not-on-a-boat

not-on-a-boat t1_j8qlb0u wrote

No, it's mostly land.

You can't put more people into San Francisco. It's not because SF can't get building materials or construction costs are too much. It's because there's no land where you can build more housing, so people live further and further from the city center to find affordable housing.

You can make land more efficient by increasing the number of housing units built on the land. That's a great solution. But it has nothing to do with the labor cost of home construction.

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not-on-a-boat t1_j8pox3a wrote

I think productivity has improved. Those gains might not be reflected in housing costs, but that's not the same. I saw two guys put up a whole house of windows in one day a couple years ago. When my parents built a house in the 90s, that took a week. Concrete pours are faster, electrical is faster and cheaper, roofing is more efficient. There are lots of efficiency gains.

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