The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the US Construction Sector (uchicago.edu) 149
Despite aggregate productivity for the US economy having doubled over the past 50 years, the country's construction sector has diverged considerably, trending downward throughout that period. And this is no slight decrease. Raw BEA data suggest that the value added per worker in the construction sector was about 40 percent lower in 2020 than in 1970. From a report: How can a sector like construction, with average value-added of 4.3 percent of GDP between 1950 and 2020, experience such a precipitous decline in productivity relative to the rest of the economy? To answer this question, researchers have focused on issues relating to data measurement, hypothesizing that measurement errors largely explain this phenomenon. This new research updates some of those efforts and, importantly, extends them to investigate other hypotheses to find the following:
1. Using measures of physical productivity in housing construction (i.e., number of houses or total square footage built per employee), the authors confirm that productivity is indeed falling or, at best, stagnant over multiple decades. Importantly, these facts are not explained by the incidence of price measurement problems.
2. Instead of data error, the authors investigate two other possible explanations. First, they find that the construction sector's ability to transform intermediate goods into finished products has deteriorated.
3. And second, the authors describe the curious fact that producers located in more-productive areas do not grow at expected rates. Indeed, rather than construction inputs flowing to areas where they are more productive, the activity share of these areas either stagnates or even falls. The authors suggest that this problem with allocative efficiency may accentuate the aggregate productivity problem for the industry.
1. Using measures of physical productivity in housing construction (i.e., number of houses or total square footage built per employee), the authors confirm that productivity is indeed falling or, at best, stagnant over multiple decades. Importantly, these facts are not explained by the incidence of price measurement problems.
2. Instead of data error, the authors investigate two other possible explanations. First, they find that the construction sector's ability to transform intermediate goods into finished products has deteriorated.
3. And second, the authors describe the curious fact that producers located in more-productive areas do not grow at expected rates. Indeed, rather than construction inputs flowing to areas where they are more productive, the activity share of these areas either stagnates or even falls. The authors suggest that this problem with allocative efficiency may accentuate the aggregate productivity problem for the industry.
Seems obvious (Score:2)
> Raw BEA data suggest that the value added per worker in the construction sector was about 40 percent lower in 2020 than in 1970.
Why would they need to be productive? It's a localized market and fools are willing to throw money at real estate. There is no incentive.
Youtube creators and Uber drivers -- glut of workers. They can let go of anyone at any time.
Construction workers -- can't find enough and they're begging the current ones to stay. Doesn't sound like they can let go of even unproductive wo
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Why would they need to be productive? It's a localized market and fools are willing to throw money at real estate. There is no incentive.
Being a home owner in the middle of a kitchen remodel, I don't believe you. I am in fact quite cost conscious. The contractors bidding work have a ton of incentive to cut costs because if they don't, the other company will.
Every homeowner and buyer I know if is manically fixated on paying less if they can. Maybe Bill Gates wants his mansion to be expensive for bragging rights but that's a rare exception.
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Every homeowner and buyer I know if is manically fixated on paying less if they can.
While true, this would only explain drop in quality, but not in productivity.
Re: Seems obvious (Score:2)
"Productivity" in the context in economic analisys is simply cost/sale divided by workhours.
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"Productivity" in the context in economic analisys is simply cost/sale divided by workhours.
Exactly. Lower cost for the same hours is by definition lower productivity. Lower quality at lower cost for same hours, gee, I don't know how you classify that. Lower quality, lower cost, fewer hours, might be a wash. It's complicated.
There's also the difference between price and value. The value of my new kitchen cabinets is greater (to me) than the price I paid. Oddly enough, the value is lower to the carpenter than the income he gets. Ain't the economics of free exchange fun? Which value should one use t
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Which value should one use to compute productivity?
The transaction price.
Re:Seems obvious (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking from experience with my own remodels, the quality drop is so extreme for some of them that rework is required. Multiple reworks, sometimes.
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Re:Seems obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who is also in the middle of a kitchen remodel and is fairly familiar with the trades involved, the lack of productivity is largely due to the fact that there are just not enough workers to do the work - skilled or not. And when that happens, things get done out of order - for example, my cabinets got put in the other day and I commented that I thought the electricians and plumbers would need to come in first - my GC agreed but the carpenter could come and do the job now or in a month
Sorry to hear that. TBH, sounds like you should fire the general. That's their job, coordinating the subs to minimize the critical path.
We're our own general contractor. Coordinating schedules is a royal pain in the a$$. Just getting people to give us a bid is ridiculously hard. It's to the point where we wonder if we've been black balled at some double-secret contractor confab.
I'm also wondering where smoot123 is from because contractors in my area (midwest) can name their price because of how busy they are.
San Francisco bay area. There's a lot of "take it or leave it" but there's also often a 2x difference between the low and high bids. With, I think, a corresponding difference in quality. Big differentiators also include whether someone has a licensed or not, is bonded or not, and would prefer to work for cash or not (and we all pretend to not realize that's a way to avoid reporting income).
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Being your own GC in the Bay Area in the current market? I'm surprised you get any bids at all. Contractors have more work than they can handle. I'm surprised they'd even give you the time of day. Best to spend their efforts on real GCs, who they can count on for future work.
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Could have fooled me there. I pay reputable contractors with years of experience to do the work which may cost more.
You get what you pay for.
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In my area, Metro Phoenix, the past two years have been heated in construction, be it renovation or new builds. For about a year you could hardly get a remodel started, the contractors were out building new and doing very high-priced jobs, leaving the middle unable to find anyone to do work. This has only recently loosened up in the past 6 months or so. This is all downstream of home sales, I think, and those are being muted by realistic interest rates and a perceived disconnect between valuations and offer
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...the plans seem to be 0. lots of prep, 1. Furious activity, 2. Long pauses as something unseen happens, 3. Furious activity, and finally 4. Longer periods of low intensity work.
Thing is, that shouldn't affect a productivity computation. The idle times don't factor into it because productivity isn't measured by calendar time, it's by hours worked.
What might affect a productivity measurement, if naively done, is you need to spend twice as long compacting the gravel under the road as you used to. If you don't account for the improved quality of the road, it will seem like your productivity went down. That's what I'd be concerned TFA is running afoul of.
Did anyone read TFA to see if t
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As a homeowner in the middle of a kitchen remodel...you're buying overpriced services to install overpriced goods at the direction of overpriced architects that all compete in a largely fixed environment...most will refuse bc people will see how ridiculous their $10-20k+ of cabinets actually is.
Value is in the eye of the beholder. Most people will balk but enough are willing to pay that every contractor is booked for the next six months.
In addition, I know what quality work I do, I know what work is simply beyond my capabilities, and what's worth it to me to hire out. Some of it is even dumb stuff: I replaced the sink shutoff valves, ran into issues, and gladly paid Karl $200 to fix it right now. Learning how to sweat pipes wouldn't be hard, it just wasn't reasonable with the installers drumming t
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We have a winner!
Re:Seems obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup! Had some roofing work done in California and the workers were migrants. They did a terrible job because they didn't seem to know what they were doing. Then one day they just stopped showing up. The GC also ghosted me but fortunately payment wasn't delivered yet. But I was left with an unfinished roof. So then I decided to be a lot more discerning in who I hired. But I found it impossible to find a GC with an english speaking crew with experience. Fortunately the next GC had a decent crew but they still were all migrants.
From what I can tell there are no formal processes anymore for the education of construction workers. There used to be a tradesman process of apprentice, journeyman, master. But as it stands now, it's whoever can swing a hammer gets thrown out there to do jobs.
Re:Seems obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because "everyone MUST go to college" because getting dirty is beneath us all... Besides such jobs are "soul sucking" and "non-impactful"!
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I can see the truth of that in California. But I did convince a nephew of mine back in Pennsylvania to go into the trades. He's an apprentice welder now and making very good money doing it.
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My son in law is a welder (non-union too) and he makes more than I do
Re:Seems obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup. As a nation we should really be pushing trades as an alternative to college. Even incentivizing it.
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That's exactly what Mike Rowe has been trying to do with his shows Dirty Jobs, and Somebody's Gotta Do It, and then his foundation.
And mad props to him to suggest that we should each be trained according to our individual talents.
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Automation is not going to replace the plumber or electrician going into your crawl space, attic, basement, under sink to do their work. Most stuff is dealing with existing infrastructure. Automation needs a clean slate and its hard to get much cost reduction vs skilled labor. Often, the blueprints don't match what is built by 1/2 way through the job.
They also need to get licensed which takes 3-7 years. It takes dedication and isn't subject to wild swings in the labor market.
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More likely because anti-union sentiment has led to fewer union contractors and so fewer union apprenticeships, etc.
Which doesn't stop me from complaining about some of the union workers and union work rules that may also be contributing to stagnant
Re:Seems obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Young people have grown up watching their disabled parents struggle with back injuries and various job site exposure diseases while being financially left to rot. They want a white collared job, or anything that won't lead to certain poor health, especially since our medical and insurance industry is a complete joke.
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This too is true
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Not really. A roofer doesn't get paid much. It's not because it's "non-impactful" or dirty. It's because the pay is low.
Re: Seems obvious (Score:2)
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In some areas there is money laundering to be considered. Cocaine was a big factor in South Florida real estate development in the 80s and 90s and Russian oligarch money in New York in the 90s and 00s. You don't have to be efficient in building the house, because it's almost beside the point. The point is to take your dirty money and pass it through to a number of legitimate businesses.
Re: Seems obvious (Score:3)
If that were true, why wouldnâ(TM)t contractors want people to work faster and be more productive, so they can pay less hours and still collect massive fees.
Something doesnâ(TM)t add up in your collectivist feverdreams.
The primary reason people are less productive in construction is because massive rules and regulations. Some for the better, most make no sense. Iâ(TM)ve been involved in construction projects and it always gets bottlenecked when the building inspectors and OSHA and the fire ma
It's because a person can only (Score:5, Insightful)
Those physical limits haven't changed much since we evolved from apes, and manual labor people have been working at the limits of their bodies since before the development of agriculture.
So, no surprise that productivity is flat in the construction sector. Until we innovate/automate construction, it'll stay that way.
Re:It's because a person can only (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess would be a lack of cheap disposable labor (Score:2)
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I'm not sure who you mean by "we", but many employers, especially in the construction industry and in agriculture, have been relentlessly pursuing illegal immigrants since well before Obama. Also, under Obama, more illegals were deported than under previous administrations.
Re:It's because a person can only (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the metrics listed. Number of houses or total square footage built per employee. Going back a few years the building codes were simpler. Electrical, plumbing, insulation, HVAC, etc... have all gotten more complex. If you look at housing from the 30's and 40's, the electrical was connected together in one junction box and you had 2 to 4 fuses in your fuse box and you were lucky if it was grounded. Current housing has a panel of 48 fuses and GFI breakers and color coded wire for voltage/amperage/usage and it's all grounded. In the 30/40's the 2x4's were not evenly spaced and the floors were build with 2x10 or 2x12. Today the 2x4's are evenly spaced and the floors use less expensive raw material made of 2by2 with cross 2by2. Older houses with 2 to 3 bedrooms had only one washroom. Older housing had no air exchangers. What we gained in productivity we lost due to complexity.
Today's houses are considerably more comfortable than in the past. A lot more goes into building a home today than in the past. If you use energy as a metric today's homes consume 1/10 of homes built in the 60/70's and probably 1/30 of those built in the 30/40's. My current home is twice the size of my first home and I spend less on energy than I did 30 years ago in my first home. And I haven't adjusted the cost to inflation yet.
Re:It's because a person can only (Score:4, Interesting)
The metric indeed.... number of houses or total quare footage built per employee.
One of the other changes over the last ~50 years? Death of the generalist construction worker. It takes several people to build a house, sure; but a great deal more people when each one employee has only one role - Framer, Roofer, electrician, drywaller, taper, mudder (yup, 3 people/roles for the drywall alone!), plumber, finish carpenter, window installer, painter, masonry, soffit/faschia installer... the list undoubtedly goes on.
A house might only have 2-5 people on site at a given time... but roll through over 40 different employees to finish the work.all the way from digging the foundation hole through final touchups.
A different metric would be to look at the person-hours involved per sqft, as compared over the timeline. Is the work "more" efficient (less person-hours)? Or has the multiplication of required job roles increased the total person-hour count required? In the first case, we might have situations where individual tradespeople are underutilized. In the second, we could be dealing with true productivity stagnation or loss (the workers in question, on average, can't do as much) or we could be looking at impacts of complexity or regulation increasing the total workload, as others have pointed out in these threads.
"Efficiency" is a funny number to work with, mathematically. Choosing what to measure efficiency against is almost more of an art than a science...
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Don't worry, I'll vote him up.
Oh wait....
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As I heard an old black man say in an interview on NPR about how the "illegals" "took" his work in the central valley fields... "They didn't TAKE anything I wanted... I gave it to them". The same is true in construction. Those who DO want to work in construction want to be "artists".
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They're officially employed. They also show the proper documents when they get hired. The documents are fake, but those can be had.
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Those physical limits haven't changed much since we evolved from apes
Really? Something that you point out has been a constant pretty much since there have been people at all is your explanation as to why productivity in construction has fallen in the last half century?
They're working on the automation (Score:2)
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What proportion of workers were using a nail gun in 1950 compared to today?
We just had a new roof put on the house, and what I was expecting to be a multi-day job was done in five hours. I was absolutely shocked at how fast those guys got the job done, but those guys worked their damned asses off for those five hours, except the fifteen minutes they stopped for lunch. With that said, most times I pass a large job site, I see two guys working and ten guys sitting in the cabs of pickup trucks, so if I were taking a guess as to why productivity was down, I'd say it was likely that
What about regulatory burden (Score:5, Insightful)
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US OSHA requirements largely match those in Europe.
Which leads to the question: Does Europe see the same pattern in productivity?
Re:What about regulatory burden (Score:4, Interesting)
1: Much larger houses. The summary mentions two metrics for measuring productivity; houses built per worker, and square footage built per worker. Larger houses take more time, so they will skew the first metric. I’ve helped build houses that a single family home from the 70’s would fit in the living room.
The second metric is related, these new much larger homes are *much* more complex, so in the time a crew could have built three 4000 square foot homes, they build one 10,000 square foot home. Less square footage, in fewer structures, over a longer period, due to the complex designs, complex regulations, and physical limitations. Many of these houses are difficult to build *with heavy equipment*. The way they are situated on lots limits access, requiring more complex rigging and setup to perform tasks, restrictions on when equipment can be used due to noise regulations, all slow down the process.
2: just in time supply chain and custom ordered *everything* slow the process as well. With most ‘custom’ homes, there are no ‘home depot’ windows and doors that can be bought and taken to the job site that day; nothing is ‘in stock’ rather, it must be ordered, manufactured, delivered to the retailer, and delivered again to the job site. Delays and mistakes abound, there is an entire industry around re-selling ‘mistake’ cabinetry, windows, and doors that were either damaged in transit, or did not meet the customers specifications.. Contrast this to the 60’s and before where a great deal of windows, doors, and cabinetry was built onsite, by the builders, with raw materials.
All these combine to produce fewer homes, more slowly.
Re:What about regulatory burden (Score:5, Insightful)
I this is it - the US massively overbuilds high end housing, which cost a lot more to build, and underbuilds affordable housing, because the market is optimized for ROI not for producing houses efficiently, and they'd rather spend more time making a house that's 4x larger and sells for 4x as much, because it gets more money out of the single lot, which means that there's far more labor per house built and thus fewer houses produced for unit of labor, which is less output as measured by this productivity metric, but making the builder far more money per lot, which is what the builder cares about. A huge factor on top of that is that private equity firms have been distorting the market to buy up all the lower cost housing and taking it off the market as rentals, leaving only much more expensive housing, which they buy and flip at inflated prices. So, basically, the US massively underbuilds housing, making far too few houses that are far too large, because that's most profitable to the builders. In other countries they have more rational housing policies, and crank out many affordable houses instead of forcing people to either rent or buy far more house than they want, which yes, is wildly unproductive by any rational standards, but which makes investors and builders much more money. And what's more important - people being able to buy starter homes, or making investors richer?
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I this is it - the US massively overbuilds high end housing, which cost a lot more to build, and underbuilds affordable housing, because the market is optimized for ROI not for producing houses efficiently, and they'd rather spend more time making a house that's 4x larger and sells for 4x as much, because it gets more money out of the single lot...
They'd rather build a house that's 4x larger and sells for 8x as much or more. And what differentiates the high end house from the affordable house? Labor-intensive details. Crown molding, fancy textured wall paints, granite countertops, ceramic tiled walls in kitchens and bathrooms, ceramic tiled floors (not vinyl sheet), extra laundry rooms and accompanying plumbing, and the houses are so big they require multiple independent air conditioning and heating units and hot water heaters, which can double an
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Textured walls are standard. Crown molding adds maybe a few hours total to the entire build. Countertops are the same labor regardless of material. Tiled walls and floors are more common in older buildings, especially the really tiny tiles.
extra laundry rooms
I don't know any SFH that has more than 1 laundry room. If you know an example of one, can you link to their Zillow page?
the houses are so big they require multiple independent air conditioning and heating units and hot water heaters
Now you're talking about mansions with detached units. Those are not being built in significant numbers.
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Regulatory burdens don't seem to have increased (Score:2)
But there's a substantial and extremely powerful lobby that very much wants to make sure public transporta
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I initially thought of this as a probable source of the issue. But think about automotive manufacturing. Over the same timeframe the regulations involving both the employees building the vehicles and the safety and performance rules on the product itself (air bags, crumple zones, ABS, head lights, emissions, the list goes on) are at least equal to that of housing construction.
The paper really does a good job of covering the various issues. It's not just an easy out on 'mismeasurement' or 'NIMBY/OSHA' . I
This is really sad if true because (Score:3, Insightful)
. . .quality and variability of housing have gone down, and there are so many more labor saving devices today. Both the uniformity (standardization) of materials, and tools like air and gunpowder powered nail guns, should mean a grand increase in worker productivity. I replumbed half a house in less than two days, including demo of all the old galvanized. The job was made super easy thanks to PEX and schedule 40. I can't speak to commercial construction. But residential, even with all the new code section, seems easier than ever.
Perhaps the problem is permitting and inspection? Crews idle due to waiting?
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Meanwhile, the independent shutoffs sounds exactly like something thrown in during an endless meeting by someone who wanted to be seen as 'contributing'.
OSHA! (Score:2)
All kidding aside, regulation of the construction industry has continued to get worse and worse over the years. This includes the aforementioned health and safety but also means other sources of red tape like permits, funding, government inspections, etc. All of this adds overhead and generates a log of drag on productivity and it has only gotten worse in recent years.
When workers are treated as expendable (Score:3, Informative)
In the construction industry workers are treated as expendable. There's a reason you see an increasing number of migratory workers(likely without work visas) doing construction work; It's dangerous and the pay doesn't match the risks. This highlights an interesting contradiction in US labor markets: Those who work the most, take the most actual(physical) risk, and work the longest hours, are oftentimes compensated the least.
Anyone doing construction work with a Green Card or better will quickly seek to transition out of the industry towards work with better conditions. This leads to a situation where the workers who remain are the ones that can't find better work elsewhere.
Want faster, more skilled, construction workers? Make the working conditions better. Treat the workers with respect. Wages will go up, but so will their productivity. Instead of 15 workers that need extremely high supervision and often times need to re-do the work several times anyway, you'll have 5 that get the job done correctly the first time and on time.
OSHA, Unions, Building Codes (Score:3)
I guess now I'm a "researcher" too...
Workplace safety regulation (Score:4, Informative)
I've seen a few factors contributing to a slower pace on new builds and renovations in the past few decades. Others have already posted about job satisfaction so I won't get into that, but I will point out that workplace safety regulation has progressed significantly in the past 50 years. No longer can you hang your buddy over the edge by his belt to finish that trim. Crews on higher roofs wear harnesses and safety lines. You won't see them swanning around like the old days [wikipedia.org].
Workplace safety regulations like those coming out of OSHA and CCOHS keep people safer and I think they're good and required, but it's a very obvious fact that taking the time to be safe while building is slower than just winging it.
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Fewer dead and maimed buddies, too. OSHA doesn't add that much to how long work takes. There is, however, a ton of idling while waiting for permits. Sometimes it's months. Efficiency partly comes from efficient scheduling, and permitting makes efficient scheduling almost impossible.
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Permitting is NOT the problem. Construction work has plenty of time to get all the permits and the regularly fail/forget to do so. Construction starts without permits all the time, and only stops when they get found out that they don't have the permits. I am a planner. It's what I did in the military, and it's not much different. They could schedule efficiently, but they don't, because the people doing the scheduling are stupid.
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That all sounds good, but why has productivity gone up in Europe, where they're far more regulated, and not in the US?
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I heard about a program in (IIRC) The Netherlands to take care of where to charge an electric car when so many people live in apartments.
If you buy a car, you also fill out a request to have a charging station installed for a space on the street in front of your apartment. The charger will be installed and operational in 2 days. And they actually meet the promise.
In the U.S., I can't even imagine it taking less than a week to get an acknowledgement that the form was received and probably another week to be
Off topic but (Score:2)
It's been awhile since I worked on construction. And I only did a brief stint between careers. But I can tell you right now nobody pays any attention whatsoever to those safety regulations until somebody gets killed and even then only if they're killed in a particularly gruesome fashion. The fines are pretty minimal and the companies can just close their shop on paper and open up a new one.
That said, I th
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Your view on that may have been colored by your brief stint. I've been in a lot of construction sites (I do the mechanical design), some of which were very loose with safety regulations, but more that were very strict abou
Seems implausible (Score:2)
I call BS.
Think about how construction worked in 1973: hand hammering nails, corded drills and power tools, no laser levels or laser saw guides, fewer portable tools such as table and miter saws, fewer time savers like Shark Bite plumbing fittings, black iron pipes instead of PVC or ABS, scissor lifts and cranes instead of ladders, sawsalls instead of crow bars, pre-fabricated trusses instead of hand-framing roofs, the list of productivity innovations is virtually endless. Oh, and quality is better too.
Just
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To reply to my own post, just reading the summary begs some questions.
For example, they talk about houses built per worker and square footage built per worker. That doesn't account for things like houses being more complicated than they used to be. Houses have more electrical than in the past. They have more complicated HVAC systems. Kitchens are more elaborate. Houses are wrapped to make them air tight and better insulated. All that's going to show up in quality but not in speed.
I can't get to the actual p
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Watching construction near me it is clear that team availability is the biggest limiting factor, houses go up very fast and seem to linger briefly for the more specialized skilled trades.
Even for relatively unskilled labor (e.g. landscaping), contractors easily are twice as productive as I am. For skilled trades like plumbing, easily four times.
Of course, I hope I'm at least four times as productive making PowerPoints explaining in mind-numbing detail why customer X hit bug Y and how we're going to change development processes to ensure that never, ever happens again. Oh, wait, that's value over time and it's...carry the three...still zero.
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Here's a few reasons:
- OSHA and similar: procedures that slow the process to improve safety. They also add head count to the simplest of operations. Not saying it's bad to be safe, but it add humans and cost which reduces productivity
- BIM and similar: Despite promises, BIM adds 30+% to the drafting process and have not yielded reduction in field coordination issues. You can blame lack of training and experience, but the problems continue.
- Increased complexity of materials, designs, and methods: newer mate
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They seemed to be talking about the value add of the workers. The new pre-fab windows are more expensive (justifiable for the time savings and consistent quality) and the time to install is way down, so not as much value add by the construction workers.
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They seemed to be talking about the value add of the workers. The new pre-fab windows are more expensive (justifiable for the time savings and consistent quality) and the time to install is way down, so not as much value add by the construction workers.
I'd have to read TFA to be sure. The summary only talked about number of houses or square feet produced. That's why I wonder if they considered the quality of that square foot or even better, value per worker per hour worked. In general, I'd much rather have a house built today versus one in '73, even if they were the same size (and they're generally not, houses tend larger today).
The window example is an interesting one. I don't know the vinyl frame is more expensive than framing it from bits of wood. It m
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I suspect the pre-fab is a better value for the homeowner in spite of costing more for the MATERIALS (the pre-fab window, or the wood and glass). Consider:
Old school windows: relatively cheap materials, significant labor. Overall higher cost for homeowner, big value add from the laborer.
Pre-fab: relatively expensive materials, not much labor. Overall cheaper for the homeowner, not much value add from the laborer.
Value add of labor = the value of the installed window - the value of the materials sitting on t
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Paperwork and bureaucracy, friend.
The government is extremely good at adding systemic inefficiencies. It's what it does best.
And I wonder how that figures in the measurement. If the building is idle waiting for a building inspection, the workers are all on another house beavering away. That shouldn't affect productivity (other than time wasted packing up lot A to move to lot B).
OTOH, code requiring seven outlets in a room when four might be adequate, I don't know how they account for that. Seven is marginally better and it takes a bit more time to install. Is that being more or less productive?
I'd love to read the actual paper. I
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Yes. We really should get rid of all those terrible regulations. If your new house falls apart, oh well, sucks to be you. Profit is the only thing that matters.
There are regulations and there are regulations. Specifying how many nails to use when framing? Maybe good, it's not something a homeowner can double check. Specifying how many electrical outlets a room requires? (Answer: way more than you'd expect--I'm required to have one within three feet of any corner in my kitchen, something like that.) Something I ought to be able to negotiate with the builder, and it's pretty easy for me to verify during a walkthrough.
My favorite regulation: when I bought my house, I
Materials cost (Score:2)
The cost of the input materials including the land itself have gone up while the portion going to workers is stagnant. That makes the value-add vs. materials lower.
We're not building the same things as 1970... (Score:3, Insightful)
Materials have changed, expertise has changed, inspections/permits/regulations have changed, waste disposal has changed, site preparation (from leveling, debris removal, drainage and sewage handling, etc.) etc have all changed from 1970.
While many can clearly point out that there have been improvements in many of these things over what we were doing in 1970, the end result is that they take longer and negatively affect productivity.
So they're comparing apples and oranges and trying to claim ridiculous things were the basis for the differences.
Re: (Score:2)
None of that is the actual issue though. Sure, those things happened. But construction companies have done zero evolution to stay up with technology and the new practices. They continue to do all the same shit the same way with more downtime while they "wait" for whatever. Despite whatever work they do, in general, construction companies are lazy, especially anyone higher than lowest level workers. Owner, foreman, site sup? All lazy as fuck.
Less skilled labor? (Score:5, Insightful)
My own observation from multiple projects over the last 20 years is that there is a serious shortage of highly-skilled, highly-experienced construction labor in residential construction. This shortage got even worse after the housing crisis, when many experienced workers left the industry for sectors they considered more stable (such as commercial construction).
The result is that you have projects being done by understaffed crews, with less experienced workers, suffering from high turnover. Problems at one sub can hold up other subs since everyone has to be coordinated together.
Wages have increased and job opportunity is high right now, but like many skilled blue-collar jobs there are still challenges finding eager, willing workers and retaining them long enough to obtain a high level of competence.
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I dunno, pretty much every construction site I go by in California is staffed by illegals and other assorted day laborers who just arrived with dubious legality from Central America.
Pretty much no one speaks a word of English with the exception of the foreman who's English is barely passable. Wages (if they are even declared to tax authorities) are commensurate.
It is no wonder highly experienced Americans no longer want to go into this field..
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It's a field that has seen absolutely zero innovation in like 100 years. All the technology we've advanced, and we still build buildings the same basic way. Sure, we have fancier tools and machines, but the actual construction of the buildings is the same. Zero innovation. We still use shitty wood, shitty nails, shitty insulation, shitty drywall, etc, etc.
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I've been on the design end of construction for 40+ years. The way buildings are built, especially the systems inside them, have advanced significantly in that 40 years.
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Hard to bullshit the metrics (Score:2)
It is rather obvious when framing, roofing, plumbing or electrical is not completed on time. There is no agile, there is very little in a way of accumulating tech debt (you have building inspector), and there is no ability to push for a crazy overtime as work is physical in nature and would lead to site safety violations.
Fewer undocumented workers? (Score:3)
I wonder if making it harder for undocumented workers to enter the country is part of this.
Building was "more efficient" when there were more "unofficial/off-the-books workers". Now there's fewer of them so more on-the-books workers need to be hired or less work gets done.
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No, it wasn't. It was cheaper and deadlier. The quality of construction was still garbage. You have to go back even earlier to find decent American construction.
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But efficiency isn't about quality or safety. Efficiency is strictly the amount of output for a given input.
I you have a building team with 5 actual employees and 5 undocumented workers (off the books, paid in cash), they can build more than a team of just 5 actual employees. In both cases, the denominator is 5 employees, but in the undocumented case, there is more output, so it's "more efficient" in a strictly capitalist sense.
That said, better enforcement of workplace safety rules will likely cause a de
Building regulations changed (Score:2)
Zero Quality (Score:2)
There is not a single American construction company in existence today that knows what they're doing, knows the best practices for it, and can do it in a timely manner. At best, you can get maybe one of those three qualities, but never more than one. America's construction sector is a joke - crappy materials, crappy skills.
Not just US and not just productivity (Score:2)
The quality of workmanship (and productivity) in the trades has dropped through the fucking floor. I'm in Canada. The only thing in the last 15 years that I had done that was done correctly was an HVAC installation in my "new" home. I had HVAC done in my last home and it cost me a total of $20,000 in mold damage over time. I had a toilet installed incorrectly that cost me $3000 in water damage. The painting in my condo (bought new) was abysmal. I have friends with absolute horror stories of kitchen renovat
Good workers aren't paid enough (Score:2)
What is the metric by which this is judged? (Score:2)
No mystery here. (Score:2)
Anyone who has worked in this field knows what the problem is. There is absolutely no need to be more productive or try to cut costs at all. The housing market is completely locked down, so you are mostly competing with existing houses, which are selling for a million dollars apeace. That's a lot more than a house would really cost to build if you were worried about the cost. So you can afford to keep a bunch of dead weight around, waste materials and hours, take a long lunch and bill it to the customer. It
Re: (Score:3)
I'm in construction, on the design end.
I assure you that Contractors have a vested interest in being efficient, but not necessarily their employees.
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At the risk of offending by being blunt, that is bullshit. I've been in the consulting engineering field in construction and most of our clients are architects. Contractors pounce on any mistakes and and file Change Order Requests, which, if approved, are priced at about twice what a competitive bid would be. The architect / engineer has to spen