BuildZoom, a construction and remodeling marketplace, publishes data analyses of housing costs, construction costs, and city growth.
HN links it for construction cost data, with commenters citing labor costs as the main driver of regional variation, and for its job posts.
Nearly all of the regional variation in construction costs is attributable to differences in labor costs. This can create a self-reinforcing upward spiral in home prices [0]:
> Inasmuch as it means that those working in the construction trades are better off, construction wage growth in the expensive coastal cities is a welcome development, which ought to be celebrated.
> However, construction wage growth could also be part of a dangerous, self-reinforcing cycle. Rising construction costs tend to reduce the supply of new housing because they shift marginally-worthwhile residential development into the red.8 This helps raise housing costs, which in turn feeds back into construction wage growth for at least three reasons:
> - When housing prices rise, workers require greater compensation to subsist.
> -When housing prices rise and the supply of homes is smaller than it would be otherwise, it is harder for people to find suitable homes for sale (and to afford them). This creates a greater incentive for renovation, which exerts upward pressure on labor costs as suggested earlier.
> -When housing prices rise, the pool of potential home buyers becomes more financially select, which likely corresponds to higher expectations with respect to homes’ level of finish.9 Once again, this means that more renovation is bound to take place (including home-flipping), exerting even more upward pressure on labor costs.
A one-off influx of affordable housing could potentially break that…
The Bay Area’s environmentalists have decided to put the mountains off limit to development. Here’s one map: (https://www.greenbelt.org/uncategorized/bay-area-policy-protection-map/). Randal O’Toole claims that urban growth boundaries are a major cause of the housing crisis in his book American Nightmare (https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermines-Ownership/dp/1937184889), and Issi Romem corroborates this thesis (https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/cities-expansion-slowing is currently in a 301 redirect loop; see archive https://web.archive.org/web/20181207215721/https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/cities-expansion-slowing).
I think the question of whether a prosperous region can have both urban growth boundaries and affordable housing is an open question. The Bay Area has not set a good example in this manner; we listen to environmentalists when it’s time to put walls around the region but we don’t listen to them when they call for greater infill development (to their credit, the Greenbelt Alliance has a subsidiary called the SF Housing Action Coalition that promotes infill development, but in SF politics they are often written off as developer shills).
BuildZoom - San Francisco, CA - Full time
BuildZoom is a marketplace for remodeling and construction services that is changing the way people approach home improvement. With over half-a-million monthly users, we're the fastest growing company in this enormous sector of the market.
Full-Stack Rails Developer
http://www.buildzoom.com/jobs#senior-developer
with...
- Extensive experience with medium-to-large scale RoR deployments
- Strong fundamentals: OOP and application architecture
- Experience with scaling for exponential user growth
- Appreciation for quality, maintainability, and performance
- Attention to detail and personal pride in your work
Data Analyst / Quality Engineer
http://www.buildzoom.com/jobs#data
with...
- Programming experience
- Effortless comfort with SQL
- Experience manipulating large volumes of data
- Experience with machine learning algorithms is a plus
To learn more, email me at artem@buildzoom.com
Buildzoom.com - San Francisco, CA (INTERN no, Remote/H1B no)
Buildzoom is a YC company, we raised our seed money about a year ago (http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/25/yc-backed-contractor-directory-buildzoom-raises-1-4-million-seed-round/) and are thinking about series A, probably in 6 months.
Our team is fairly small (Only 6!) and mostly tech (4 ppl). We share our office with 3 other YC company. It's less than a block away from the Montgomery Bart station. There are plenty of restaurants to eat for lunch and bars for after works.
We often have poker night with other YC folks.
We are hiring for 4 differents positions.(http://www.buildzoom.com/jobs):
- Front-End Developer
- Customer Relationship Manager
- Remodeling Broker
- Economic Analyst/Journalist
Our team is pretty awesome and very talented. If you're in the Bay Area and are interested, come say hi!
==At significantly higher cost.==
Significantly higher building costs, but lower land acquisition costs.
Excerpt from a BuildZoom analysis:
"The high cost of housing in expensive coastal metros is not driven by construction costs. It is driven by the high cost of land which, in turn, reflects a scarcity of zoned units, not a scarcity of land per se."
https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/paying-for-dirt-where-have-home-values-detached-from-construction-costs
==That the difference is in part due to policy doesn’t change that there is less availability==
Except the current policy explicitly limits the availability, they are one in the same.
BuildZoom (YC Winter 2013) | San Francisco, CA | https://www.buildzoom.com | Full-time | Onsite Only
We are a remodeling/construction marketplace that is tackling an enormous and challenging problem. We're growing fast (1M+ visitors/month) and need your help. We're looking for talented engineers (full-stack, front-end, data, intern) to join us in our beautiful Soma office.
You can apply directly via the links below, but feel free to ping me directly if you have questions (dlee at …).
* https://www.buildzoom.com/team
* https://jobs.lever.co/buildzoom