Cheaper, Faster, Better Housing

The year is 2026 and there's angry talk of repealing old free-trade deals as politicians claim jobs are being destroyed by foreign competition. That is, Chinese and Indian construction companies are going bankrupt in their thousands against invading low-cost companies from the United States.

Due to unexpectedly enlightened, pro-business leadership, good old American grit and ingenuity, and a massive increase in H1B visas for foreign PhDs, companies that were merely startups 5 year prior are now trillion-dollar concerns and are revolutionizing the construction business with radically high-tech construction methods driving durability up, quality up, and prices way way down.

The revolution is driven by a set of dual technological breakthroughs, respectively in industrial robotics, with autonomous heavy-duty mobile industrial plant assemblers replacing 95% of construction labor, and in materials science, with a relatively cheap and reliable way to build nonflamable high-strength long fibers in vast quantities, with a color range dialable from transparent through the entire rainbow. Pipes and even powerlines can be weaved in, as it were, during the automated construction process.

The story is from the perspective of an American business-man on Indian origin in India, where he's dealing with the regulation Raj and hostile construction workers and companies. He's a salesman, not an engineer, but it would help the story to make him sound like he knows a bit about what he's talking about.

Let's take a standard single-family home (let's say a tad below today's U.S. median, 2200 sq. ft space ~ 200 sq. meters).

• How cheap would it have to be to build to drive low-cost labor using standard materials (cement, bamboo, whatever) out of business? (Answers may ignore the cost of land if it makes it easier, just focus the build)
• How cheap could it conceivably get? As in, is it plausible to have a house that size cost the manufacturer \$100, \$1,000 or \$10,000 to build from the ground up?

Note: To the untrained eye, it might look like there are 2 questions above, but I actually care about the entepreneur's profit margin, so it's really just one question...

posted over 8 years ago

Serban Tanasa‭

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