> The project, initially approved by the city in 2010 as a hotel, then re-approved in 2015 as studio apartments, will be leased to UC Berkeley for graduate student housing
4 days of box stacking. 8 years of permitting. Multi-unit projects like this which require discretionary permits and approvals are too slow of a response for the housing crisis. California state senators enacted laws in 2017 (SB 1069 and AB 2299) which allow Accessory Dwelling Units to be built in backyards of single family homes. They're full living units with kitchens and bathrooms, and the state law requires that cities approve them strictly based on zoning within 120 days of an application being submitted.
Problem: Almost every SFH has an easement in the rear of the lot. And cities like Mountain View are using that as the basis for denying ADU applications.
If there’s telephone wires (not even a pole) then there’s an easement.
Four days to assemble, how many days did it take to build, in China?
What about the energy loss in transport? How much carbon was generated by this project versus if it had been built with modernist techniques. More interesting if had been been built with pre 20th century techniques.
Awesome video. That's as pretty as a ballet to me. I've built a 14x9 meter 3 story high workshop attached to a house with a very small crew and I can totally relate to all the work that is being done there. That is most likely not the first barn that crew put together.
Days to assemble in China is not as long as you would think. Probably less than a month to build if I had to guess. Once you establish the first prototype others don't take as long. Most of the time went into R&D. It really depends how far back you want to go with sourcing material components. You arent going to make your own steel beams from pigiron.
Energy loss in transport can be calculated by the amount of containers needed overseas for building construction materials. I would guess about 3 or 4 , 45' or 53' high cube containers in raw materials. I could not find good estimates on volume of materials needed for this type of building right away.
Carbon footprint is probably not as crazy as you would assume. Many parts are sourced overseas and end up in home depot etc. Adding logistics warehouse and labor to manage this adds significantly higher carbon footprint overall than just a one time shipment.
>Watch the Amish build a complex barn in ten hours
But that's made out of wood!
>Four days to assemble, how many days did it take to build, in China?
Depends if they were shipping complete panels with infill, hollow panels, or just precut frame parts, but in all cases it should still be economical to bring stuff across the pacific.
Good point, it would fare better in an earthquake.
> Some 1,400 years ago, tall wood-framed pagodas in Japan were built to 19 stories tall. In spite of the area’s high seismic activity – including the 6.8 magnitude Hyogo-ken Nambu earthquake in 1995 that caused widespread damage – these structures still stand today.
Now, I don't know if actually would fare better than a steel frame in an earthquake (which this building is very close a fault line), but the Japanese seemed to have figured out how to do it a long time ago. I don't know because I am not even close to experienced with wood structures over 3 stories.
In japan they build pre fabricated building for years, made from steel or concrete slabs. Those building are pretty solid but in Japan they tend to destroy them after a while and build new ones instead anyway.
I feel like you may want to go a little further back than the 20th century. There is a large time span in there that was the single most dirty and unhealthy time in human history which started off our incredible production of carbon and subsequent impact on climate change.
I don't know if they bought this stuff from the Broad Group[1] in China but this sort of prefab is catching on. They were never successful at building their "sky city"[2] which got them a lot of publicity (perhaps the intent). If it was possible to build it suggests some interesting things like a single sky city would be possible to house the entire bay area homeless population, assuming you could fill each living space to its capacity, plus a hospital, plus mental health and drug treatment centers, plus kitchens and shops in one building. It starts looking like Silverberg's arcologies.
But I haven't seen any reports on how maintainable these structures are once built. I presume that Berkeley will be doing that as part of their program.
You know what would have way more impact on housing affordability? Build it using traditional construction methods but make it 10 stories instead of 4 stories.
But the city will find some reason why that's absolutely unacceptable. Then they will go on to talk about how this is just fundamentally a difficult problem that they haven't found a solution for, but rest assured they are still looking for ways to solve it.
There is a practical aspect to building height. Berkeley is on an earthquake fault line, and buildings in the 6-15 storey range have a natural resonance that tends to match the frequency of earthquake waves.
I'm having difficulty finding references to this, so maybe it's not as big a deal as I thought?
The breakpoints have more to do with other parts of building codes. Wood framing is only strong enough to support three floors (unless you use cross laminated timber, which is a relatively new construction technology). Furthermore there are increasing requirements for fire suppression and accessibility as you add height. The breakpoints are basically either 2-floor duplex through quadplex that don't need elevators, or putting three floors of wood-framed apartments over a concrete or steel podium that contains commercial space and parking. Podium construction basically explains why so many 4 and 5 floor buildings get put up - it's significantly cheaper than the more expensive material required to make stuff strong enough for taller buildings.
Depends on the location. In the Bay Area a large portion of the cost is having your capital tied up for like 5+ years while trying to get your project approved.
That's not a real excuse. Tokyo is crisscrossed with fault-lines and they manage to build to quake code --the proof being all the healthy buildings despite frequent quakes.
I'm impressed Berkeley went to all the trouble of designing, approving and erecting an entire dormitory without ever seeing the point - or maybe while trying not to.
Of course, how else would they feed their families and why would they put their capital at risk if there is no possible profit? The question you should be asking is "why is the regulator slowing down the housing market?" - because the profit margin would be much lower if they weren't, as more competition would be allowed to grow and it's a well-known fact that competition leads to better services for lower prices.
Thing with prefab is it's been tried many times before, and hasn't succeeded. Why? Most companies take traditional construction methods, and simply move them into a factory where there's cheaper labor. But then the assembly process and on-site finish work is laborious and expensive (in this case, 70%+ of costs). For prefab to succeed, there needs to be a ground up redesign of the entire building process, from design and engineering to manufacturing and assembly, with software at the core to enable a system that's scalable and allows for different designs across numerous projects, and with the actual building to be made of parts that truly click together like legos. YC F3 company Cover (i'm a founder) is doing this.
I've been involved in modular buildings in the past and one area that seems to end up informing design choices (in a negative way) is the size of elements that can be readily transported from a central facility to a site. Having bays of modules related to wagon width often, and regular joints/seams seems to end up driving basic ideas like wall loactions and floorplate thicknesses. Have you evolved much in this aspect?
I thought the biggest issue with prefab was lack of demand largely from bad reputation owing to aesthetic or safety concerns - trailers are considered hideous and are often dangerous given lack of sufficient storm anchoring. They were stuck in the role not of a legitimate alternative like siding instead of plaster but 'something to be replaced with a real building as soon as feasible'.
Some of that may be human senses of aesthetics and a sense of uncanny valley with repeats. Just look at video game level generation and the moves to 3D. Preassembled components added more complexity and sense of structure but insufficient amounts of them made the area feel samey and copy pasted.
I'm curious as to how software could be the core instead of merely an optional but useful tool akin to typical usage of CAD for housing schematics.
In other news, $2100+ for a small unit is viewed as 'affordable' for grad students to UC Berkeley administrators. I know there's a rent crisis out that neck of the woods, but that's some quality lack of perspective.
It’s interesting that the contractor had to pay a $500k fee to Berkeley for an affordable housing trust. While I applaud the spirit of such a thing, it seems like the last thing you want to do in a housing crisis is make building more expensive. Perhaps if the contractor didn’t have to pay such a high fee just to build the place, they could offer better prices to the tenants.
Can anyone comment on the work done by that housing trust?
It’s illegal to sleep in an office. That legislation, like many others, was put in place to protect renters and workers but now ends up hurting them instead
In other words, that was the rhetoric the council used to clear their conscience while helping their developer friends fill vacancies. It makes sense if you don’t think about it.
I mean that's kind of what a law is. It stipulates things for a restricted set of circumstances. Should laws be continually refined to better define the circumstances? Of course. But if you rule by loophole you have created a sieve of a boat for a social structure.
Laws are supposed to be written in such a way as to communicate their intent. It's already there, it's just in terse, technical language. The problem with spelling out intent is it creates a huge attack surface to get a law thrown out or circumvented. It is sort of like trying to program using natural language. People understand better but it functions worse.
The way we fight this in programming is comments and documentation. Perhaps we need something similar for laws? I see the Federalist Papers mentioned quite often in constitutional law; are there other bodies of debate and paper that provide similar justification around other laws? There might also be room for "non-binding" clauses when writing the law.
Depending on the governing body, there is a process of comment and redaction before a law is adopted which is recorded and can be used to make a case. It serves such a purpose.
You are mixing two concepts here, perhaps unintentionally. The supreme court has a standards document against which it evaluates the laws (the constitution, whether it is state (SCOC) or country (SCOTUS)). I have not read a decision where they evaluate "what the legislature 'meant'" when they make their rulings, although they do sometimes comment on that.
The Supreme Court absolutely interprets the meaning of federal law passed by the legislature. Whether they do it by appeal to authorial intent or something else is a matter of jurisprudential philosophy.
Our two main political parties constantly fight to appoint their preferred candidate to the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court were just following some apolitical procedure of interpretation, none of that would be necessary.
Even then, wouldn't it have been more about case law defining what could be be feasibly prosecuted rather than refining what the law actually says?
If so, it's better, nut still not ideal. It results in information asymmetry for those that don't have a law degree or experience with the system, or can't afford to hire someone who can. That is, law enforcement can use the letter of the law to take actions that aren't enforceable if challenged, but it still requires a challenge be mounted.
If you are fine with roommates, there are plenty of sub 1k options in and around the area. El Cerrito and Richmond aren't too far away and generally cheaper than Berkeley.
Exactly. Even in decent areas of Oakland you can find sub 1k rent with a roommate. Currently live in an apartment that's a 5 minute walk away from a BART station in Oakland and pay 1800/month for a 1 bedroom that I split. Takes me 35 minutes to get to work in the SF Financial District.
While housing is very expensive here (especially if you have family), there are definitely ways to find cheap housing.
Anecdotally I know people who are renting rooms out of their homes in San Leandro/Hayward for $750/month.
In America, all it takes is a developer not making their money back (i.e. not wanting to be a “risk-taker” anymore) and these sorts of laws magically disappear.
Indeed, however, the number is usually very reasonable, usually 5+, its not gonna stop a grad student from saving money on rent.
Though the court case that upheld these laws as constitutional, Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, the zoning law was extreme at limiting only two unrelated persons - which is extreme.
It's zoning ordinances and like any zoning ordinance its aimed at controlling or maintaining the character of the neighborhood, preventing frat houses and group homes in certain neighborhoods, etc. If parking for one family is expected and 8 students take up the whole block, etc. It's limited to unrelated persons because "family status" is a protected class under housing law.
Different houses on the same street can be zoned differently. My house is zoned "single family" but two houses down is zoned "boarding house."
That's the sad reality of bay area housing in 2018. However, if they keep building enough units like these, prices should eventually become less insane.
While strictly better than a two story or a one story single family home I don't think that they'd be sufficient for solving the bay area housing issue.
Not in our lifetimes. Any American not retired or who doesn’t own a home most likely wants to move to the Bay Area, and most likely because there are jobs. The only reason they don’t is the rent rates.
> Any American not retired or who doesn’t own a home most likely wants to move to the Bay Area
Huh? Is this supposed to be serious? I know plenty of Americans who don't own a home and aren't retired. No more than a few percent of whom want to move to the Bay Area.
I share 1BR for $2000 about 2 miles from this location (away from campus). It has a great yard but is old and has rats/squirrels in the walls. Rent is crazy here.
This was the normal case with most college students in the U.S. Dormitory rooms when I was in university (1980s) were typically a single room with two twin beds, two desks, and maybe a private bathroom, but often a bath shared with another room, or sometimes a large common bath for the whole floor. At my school, they were all same-sex dorms, but at other schools that was beginning to change. I was fortunate enough to have good roommates, but it was a struggle for other people I knew. This was an accepted part of college/university life. Single-occupancy rooms were rare and expensive. Some students lived in off-campus apartments (flats) or rental houses, but even in those situation it was not uncommon to similarly double-up in bedrooms.
Today, on-campus housing is often much nicer than what was available in my day, but it's also more expensive, contributing to the rising cost of higher-education in the United States. The education I received would not have been affordable to me then at today's prices, even accounting for inflation. Also, I'm grateful for the friendships I made with my roommates. We in the United States now live such isolated lives, I am actually glad I was forced to live with someone else, even with all the difficulties, during those four years of my life.
Literally every freshman dorm in the US has this arrangement, not uncommon, not bizarre, it's even considered part of the "college experience."
You do that in situations where that's all you can afford, like when you are a student.
My sister spent a year with a volunteer organization in her mid 20s, their living stipend was very small, so everyone lived "group home style" with 2 to a bedroom. In her house they even had someone sleeping in the landing area at the top of the stairs. They actually rented a fancy luxury apartment but ended up being cheap because the rent was split seven ways.
I've maintained a relationship during the time both myself and my partner lived in dorms, you (tactfully) make arrangements with your roommate and work around each other's schedules. You've never heard of a doorsock? We didn't use a doorsock, we duct taped the door locked if there was even a chance of a roommate coming home so they didn't walk in on us.
I believe most dorm rooms are like this for first year students across the US. Where I went to college, it was 2 to a room but some opted for privates. It was kind of odd to do a private suite - living with someone in a dorm room is part of th first year college experience, at least in the US.
I've heard of people who go on to share their room later in college and even into adult life. You do what you have to do. Almost all those cases are temporary anyways.
It's extremely normal for students living in dorms (and frats) in the US--especially for the first couple of years of undergrad. (It's certainly less common--though hardly unheard of--for grad students.)
Maybe your partner has a single room. Or, as others have mentioned, you make arrangements with roommates to stay out of the room for a bit--and maybe someone stays quietly overnight and the roommate tactfully avoids paying attention.
Trust me. Roommates are very common in US undergrad housing and students manage to indulge in, um, romantic behavior just fine. If there's a willing participant of the opposite (or same) sex, life will find a way.
I didn't want (and didn't have) even housemates after school. Maybe it's a cultural thing (don't really know the norms in other countries, see you went to school in the UK), but having roommates through at least part of your time at US residential colleges is almost obligatory. And, as others have noted, it's often seen as part of the experience of transitioning to college.
Ever considered (a) cat(s)? If deployed correctly, they deliver those that they don't like the taste of to your doorstep, albeit often very mutilated (think with (part (!)) of the head missing).
That's a great idea. We live on the second floor, so the cat wouldn't have access to the outside directly, which is complicated. The other issue is the lovely vizsla that lives downstairs - she is scared of cats. But I'd love to get a cat or dog when my life is 10% more stable.
Exactly, the cost of the rental ($2180) for a single person for a 310 square foot apartment overshadowed the modular/technical aspect of the story for me. If it was 800 square feet or something like that I could understand but these are tiny.
Berkeley hasn't built a damn thing since Gerald Ford was President, while the population has increased a lot, mostly through longevity rather than the oft-blamed migration. Going rate for a normal sized studio apartment is about $4000/mo.
Berkeley's population has actually been flat or falling for most of the period since 1970. In the 1970 census there were 116,700 people living there. In 2010 there were 112,580. Many of the intervening years were barely above 100k.
This is what happens when you don't build any new housing and median household sizes continue their decades long decline.
Yes but Berkeley is not in deep orbit, it is central to the 7-million-person Bay Area. The population has doubled in the time since Berkeley decided to freeze itself in amber.
True. While stipends vary from school to school, they don't really seem to vary according to regional cost of living. You're probably maxing out at 30k/year whether you're in Boston or Cleveland.
Somewhat similar methods were used to build a hotel in San Antonio, Texas back in 1968. It wasn't done in 4 days, but the rooms were built off site, complete with furnishings, then installed in the building.
EDIT: As a bonus, the wikipedia article links to a video about the hotel's construction, and at the 2-minute mark, they talk about how an IBM System/360 computer is used to do critical path analysis for the project planning.
It'll rust just fine and the acoustics are terrible. A container based building I worked in had a fridge several units over that you could clearly hear. Steel construction needs to be clad properly or you're going to hear everybody moving around.
The homelessness problem in the Bay area has more to do with good weather and a homeless-friendly local government than it does with the usual causes of homelessness. Lots of other homeless-unfriendly cities tend to drive people there.
I love seeing those signs on the jetway in Cali airports. It's basically saying to me "the state of California is known to cause cancer by the state of California"
We also had some super cheap mice at one job that had that sticker on them. Like $1.02 per mouse. And it was on the cable. We were like a) profit margin, b) are we safe of we just don't handle the cable or is the mouse body itself the problem?
Look, given that for the majority of cancers there are no definitive environmental causes, the state of California should basically slap a sticker like that on the forehead of each one of its residents. Anything else is not full disclosure.
A dirty little secret of Prop 65 warnings is that businesses often put them on things as a lazy CYA measure, not actually having evaluated whether they've exceeded the limits.
> Imagine a four-story apartment building going up in four days, and from steel.
That’s easy to imagine. Now something that’s difficult to imagine is them finishing the permitting and environmental impact studies in less than 3 months!
I live pretty close to Berkeley and have walked past this a couple times.
I'm impressed that the developer embarked on an experiment. That kind of thinking is welcome for solving the housing problem. It didn't seem like a huge saving but I imagine there's a lot of learnings here that can be put towards v2.
That said, that price point is not for Cal students, especially if it is single occupancy only. My guess is this might be geared towards older students / grad students who want to maintain a certain standard of life they are used to.
Doesn’t say much about the materials used for walls/insulation/etc. No info on HVAC either.
It does compare these to containers. After spending a few weeks overall inside an office building built of recycled shipping containers, I’d definitely think twice about considering these at any price - the air inside gets very stale and humid from breath alone. Nothing “breathes” inside and you end up in a very unpleasant tin can situation.
Good AC/dehumidifier, strategically planted plants and ventilation can help, but never fully cure this environment. At least not easily.
Not while real estate is appreciating dramatically. A unit would be worth several times that. Play with the NYT rent/buy calculator for the Bay Area’s recent numbers.
I'd suggest breaking a leg sometime and see what you think after you've been on crutches for a few months.
Yes, every now and then there are results that seem out of line but, if compliance were something it was easy to avoid, every business would be a special snowflake that had some unique excuse for not complying.
> The modules are effectively ready-to-go 310-square-feet studio apartments with a bathroom, closets, a front entry area, and a main room with a kitchenette and sofa that converts to a queen-size bed. They come with flat-screen TVs and coffee makers.
Affordable my ass. They built these things to bilk young people out of more money because they know my generation and Gen Z grew up spoiled and have suburbanite parents that think nothing's too good for their son or daughter.
If I was going to university, and was serious about getting a worthwhile degree, the last thing on my mind would be TV, and why the hell would I want to blow so much money on a fancy studio that I'm going to use primarily for sleeping? I'd prefer something much more minimalist, perhaps even with community restrooms and showers. Give me a closet with a cot or even a hammock for all I care, so long as I don't have to waste even more student loan money on what's essentially nothing. Boy, we're sure spoiled these days.
How much do you think it costs to add the "luxury" you see here vs construction costs for the actual building?
Spoiler alert: very little.
So it makes perfect sense to make the interior a bit nicer for what is at most 10% of the total cost.
You probably could save a little on community showers, but given this is private construction, not university dorms its not surprising that this more closely resembles a studio rather than a dorm.
You're speaking as if there's a one-to-one relationship between construction costs and the value of the product.
It costs relatively little to add luxury to an apartment, but that's not even the point. The value of a dwelling doesn't come from totaling all the expenses of building it, but from what people are willing to pay. When you take the modern spoiled American young person and their parents, show them an essentially furnished studio with a kitchenette, a bathroom, a TV, and then show them a spartan studio apartment with basically nothing in it (but costs a fraction of the other apartment), they'll gladly pay more for the first one because nothing's too good for their child.
So yes, relatively little can turn an apartment into what, for university students, is luxury. Nobody I've known ever had university dorms that nice. I don't even care if Berkeley students are somehow better than other university students; they'd be throwing away money by living there. I would much rather take that money and set it on fire.
Yeah its quite something just how far the concept of dormitory living has shifted. I would expect student housing to be some of the most austere options out there on the market.
A large desk, a small bed, and the real luxuries if they can be got: Lots of natural light and freedom from noise.
The studio pictured seems to do OK on the lux, but the area granted to television and whatever's below it seems wacky. Then again, if people want it and will pay for it...
The lux is mostly having both a private bathroom and private kitchenette--which I never had as a grad student--although I did have a private room for some of my time. Other than that, a flat panel TV is, what? $300? And slightly nicer looking, in part because it's new, minimalist furniture doesn't add a lot of cost either.
ADDED: This seems to have been originally designed as a hotel or studio apartments but is being leased to Berkeley as grad student housing. They're pretty small as apartments go but are probably on the high-end side for student housing, even grad student.
You're talking about graduate students - they're likely going to be there for 5-6 years, and are actual adults. They might want to - you know - date someone. Or make a space their own.
And having been serious about one of those worthwhile degrees, I still watched TV. Living like a monk and doing nothing but studying for the entirety of your PhD, and pretending the surrounds you do it in don't matter, is a recipe for having a breakdown.
The picture you shared is a render; of course it's supposed to look somewhat decent. I'd assume most rooms look only somewhat similar to that one.
> They built these things to bilk young people out of more money because they know my generation and Gen Z grew up spoiled and have suburbanite parents that think nothing's too good for their son or daughter.
Uh, what? Many parents can barely afford to send their children to college. Most end up paying for much smaller dorm rooms where their children share space with others. What makes you think that people are regularly blowing money for housing (keeping in mind that a TV isn't all that expensive)–and even if they are, why do you care?
I've lived in plenty of apartments that are like this and from experience, looks are extremely deceiving. Especially when it comes to apartments. They look nice most of the time, but feel and look cheap up close. To the point I've felt disappointed and ripped off if I wasn't able to see a place in person.
I agree on the affordable part- I live in a major college town being filled up by "luxury dorms" that are shoddily built and have cheap furniture stuffed in to the gills but are 725 a ROOM in a 6/6 apartment.
but I don't know, the tv is whatever in this age of cable cutting but after sharing a dorm bathroom with 40 plus people for one 16-week semester, even if i just come home to my apartment now some nights to sleep between work/class having my own space does wonders for my mental health.
As I mentioned above, the point is not that the actual cost of the furnishings and the bathroom are somehow wrapped into the rent. It's that people are willing to pay extra for something they ultimately don't actually need. People will usually choose superficial quality over something more utilitarian, and will pay handsomely for it because it makes them feel like they're at home in mom and dad's suburban mansion.
> pay extra for something they ultimately don't actually need
Do you understand the concept of "want"? Things have value to people.
If you want to be so reductionist as to say that we should only have what we "need", then we don't need higher education - or any education. We don't need air conditioning, cell phones, lighting, or plumbing. All we really need is a shelter from our immediate environment and a food source.
Capitalism and the modern world in general are driven in a large part by what people want. Acting on these wants is much of what has driven humanity to where it us today. And wanting things is an absolutely fine emotion to have - more than fine to act on if it's within your financial means.
So reducing the size of rooms by eliminating the bathroom and kitchenette and having public restrooms makes it group style living?
I'd certainly love a world where merely being able to live comfortably doesn't eat the majority of one's income. But if the system is fine introducing more "affordable" housing to young people who are already taking on the majority of the debt, there's a serious problem. They should reduce the expense of students wherever possible, within reason. I've known very intelligent, highly successful individuals who lived with much less at university. Calling building these apartments for students and calling them affordable is absurd.
8 years of permitting!
Most infuriation article.