The problem with housing
Affordable housing and homelessness are major problems facing many communities. To fix this problem, communities often focus on finding ways to raise funds to subsidize the building of more affordable housing. However, in spite of their best efforts and no matter how much additional income is raised, the problem never seems to go away.
The current building process is generally a long and complicated business. Each municipality sets its own zoning rules, permitting procedures, inspection requirements, and construction standards. Many steps and approvals are needed before actual construction can begin. The physical building process is usually done on the job site by different contractors working at different times using skilled labor. Delays and additional costs are common problems builders must deal with.
A hundred years ago a Sears House package could be ordered and shipped with all the materials precut and numbered for local assembly. Many different types of homes at different quality and cost levels were offered. The building process was relatively straight-forward and relatively fast. People are still living in some of these Sear’s homes today.
We certainly have the ability to create a modern version of a Sears home system. Such a system would use automated factories and standardized materials to build high-quality homes, at lower cost and in shorter time frames. So why are the vast majority of homes still built on site using traditional methods? The answer is surprisingly simple.
Our current system exists because people living in local municipalities want to control where housing is located, what kind of housing is built and indirectly, the characteristics of people that will be moving in. Building codes are often adjusted to effectively exclude some groups for perceived behavioral, economic, or quality of life reasons. For instance, communities might fear that crime rates will rise if to many low-income people where to move in. Or housing prices might fall if high-quality but lower cost housing could be built near existing homes. Or the character of a community might change without restrictive housing and land use codes.
This means that each project must be reviewed to verify that it meets local requirements and community wishes. Hence no mass market exists to justify the expense of building automated factories that could produce different types of high-quality standardized housing.
The solution
The CSS housing plan proposes a way to fix this problem by creating a mass market for high quality standardized factory built modular housing. When these housing modules are assembled, the finished product would look like traditional built projects.
The plan starts with the creation a set of national standardized zoning, permitting, inspection, and construction standards. Local communities could adopt the national standards with adjustments to meet local conditions and wishes. All these adjustments would be listed in a national building database.
If a sufficient number of local communities voluntarily agreed to adopt these standards, enough demand could be created to justify the building of automated factories. Different factories would supply different kinds of housing modules at different cost levels. These housing modules could be shipped anywhere in the country and assembled on-site to create finished housing.
The building process might start by going to a computer to select the factory, design, options, and pricing levels desired. The factories would use the is national building database to finalize their housing designs to meet local requirements. The system would then generate and submit a standardized set of forms to the local community to get the needed building permits. The permitting process should be relatively fast as all local issues and wishes have already been specified and addressed. If a variance is needed, the permitting process would be slower and similar to what now occurs.
Once approved, the factory would build, ship, and certify that construction standards and inspection requirements for prebuilt housing modules, have been meet. Only local inspections would be needed to verify that the assembly of the prebuilt housing modules and site-specific issues were done correctly. Site-specific issues include such things as foundations, water, and sewer hookups.
If enough communities voluntarily adopted the CSS housing plan, different kinds of high-quality housing may be built faster and at significantly lower costs. Additionally, if community’s permit micro-apartments or very small homes and the negative income tax proposal is adopted, all Americans should have enough income to afford to rent one of these smaller units. Governments should not have to allocate funds to build these smaller units since the rent charged should be enough to warrant commercial investments in them. This means that no American should ever need to be homeless for economic reasons.
Additional information about housing issues can be found in book
Questions: email David@fundingvisions.org