Away from the perma-misery of politics, wars, regulatory nonsense and so on, I came across this article on the Substack of the Rational Optimists Society (with a name like that, it is not a place to go for the doom-scrollers):
“Housing is arguably the most broken industry in the world, with tough competition from healthcare and education. It’s a gigantic market that affects us all,” writes Stephen McBride.
He argues that firms such as Cuby Technologies are doing for housing what shipping containers did for transportation and global trade, with massively positive effects.
Cuby’s product is the Mobile Micro-Factory (MMFTM). It’s a standardized, portable factory that turns homebuilding into a predictable manufacturing process. I can see that acronym MMF, in this context, getting the same visibility as SMR for “small modular reactors”, and tapping into the same idea of using economies of scale, mass customisation and fiendishly clever computer tech to produce lots of useful, not eye-wateringly expensive things for our homes, power generators, whatever. And I can see, in time, how this fits with still-developing tech such as 3-D printing (which has been around a while). It will of course give some folk the vapours, such as those in the construction trades, much as happened with other disruptive changes. But if, for example, ageing and other forces squeeze labour market supply of people in such trades, then business models such as the MMF one, able to churn out homes, will have a lot of appeal. Plus new jobs can be created around design and all the associated, value-add opportunities that can arise.
One aspect of all this is that if it lives up to the billing, the precision with which homes are built will be very high.
Also, there is an appeal, is there not, for the likes of Elon Musk in figuring out how to efficiently produce things for spacefaring and the settlement of Mars. I can bet he is following all this closely.
Final thought – for places that have suffered a devastating loss of housing (such as Southern California exactly a year ago because of the fires), being able to produce attractive homes at scale for people seems to have a lot of appeal. And, er, that’s where the horrible politics comes in. To date, only a fraction of the number of houses lost have been replaced. That is a shameful state of affairs, and one for which the local politicians deserve to pay a high price.
Just an old man ranting here, but I would love to see part of the housing solution be to educate younger guys in how to repair and upgrade older structures. It helps build wealth through sweat equity but more importantly, doing things with your hands, and accomplishing something physical like a small repair or even a larger remodel, is good for the soul.
Doesn’t solve the problem for the millions of homes we need to build (if the “experts” quoted are to be believed!), but it could help. And I do like Cuby…but I wish their website showed a few actual houses they’ve built and sold. It’s all AI as far as I can tell!
One quibble with a Cuby house: with steel framing, modifications would be hard…I think? Maybe that’s one of the transitions: instead of calling a carpenter to make structural changes, you’d call a welder? Nothing wrong with that, but I want to also be able to do as much as possible myself
And yes, Jonathan, I hope Elon is watching! Whatever the economics of Cuby, Elon would likely improve on them.
Another bit of rant: the complaints about not being able to supply enough homes compared to say 50 years ago ignore the fact that we now want 100% more square footage (>2000 SF vs ~1000SF 50 years ago, for a 2-3 BR home). And everyone gets their own room, their own screens (multiple), streaming services, etc. …all while complaining about “affordability”. How many of the poor or lower middle class had a supercomputer in their pocket 50 years ago?
“We don’t have enough” completely depends on the definition of “enough”