We could address the staff shortage through factory built housing

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What happened to construction productivity? Part 1: Measurement

How do we know what's actually happening to construction productivity?
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@Protocol it's a good chart but while charts can tell a lot of information there is also a lot of stuff they don't show. US construction productivity was very high after the war because that was when they were building all those vast car dependent suberbs on green field sites, it's easy to be productive when building on clean new sites. You can sort of approximate factory productivity in that environment. Now those suburbs are all built and just like in Europe they need to retrofit existing buildings or clear sites in existing built up areas.

Imagine how productive modern manufacturing would be if you had to take back in an old fridge , computer or car and upgrade it to modern standards. Productivity in manufacturing is based on the fact that everything gets junked and they are always dealing with clean new materials .
 
Protocol said:

Why did agriculture mechanize and not construction?​

constructionphysics.substack.com

Why did agriculture mechanize and not construction?

On her YouTube channel, Belinda Carr poses an interesting question: why did agriculture mechanize (ie: replace manual labor with machine labor), but not construction?
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Interesting but this;
Nonrepetitive movements are fundamentally an information problem - they require some method of telling a machine the state of the surrounding environment, and what to do depending on what that state is.

As software gets better and better, and as technologies like computer vision continue to improve, our ability to solve these information problems increases. Technologies like CNC milling, 3D printing, laser/plasma cutting, and even some steel sheet folding are already capable of quickly and cheaply fabricating different parts, one right after the other.
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has been happening in Manufacturing for years. Where I work we use robot arms (co-bots or collaborative robots) to load and unload machines. Those machines can shift for manufacturing one complex part to another in about 30 minutes. In other words that technology's in place in Irish SME's so there's no reason it shouldn't be in place in larger factories building homes.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
We have some excellent construction companies and some great technical universities who would have the skills to develop this industry.

But the venture would require a guaranteed demand for many years to justify the initial expenditure e.g. The government buying 5,000 houses a year for ten years.

Brendan
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I really wonder should the State not investigate a Sale-and-Leaseback arrangement? Provide a site and tender out the build to developers. The State would lease the houses for say 60 years at an agreed rent. No upfront risk / borrowing for the government. Fixed income for the developer thereby making finance from a bank much easier. Less risk of the taxpayer getting fleeced too -> the developer would take that risk. You can be sure the houses would be built quickly.
 
Firefly said:
I really wonder should the State not investigate a Sale-and-Leaseback arrangement? Provide a site and tender out the build to developers. The State would lease the houses for say 60 years at an agreed rent. No upfront risk / borrowing for the government. Fixed income for the developer thereby making finance from a bank much easier. Less risk of the taxpayer getting fleeced too -> the developer would take that risk. You can be sure the houses would be built quickly.
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Isn't that what's happening with the buy to let's at the moment?
 
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