Reading about what life was back in 1910 and pretty crazy to hear how Sears had prefabricated housing materials, shipped them, and it only took 350 hours for a carpenter to put the whole house together.
At $1 per square foot.
How & why did we... lose that?
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Prefab now exists, sure, but only generates 15-20% in construction cost savings.
Why not 50%?
Appears to be primarily abut permitting, lawyers, and transportation regulations.
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@zachtratar
You can still buy kit homes for roughly the same price / sqft adjusted for inflation.
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@zachtratar
Counterpoint: single-family homes are incredibly wasteful.
On the other hand, prefab high-rises kind of seem to be a thing?
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@zachtratar
My father built apartments and single unit homes his whole life. There is an answer but it is a two hour conversation...
But is there an answer to how I can merge my new corporate & old sole prop stripe accounts so I can start issuing credit cards again? :-)
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@Bryan_Barton
Hey Bryan - we don't support merging these accounts as of right now. Can you issue on the new account?
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@zachtratar
Zach, factory built prefab is definitely an improvement over on site, stick built, although it still has a lot of challenges that cannot be eliminated. 1) Logistics / Transport 2) Over engineering to withstand item
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3) Latency
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@zachtratar
3) Latency - Time between factory part build and site install allows for hidden quality defects to propagate to subsequent assemblies 4) Site dimensional accuracy - variation between factory parts and mating site
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@zachtratar
5) Skill & Process Variation - craftsperson landing part on site is not always the same, not always trained, not on a "takt" tempo as would happen in a real factory
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@zachtratar
6) Many more issues... Long story short, prefab is an improvement over stick - site built, but we need to get to a place where automation and factory methods are 80% or more done on site. - Diamondage...
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@zachtratar
Sears is one of the biggest fumbles of the century
They coulda had it all. If they didn't resist online, Amazon wouldn't exist and they'd probably be the first to 2T
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Work with
@alon_levy
and me at
@NYUMarron
. We are trying to figure out why it’s so expensive to build subways in America and how we can do better. We are building a database with costs and project scopes and doing in-depth cases. Apply here
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