Students at a Brooklyn high school were kicked out of the classroom to make room for nearly 2,000 migrants who were evacuated from a controversial tent shelter due to a monster storm closed in on the Big Apple.
The city made the move amid concerns that a massive migrant tent at Floyd Bennett Field would collapse from torrential rains and gusting winds — packing them instead into the second-floor gym at James Madison High School five miles away.
“There’s 1,900 people getting thrown into my neighborhood, half a block from where I live and we don’t know who they are,” he said. “They’re not vetted. A lot of them have criminal records and backgrounds and we don’t even know.”
How would Americans “vet” migrants? What do we know about who did what in various foreign countries?
“They told us we had to get everything out by 5 [p.m.],” gym teacher Robyn Levy said outside the school. “They sent us the email at 6 in the morning. I don’t know when we’ll be able to back.
“What I want to know is why here?” Levy said. “Why not send them somewhere where students wouldn’t be disrupted, where students learning wouldn’t be disrupted?”
Why indeed? If there are only 1,900 migrants and the majority of New Yorkers wanted the city to be a sanctuary for the undocumented, why can’t 1,900 spare bedrooms be found among the righteous?
I was chatting with a software engineer who has been at Facebook (“Meta”) for about 10 years. His wife works an Excel-oriented analytics job for a company on the Peninsula. After their employers went 100-percent remote, they began spending more and more time in Hawaii. They grew to love it out there and now have purchased a family-sized house in Hawaii and are planning to move there full-time. Together they probably earn between $500,000 and $1 million/year. They’ll stop paying over $30,000 per year in property tax in California and start paying property tax on a multi-$million place in Hawaii. They’ll stop paying California income tax and begin paying income tax to Hawaii. What about schools? “The public schools in California are terrible,” said the Facebooker, “and the private schools are extremely expensive and in depressing facilities. The public schools in Hawaii might be even worse, but the private schools are cheap and they’re in beautiful natural settings between the beach and the mountains.”
Hawaii has one of the highest income tax burdens of any state for all income levels
… The state ranks between first and the third place for highest income tax burden for every income level. Hawaii has the highest tax burden for very high-income taxpayers making over $500,000 filing single and $1,000,000 filing jointly, highlighting the progressivity of the state’s brackets.
In addition to paying high taxes, they’ll incur higher-even-than-California prices for many significant items.
This is a move that never could have happened, however, if California hadn’t developed a culture of maximum coronapanic, which necessarily spawned a culture of remote work.
Maybe Shohei Ohtani moving in to collect $700 million will help Gavin Newsom? ABC says he’ll likely pay California tax on only 3 percent of the headline number:
The Dodgers will pay Ohtani $20 million over the next decade, when the baseball star will be hitting and, health permitting, pitching for the National League powerhouse.
It’s the decade after that when the Dodgers will really start to pay Ohtani — $68 million per year from 2034-43. Ohtani will turn 40 in 2034, an age when most Major League Baseball players have retired. By then, Ohtani could stop playing baseball and choose not to live in California, potentially avoiding for the bulk of his salary the state’s 13.3% income tax and 1.1% payroll tax for State Disability Insurance.
With 97% of Ohtani’s Dodgers income deferred, it means California — where there is an estimated $68 billion budget deficit this year — will have to wait at least a decade before it can collect taxes on the bulk of his salary, if it can collect at all. California could collect taxes from Ohtani’s significant endorsement deals, assuming Ohtani is a California resident.
Loosely related, one of my favorite Hawaii snapshots, captured on 6×6 cm film with a Rollei.
(I personally wouldn’t want to live in Hawaii. The topography makes it mostly impossible to build standard walkable/bikeable towns and cities with a grid of roads. The typical Hawaiian island is a strip of development on a ring road and that ring road has become extremely congested. For those who love Asia, Hawaii seems like it might be a reasonable choice, but it is a 9-hour flight to Tokyo and 11 hours to Korea. You’re not going to go to Asia for a long weekend.)
Related:
“The wealthiest Californians are fleeing the state. Why that’s very bad news for the economy” (LA Times, December 2023): “… in the years 2015-16, an individual or couple who had moved from California to Texas reported an average income of $78,000, about the same as Texans who relocated to California. But by 2020-21, California transplants in Texas reported an average income of about $137,000, while tax returns from former Texans who moved to California showed an average income of $75,000. The income gap between those coming into California and those going out is even bigger when it comes to Florida, which, as far away as it is, has become a top five destination for emigrating Californians.”
More than two years ago, lawmakers approved billions of dollars [at least $5 billion] to build out a national electric vehicle charging network in the hopes of encouraging more drivers to switch to cleaner cars. The money, included in the bipartisan infrastructure law, was intended to help assure drivers they could reliably travel longer distances without running out of power.
But a robust federal charging network is still years away. Only two states — Ohio and New York — have opened any charging stations so far.
Central planners also love asylum-seekers and other immigrants without educational credentials. One popular job for low-skill immigrants is working in a food truck.
Our HOA sometimes hires a food truck for events on the common grass field. The sound of the truck’s generator is clearly audible and it would be much nicer if the truck were powered from a big EV battery.
What if the central planners in Washington, D.C. could be convinced to ladle out the taxpayer cash to a food truck EV startup?
What are the engineering requirements? A Google search shows that 5,000 watts (roughly 44 amps at 115V) is a good ballpark for the maximum draw of a typical food truck. Maybe the average load would be 2,500 watts and that needs to be supported for at least 6 hours, which implies a 15,000 watt-hour battery (15 kWh). The standard Tesla Cybertruck has a 123 kWh battery, so that should get the food truck to the site, run for two shifts if necessary, and get the food truck home. (The Ford F150 comes in 98 and 131 kWh “usable capacity” versions.)
Elon Musk simultaneously believes that (1) civilization will collapse because of a declining birth rate in the West, and (2) we’re entering a glorious age of humanoid robots.
In early 2021, Musk began mentioning at his executive meetings that Tesla should get serious about building a robot, and at one point he played for them a video of the impressive ones that Boston Dynamics were designing. “Humanoid robots are going to happen, like it or not,” he said, “and we should do it so we can guide it in a good direction.” The more he talked about it, the more excited he got. “This has the potential to be the far biggest thing we ever do, even bigger than a self-driving car,” he told his chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen.
Musk gave the specs: the robot should be about five-foot-eight, with an elfish and androgenous look so it “doesn’t feel like it could or would want to hurt you.” Thus was born Optimus, a humanoid robot to be made by the Tesla teams working on self-driving cars. Musk decided that it should be announced at an event called “AI Day,” which he scheduled for Tesla’s Palo Alto headquarters on August 19, 2021.
It was not a very polished event. The sixteen presenters were all male. The only woman was the actress who dressed up as the robot, and she didn’t do any fun hat-and-cane dance routines. There were no acrobatics. But in his slightly stuttering monotone, Musk was able to connect Optimus to Tesla’s plans for self-driving cars and the Dojo supercomputer. Optimus, he said, would learn to perform tasks without needing line-by-line instructions. Like a human, it would teach itself by observing. That would transform not only our economy, he said, but the way we live.
Even as he envisioned futuristic scenarios, Musk focused on making Optimus a business. By June 2022, the team had completed a simulation of robots carrying boxes around a factory. He liked the fact that, as he put it, “our robots are going to work harder than humans work.” He came to believe that Optimus would become a main driver of Tesla profits. “The Optimus humanoid robot,” he told analysts, “has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business.”
I can’t understand how these thoughts are consistent. If human population were to slide back towards 4 billion or 2 billion, there might be a short-term labor shortage, but wouldn’t that labor shortage be solved by a working humanoid robot?
I think that Musk is completely wrong about civilization collapse even without the robot angle, incidentally. The median age in Japan is 49. People don’t say that’s a collapsed civilization compared to Gaza, where the median age is 18. The worldwide median age is about 30. There is no realistic scenario, as far as I’m aware, in which the median age of the world population ever exceeds Japan’s current median age. Therefore, Japan represents a worst-case scenario.
How bad is Japan doing? Not any worse than the typical advanced economy, says this tweet:
An astonishing paper this week finds that population explains virtually all of the difference in GDP growth in advanced economies over the last 30 years! “From 1998 to 2019, Japan has grown slightly faster than the U.S. in terms of per working-age adult.”
What drives population growth? For the Palestinians, the world’s most successful people demographically, it seems to be the UNRWA guarantees of food, health care, education, and other essentials, all funded by the US and EU taxpayers. A Palestinian can have 10 children, not work, and never worry that one will go hungry so long as there are taxpayers in Illinois and Germany. What about for economies that don’t receive guaranteed aid from foreigners?
This article on “The Baby Boom” by Arctotherium looks at a falling birth rate at the beginning of the 20th century followed by the familiar post-WWII baby boom (1946-1964; I was born in 1963). Wikipedia points out that our baby boom coincided with a marriage boom, but doesn’t offer a single agreed-on explanation for why the marriage boom occurred. Arctotherium points out that a baby bust is not an inevitable result of wealth:
The Baby Boom took place in what were, at the time, the wealthiest, most technologically advanced, longest lived, most urban, most educated, most individualist, and most scientifically sophisticated societies in human history, by a wide margin. And it took place during a time when all of these metrics (except maybe individualism) were very rapidly improving.
Consistently with Wikipedia, Arctotherium highlights the marriage boom and adds a theory for the cause:
So what caused this marriage boom? The answer appears to be a rise in young men’s status compared to young women’s. The marriage boom can be explained almost entirely by a combination of female labor force participation (down), young male wages (up), and male unemployment (down).
Wages are not the only way to measure status. After briefly reaching parity at the zenith of first wave feminism, young men during the Baby Boom again greatly exceeded their female counterparts in educational attainment.
The mechanism here is clear: young women want money and status, young men have relatively more money and status, women can get men’s money and status by marrying them. Marriage leads to babies, and thus the Baby Boom.
What caused the baby boom to end with a baby bust? A decline in marriage. Women didn’t have to get married to get money and status.
Affirmative Action in favor of women is common across the Boom countries, as is disproportionate female employment in state-created regulatory jobs such as HR. There are also thousands of organizations explicitly dedicated to promoting women’s careers at the expense of men’s, and almost none of the converse. These combine to artificially raise women’s wages above the market rate, and lower men’s.
But we don’t just have wages to consider, we also have taxes and transfers. Thanks to progressive taxation, men pay the vast majority of taxes while women receive the vast majority of benefits. Since married men are the most productive, while single women are the poorest (on a per-household basis), this is predominantly a transfer from married men to single women. This makes marriage less attractive to women; they can get men’s money for free, courtesy of the government, without having to give anything in return. The state serves as a surrogate husband.
Arctotherium has some data from New Zealand, noting “The welfare state has done to marriage what the Soviet Union did to agriculture: effectively collectivized it, with the corresponding horrendous set of incentives for individual men and women”:
But young men’s vs young women’s economic status is not the only factor determining marriage rates. It fully explains the boom, but not the bust. The explanation lies in the fact that second wave feminism thoroughly redefined marriage. It shifted from a patriarchal institution in which husbands had social (and some legal, though this was mostly dismantled by first wave feminism) power over their wives to one in which wives had effective legal power over the husbands (through the mechanisms of feminist family courts, greatly expanded definitions of abuse, and the replacement of the marriage model of the family with the child support model), and from a lifelong contract to one dissolvable at will (though the institution of no-fault divorce). In JD Unwin’s terms, we shift from a regime of absolute monogamy to one of modified monogamy. This had obvious and immediate consequences on marriage rates.
The mechanism through which no-fault divorce reduces marriage rates is simple. No-fault divorce eliminates the promise of lifelong commitment, greatly reducing the benefits of marriage for both parties. The other partner can bail at any time, for any reason. This particularly increases the costs for men through the mechanism of family courts (as divorce usually means he loses his assets, income, and children).
Arctotherium found an interesting data set on marital happiness:
Despite the increase in divorce rates, people aren’t happier in the marriages that have survived.
If Arctotherium is correct, the U.S. will never have a high birth rate again because marriage will never be attractive again. (The article has some pipe dream proposals for radically overhauling our society, e.g., “Roll back the welfare and pension state and lower income taxes.” It is safe to assume that none of these will ever happen and, therefore, marriage will never make the kind of sense for a young woman that it did from 1946-1964.)
Circling back to Elon Musk, what would be so bad about the U.S. population stagnating at 336 million or declining to 200 million (the 1970 level), especially if we had robots to help out the oldsters with domestic tasks?
Related… miscellaneous quotes from Michel Houellebecq’s novels (not in quote style for better readability):
A bachelor who breathes his last at the age of sixty-four is hardly the stuff of tragedy,
I thought about Annelise’s life—and the life of every Western woman. In the morning she probably blow-dried her hair, then she thought about what to wear, as befitted her professional status, whether “stylish” or “sexy,” most likely “stylish” in her case. Either way, it was a complex calculation, and it must have taken her a while to get ready before dropping the kids off at day care, then she spent the day e-mailing, on the phone, in various meetings, and once she got home, around nine, exhausted (Bruno was the one who picked the kids up, who made them dinner—he had the hours of a civil servant), she’d collapse, get into a sweatshirt and yoga pants, and that’s how she’d greet her lord and master, and some part of him must have known—had to have known—that he was fucked, and some part of her must have known that she was fucked, and that things wouldn’t get better over the years. The children would get bigger, the demands at work would increase, as if automatically, not to mention the sagging of the flesh.
Bruno and Annelise must be divorced by now. That’s how it goes nowadays. A century ago, in Huysmans’s time, they would have stayed together, and maybe they wouldn’t have been so unhappy after all.
my body was the seat of various painful afflictions—headaches, rashes, toothaches, hemorrhoids—that followed one after another, without interruption, and almost never left me in peace—and I was only forty-four! What would it be like when I was fifty, sixty, older? I’d be no more than a jumble of organs in slow decomposition, my life an unending torment, grim, joyless, and mean.
On 14 December 1967 the government passed the Neuwirth Act on contraception at its first reading. Although not yet paid for by social security, the pill would now be freely available in pharmacies. It was this which offered a whole section of society access to the sexual revolution, which until then had been reserved for professionals, artists and senior management—and some small businessmen. It is interesting to note that the “sexual revolution” was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word “household” suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.
Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules
I didn’t notice this until last summer, but the Biden administration created a medal to commemorate the victory of truth and goodness over deplorability and evil:
Congress, especially the Democrats therein, actually authorized the medal, but the design specifics were left to the Biden administration and the choice of selling medals to the general public was left to Biden’s Secretary of the Treasury.
Readers: Which of you paid $160 to display a 3-inch version of this medal in your own home?
We last encountered Andrew Stephens, superintendent of a high school in a suburb of Boston assuming that all Muslims affiliated with the school supported the October 7 attacks on civilians in Israel. See The recent flare-up in Israel, explained by Massachusetts public school principal for the email in which “Palestine” is recognized as a nation (would that be a positive for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and their supporters? If Gaza were a standard country, the IDF could simply flatten it as the US/UK did to Germany and Japan, without trying to sort out each person’s individual level of affiliation with the government in power and the war effort.)
Something more upsetting than the deaths of October 7 has now occurred, however, and I have a new email to share:
Dear [Lincoln-Sudbury High School] Students and Families:
I am writing to let you know that, today in the L-S Library, some students were online and observed by other students to be looking at and discussing airsoft guns. This created understandable feelings of fear and anxiety for some students and staff. I am writing to reassure our community that we investigated and followed all appropriate safety measures in conjunction with the Sudbury Police. The students in question were not in possession of airsoft guns or any other device that either is, or resembles, a firearm or weapon. As a result of our investigation and consultation with the Sudbury Police, we do not have any ongoing safety concerns at this time.
Thank you, Andrew Stephens, LS Superintendent/Principal
The police were called to the scene of some kids looking at a web page with a picture of an Airsoft product that is part of a “game” (Wikipedia).
Question for readers.. the Wikipedia page says that compressed air isn’t used:
The name “soft air” referred to the compressed Freon-silicone oil mixture (later replaced by a propane-silicone oil mixture known as “Green Gas”) that was used as a propellant gas, which was significantly weaker than the cannistered CO2 used in proper airguns (pellet guns and BB guns).
If a low pressure compressed gas is required, why wasn’t simple air used, perhaps with a regulator? What was the advantage of using these exotic gases?
It looks like some of the latest Airsoft guns actually do use compressed air that is compressed on-demand with battery power. Explained by a retailer:
Contemporary electric airsoft guns use a mechanical system inside, the gearbox contains three gears and a motor that allows the transfer of electrical energy into mechanical energy. It’s a simple process that begins with a trigger pull, then the trigger contacts close thus completing the electric circuit from battery to motor. After the motor draws enough energy it will begin spinning and engage the first (bevel) gear. The bevel gear is blocked by an anti-reversal latch, so it doesn’t reverse. This bevel gear then engages with the second (spur) gear, which subsequently engages the third (sector) gear.
Once the sector gear makes contact with the piston, it pulls it back in order to compress the spring. Meanwhile, a tiny nub on the sector gear drags the tappet plate back which consequently also retracts the air nozzle towards the cylinder. With this motion set, it allows the next BB to feed up into the hop-up chamber. The tappet plate will return to its original position which then chambers the BB. With the piston released by the sector gear, a spring shoots back launching the piston through a cylinder to force pressured air out. The BB is launched out, mechanical energy which suddenly becomes pneumatic energy.
A society’s resources are finite. What is spent on military activities cannot be spent on food, health care, education, etc. Arabs declared war on Israel 75 years ago, rejecting the UN Partition Plan and vowing to kill or expel all of the Jews. Palestinians are able to keep this old war going because US and EU taxpayers, through UNRWA, fund all of the basic needs that motivate most people worldwide to work rather than wage war.
I’m wondering if the same dynamic is at work in Yemen. Let’s compare France, for example, one of the donor countries, to Yemen in terms of population growth:
Yemenis are far more successful demographically, it seems, than the French. Nonetheless, absent transfers of funds from French workers to various UN and NGO programs operating in Yemen, the Yemenis would have to devote a lot of time, money, and effort into feeding themselves and all of their kids. If the UN steps in to feed Yemenis, however, Yemenis can look around and find other stuff to do with what are now surplus resources.
People in Yemen, freed from the need to work for food, can demonstrate all day every day:
The Yemenis have been attacking ships in the Red Sea, which has prompted the U.S. to park a naval force in the area. They’re mobilizing ground troops as well:
If we assume that money is fungible, the countries now in a fight with Yemen are paying for both sides of the fight. Every person in Yemen who skips work to demonstrate was bankrolled by the US/EU. Every weapon in every image was purchased with US/EU money.
Today, I am announcing our contribution of more than $444 million, exemplifying the continued generosity of the people of the United States for the people of Yemen. As one of the largest donors, this brings our total to the humanitarian response in Yemen to over $5.4 billion since the conflict began.
Yemen supposedly was spending about $1.7 billion per year on its military in pre-Biden money back before the war over the best way to practice the Religion of Peace. Thus, $5.4 billion over time should fund quite a significant military effort. Every dollar that the U.S. sent to Yemen for food was a dollar freed up for the Yemenis to buy guns, ammo, missiles, drones, etc. and those weapons shouldn’t have cost more than $5.4 billion.
Separately, with today’s population being more than 6X what it was in 1950, with no additional agricultural land or resources added, the Giant Brains (TM) of the United Nations say that the struggle to make ends meet is due to climate:
It’s not that 33 million humans are now trying to live in a land that can produce enough food for 5 million (see “Imported food constitutes 83% of the daily calories’ intake of Yemenis.” (reliefweb.int)). it is not that those tens of millions of people have been fighting each other over the issue of what form of Islam is best (the civil war). It is atmospheric CO2 that is making life tough for Yemenis.
The last part is my favorite. Involvement with academic fraud is intolerable in an administrator, but acceptable for an active researcher and teacher. (Note that CNN implies in the headline that he will be gone (“resigned” from Stanford) when, in fact, he is merely moving offices.)
(Unlike Claudine GPT, Prof. Tessier-Lavigne may not have personally violated any rule. It may have been co-authors who manipulated data (Wikipedia).)
She won’t be leading the Crimson, but green shouldn’t be a problem.
Outgoing Harvard University president Claudine Gay will still likely earn nearly $900,000 a year despite being forced to resign her position as the school’s top administrator.
Political science professor Gay — who stepped down amid a tempest of allegations that she did not do enough to combat antisemitism and academic plagiarism Tuesday — will return to a position on the Cambridge, Mass., school’s faculty.
Prior to being named president just six months ago, Gay earned $879,079 as a faculty of arts and sciences dean in 2021 and $824,068 in 2020, according to records published by the university.
Her new position was not specified Tuesday, but she is expected to receive a salary comparable to what she previously received — if not higher.
Claudine Gay is 53. If we assume that $880,000 in salary translates to $1 million per year including benefits, the Comparative Victimhood scholar could get approximately $50 million before she dies. (No reason to retire since tenure trumps mental infirmity.) Her last book was a popular hit:
O.J. Simpson’s publisher has announced that it will be handling Gay’s next work: If I Did Research.
The latest tweet is similarly locked down against vox populi:
Harvard does not have to pay taxes on its $60 billion hoard (it was $50 billion in 2022, so I’m adjusting for inflation). The university doesn’t have to pay sales tax on stuff that it buys, nor real estate taxes on the land that it uses for nominally academic purposes (it does make a voluntary contribution to Cambridge). Harvard receives direct infusions of taxpayer cash via student loan subsidies, tuition grants, and research grants. But the school doesn’t want to hear from the chumps who pay for the federal and state infrastructure in which it sits.
Claudine Gay recently broke her silence to email “Members of the Harvard Community”. She is not resigning because she did anything wrong, but because it will be better for Harvard:
… after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.
Those who objected to her tight control of speech on campus with the single exception of anti-Jewish/Israel speech were motivated primarily by racism:
Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.
Nobody hates hate and plagiarism more than Prof. Gay! Ergo, anyone who is against this scholar and leader is a racist. The board members (“Fellows of Harvard College”) agree. They simultaneously spammed out a message condemning “racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls”.
Speaking of racism, the Affirmative Action/DEI religion says that U.S. society should have quotas for Black Americans whose ancestors lived through slavery and then Jim Crow. Descendants of victims of these pre-Eisenhower systems (it was Eisenhower who engineered the desegregation of schools) are entitled to preference in college admissions, government contracting, executive jobs, etc. Claudine Gay’s parents, however, are from Haiti (Wikipedia). Her retention as Harvard president was supported by Barack Obama, whose father was an elite Kenyan and whose mother was white, yet Obama was able to take advantages of quotas intended for descendants of slaves. Wouldn’t it make more sense for Black Americans to be angry with this pair of quota-stealers than to embrace them as fellow victims of Systemic Everything?
From a chat group with some of my friends who are still up in the Boston suburbs:
[9th grader] lost points on a grammar test today because she capitalized Black and also White when referring to groups of people. Her teacher said that only Black should be capitalized, as that is an identity – but white is just a color and doesn’t refer to a cohesive group of people.
Also:
My friend wrote a letter to the head of the private school saying they should take down the BLM-logo mural because they endorse the Palestinian attack. After much pressure, she agreed to replace it with a general message of inclusion without the BLM logo. This is what it was replaced with:
Loyal readers may recall that one of my pet obsessions is why the manufacturing techniques that have made cars and widgets cheaper can’t be applied to housing. Why can’t, at least, the house have plug-in bathrooms, kitchens, and utility rooms so that all of these items can be refreshed cheaply with factory-built rooms after 20 years?
A side effect of our failure to come up with a way to build houses at a lower cost is the “affordable housing crisis” that advocates for population growth via low-skill immigration like to decry (see Immigration and rent are both at all-time highs).
In 1969, the federal government announced that it would hand out millions of dollars in subsidies to companies willing to try something new: build houses in factories.
It didn’t work. Big companies, including Alcoa and General Electric, designed new kinds of houses, and roughly 25,000 rolled out of factories over the following decade. But none of the new home builders long survived the end of federal subsidies in the mid-1970s.
Last year, only 2 percent of new single-family homes in the United States were built in factories. Two decades into the 21st century, nearly all U.S. homes are still built the old-fashioned way: one at a time, by hand. Completing a house took an average of 8.3 months in 2022, a month longer than it took to build a house of the same size back in 1971.
As with most innovations, the central planners believe that central planning (“government help”) is necessary:
The tantalizing potential of factory-built housing, also known as modular housing, continues to attract investors and entrepreneurs, including a start-up called Fading West that opened a factory in 2021 in the Colorado mountain town of Buena Vista. But Fading West, and similar start-ups in other parts of the country, need government help to drive a significant shift from handmade housing to factories. This time, there is reason to think it could work.
How much can be saved?
Fading West says houses from its factory can be completed in as little as half the time and at as little as 80 percent of the cost of equivalent handmade homes, in part because the site can be prepared while the structure is built in the factory. A 2017 analysis by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, found similar savings for the construction of three- to five-story apartment buildings using modular components.
If we adjust for the inevitable startup hype factor… the 80 percent is probably 115 percent of what a tract house developer spends when building 25-100 houses at a time and 95 percent of what it would cost to build one house via the traditional method.
What do people who don’t get government money for their factory-built house startup say?
Factory home builders have struggled to streamline construction. [Brian Potter, a senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, a nonpartisan think tank focused on technological innovation] spent several years looking for ways to make housing construction more efficient, an effort he narrated on a fascinating blog, before concluding that significant progress wasn’t likely. “Almost any idea that you can think of for a way to build a single-family home cheaper has basically been tried, and there was probably a company that went bankrupt trying to do it,” Mr. Potter told me.
The depressing conclusion: If you believe in fairy tales, single-family houses could potentially come down in price by 15 percent (the land underneath won’t be reduced in cost by 20%!) as an absolute outer limit. If the American population is to grow, therefore, people are going to live in smaller and crummier houses unless they develop valuable work skills.
