Can American Housing Change?

Allison Arieff asks:

Is there anything made in America that’s less innovative than the single-family home? . . . [houses] continue to be built the same way they have for over a century, and usually not as well. Walls and windows are thin, materials cheap, design (and I use the term loosely) not well-considered. The building process is a protracted affair, taking far too long and creating embarrassing amounts of building waste (over 50 percent of all waste produced in the United States, in fact).

These are good questions. Housing is subject to huge crowd effects -- everybody wants a house that everybody else will like, both for social reasons and so they will be able to sell it easily. Home builders are afraid to do anything the least bit unusual, for fear that the heard will stampede in the other direction. As a result many Americans live in houses that are not well suited for them, and builders keep doing things in the same old way even where there are newer and better technologies. Steel frame houses are stronger than wood and cost no more; when assembled from prefabricated units they cost less. But somehow "prefabricated steel frame house" doesn't have the same warm and fuzzy feel of wood, so wood it is. Many people don't want big yards or two-car garages, they just buy them because they think everyone else wants them, or because that's the only kind of house available in the sort of neighborhood they're looking for. And so on.

But forces of stasis are so strong in housing that I don't expect change any time soon.