chin. Getting all the data together so it could be understood and utilized across the business was an early task. 'Almost all construction companies are talking about how to better use their data now,' says Chin, who is currently Suffolk’s CTO, and since her hiring, 'a couple others have even appointed chief data officers.' But despite such encouraging signs, she sees the effort to improve productivity in the industry as still very much a work in progress."  In short, change is on the (near) horizon. 

And let’s not overlook that fact that our still sustainable existing homes are not only providing some of the best naturally occurring affordable housing in the city but also built to last. And the timbers and many other materials used in them are FAR superior to those used often used in recent wood frame construction.