Advanced Housing

In the U.S. we consider our society to be an advanced civilization.  What qualifiers are we using to support this claim?  Well, we have advanced technology.  I could not, in good conscience, say that our behavior is any more advanced than the average ancient society though.  How about necessities?  We produce 5 times the food that we need (60% of which is exported and 20% of which is wasted).  We are definitely advanced here, though it does little good if there are still people starving.  I think that we are also fairly advanced as far as clothing goes.  Clothing is pretty simple; if it keeps us decently covered, sufficiently warm, and well protected from the elements, it is about as good as it can be.  Anything beyond that is beyond necessity.  The last true necessity is shelter.  We have some pretty advanced temperature management, and for the most part, our houses protect us from the elements, but there are some problems that are clearly less obvious than they should be.  This is what I would like to discuss.

I have been interested in and exposed to a lot of different types of houses in my life.  This has mostly been with reference to building materials.  Most modern houses in the U.S. are built out of wood.  In some areas, you can find houses or apartments made chiefly out of cinder blocks (our current apartment is made from cinder blocks), but they are less popular, because they are not well insulated.  Large buildings are often made from reinforced concrete, but these buildings are not typically used for housing.  On the whole, a vast majority of U.S. dwellings are made from wood.  This leads to a number of common problems.  The first is vulnerability to fire.  Wood houses are easy to burn down, and accidental fires are a major cause of accidental house destruction.  In many areas, wildfires cause panic, because of the fear of houses being burned down.  The second vulnerability is susceptibility to invasion of other life forms.  Wood houses are almost impossible to effectively seal.  Many animals, bugs, and insects have the capacity to make holes in wood, and some even eat wood as food.  This makes wood houses susceptible to rodent, termite, and ant infestations, among a large range of other creatures.  Another life form of concern is mold.  Damp wood makes an ideal habitat for several dangerous types of mold.  Third, wood is a fairly weak material compared to what is currently available.  If it is dry enough to prevent rot, it is brittle and can be damaged by various stresses.  These stresses are common in some areas, in the form of earthquakes.  The average one story wooden house will probably survive a moderate quake fairly well.  Adding another story or two will make the typically wooden house a dangerous place to be during an earthquake.  In addition to this, wood does not insulate very well and also is not very airtight.  As such, extra effort has to be expended to insulate and seal wooden houses, and even a well insulated wooden house must expend a lot of energy on temperature control.  The point is, wood does not seem to be a very good material for building houses.  Maybe the only real benefit is that it is easy to work with, and it can be produced fairly cheaply.

Now I want to look at how ancient civilizations handled this particular problem.  Early civilizations (some might even call them pre-civilizations) lived in caves.  Caves are very expensive for temperature control, and they allow all sorts of creatures in.  On the other side, they have no vulnerability to fire.  As civilizations started to develop, many moved out of caves and started living in tents, typically built from wood and skins.  These were vulnerable to everything, except earthquakes (if it falls down, just pick it back up), but they were highly mobile.  From there, most civilizations started making wooden buildings, of which we have already discussed the wide range of vulnerabilities.  These were more permanent and fairly cheap to build, especially in quantity.  Occasionally things like fires would wipe out whole sections of cities, and most houses were infested with something (a major factor in the spread of disease).  Some civilizations actually skipped wood though, and there is evidence that many others advanced from wood to other materials.  The final evolution of shelter for most ancient civilizations was stone or some form of concrete.  The largest native American civilizations built primarily out of stone, a superior form of concrete which we still have not managed to reproduce, or adobe, a form of clay used as a concrete (some may claim that this is because they had no other option, however, evidence has been found that prior to stone and concrete, wood was a common building material in ancient America; unfortunately, because wood decomposes fairly quickly, the extent and duration of building with wood is almost impossible to determine).  These materials are fire proof, earthquake resistant, and are much easier to seal than wood.  They are also not a form of food for pretty much anything, and they are very difficult to dig or burrow through.  Another benefit is that they impose a large degree of natural temperature control when built correctly.  We have found that our wooden houses decay into worthlessness in between 100 and 200 years, without constant maintenance.  Houses built of stone and concrete have lasted thousands of years with absolutely no maintenance.  Till recently, stone and concrete has been the highest level of evolution in materials for building dwellings.  Ironically our "advanced" civilization is still building mostly out of wood.

So, we think we are more advanced than ancient civilizations.  If this is true, shouldn't we be building houses of even better materials than they did?  What materials do we have that are better than stone and concrete, that can be used to build houses?  Stone and concrete are actually pretty good building materials themselves.  We already use a somewhat superior version of those for modern buildings.  We reinforce our concrete buildings with metal, in the form of rebar and remesh.  Our concrete is not as good as some ancient American civilizations, but we still have not figured out how to reproduce what they made.  Where we really excel is in making metal in large quantities.  It turns out that steel shipping containers make good houses.  Multiple containers can be combined to make houses of any size, and they can be stacked several stories high.  They are already fairly well sealed, and adding a thin layer of foam insulation will further seal them as well as insulate them very effectively.  We could be making houses out of reinforced concrete or even metal.  I already mentioned the benefits of concrete housing, metal housing is even better.  Metal housing needs insulation more than concrete, but with foam insulation, it does not need much.  Metal is extremely resistant to invasion by any other life form.  It is fireproof.  It is earthquake proof.  Metal houses that are well sealed with a layer of foam insulation will last forever.  Metal is a bit more expensive than wood or concrete, however there is already an existing industry making shipping containers, and containers that are no longer suitable for shipping are often still suitable for building houses with.  In short, production could be scaled to make them cheaper, and used containers are already reasonably priced, compared to the cost of building a wood house from scratch.  The logical progression of house material evolution is metal, and we have everything we need to do it.

There are some other amusing, but promising options.  Some people build houses out of straw bales.  This sounds counterintuitive, and it is.  Straw bales are so dense than they don't burn well.  They don't rot because they are installed dry, then covered in a thick layer of stucco to protect them.  Their density makes them pretty structurally sound, and they flex enough to withstand earthquakes fairly well.  Straw (not hay) is very low on nutrition, so most animals will not eat much unless they are starving.  Further, if the stucco is applied correctly, nothing will be able to get in to infest the straw.  Straw also makes extremely good natural insulation.  Unfortunately, straw prices have increased recently, but during good economic times, straw is often very competitively priced, compared to materials use for making wooden houses.  It is hard to imagine straw as a superior building material to wood, but the evidence indicates that it is.  It is also renewable, just like wood.

Really, we don't necessarily have to one-up ancient civilizations to be truly advanced.  Concrete, even without metal reinforcement, is an excellent building material for houses.  It is also very cheap.  In some 3rd world countries, notably Pakistan, some entrepreneurs have bought small cement mixers and concrete block molds, which they setup at the side of roads on the outskirts of large cities.  They then proceed to make large numbers of concrete blocks at a very fast rate.  These blocks are used to build illegal houses, which even the very poor can afford, because concrete is so cheap.  These small single room houses can be built at a rate of several a week, with a small operation.  This technique for building houses is very scalable, so long as the houses have only one story.  In short, concrete can be used to build very resilient houses, at a very fast rate, and very cheaply.  Using casting techniques can increase customizability with only moderate cost increases.  With casting rebar and remesh can be added to increase strength, again at a moderate cost increase.  Concrete is extremely versatile, as it can be used to produce houses with a very wide range of quality.  While metal is probably the most advanced material we can build houses out of (currently; maybe carbon composites will be even better), concrete is possible the most superior when cost and versatility are taken into account.

Why do we still build houses out of wood, if there are other superior materials that are often cheaper?  Tradition.  Seriously though, the main reason we still use wood as the primary material for building houses is that we have been doing it for so long.  People like the aesthetic of wooden houses, even if the wood is not visible.  Things like sloped roofs are difficult to build in any material, but they are common with wooden constructions because wood is structurally weak, and sloped roofs can handle the weight of several feet of snow, while flat roofs made of wood might collapse.  Wood is easier to make sloped roofs with than metal or concrete.  Wood is fairly cheap, and our building industry is well scaled to use wood.  In most areas, obtaining enough wood to build a house is fairly easy with mostly local sources.  Obtaining enough concrete to build a house is more difficult.  Metal is difficult to work with in a raw form, so unless parts are prefabricated, no one wants to build with it.  It is just more convenient to build with wood.

Another big reason we still use wood is legal building codes.  This is a tradition thing as well.  Legal building codes all assume that houses will be built with wood.  Running electrical wiring in a storage container house is not that difficult, if code allows the metal body of the house to be used for grounding.  Unfortunately, because code assumes that houses are not built of metal, a separate grounding wire is required, which increases the difficulty of running wiring in a house where the walls do not have space between them.  In addition, even metal houses must comply with electrical codes designed to prevent house fires, even though metal is fire proof.  There are already some difficulties using modern building materials to properly outfit a metal house, and building codes that assume houses will always be made of wood eliminate most of good solutions.  This is also a problem with straw bale houses, because they don't normally have space between the walls either.  By basing legal building codes on outdated assumptions, we have effectively stalled technological advancement in house building materials.

Is there some way we can fix this?  Well yes.  First, building codes need to be more flexible.  They could either be expanded to address requirements on a per material basis, or they could be abstracted to replace specific requirements with abstract requirements that allow more flexibility.  If it is absolutely necessary that current wood-based building codes maintain their strictness, the first option would be the best.  This strategy would require the addition of a new section for each new material that is added to the list of possible house building materials (so, if someone decides to build a carbon composite house, a new section of building code would have to be added to cover it).  If it is more necessary to maintain flexibility for adding new materials, then the second option would be better.  The downside with this plan is that it would probably leave loopholes that could result in a decreased standard of quality for wooden homes.  One way or another though, building codes need to be flexible enough to accommodate new building materials in a timely manner.

Second, we need to get over the wooden house architecture attachment that our society has.  Beautiful architecture is great, but if it comes at the cost of safety, it is not worth it (in my opinion, most wooden house architectures are far from beautiful).  Safety aside, it is possible to have beautiful architecture without wood.  We can easily look to middle eastern architecture, where wood was and is very scarce, to find beauty without wood.  Some versions of the ranch architecture, which is popular in the south western U.S. take much of their style from the abandoned adobe cities found in that region (in fact, stuccoed ranch style homes look very much like the ancient adobe houses).  Some ancient architectures that originally used marble or granite for the building material would work very well with concrete and are considered by many to be the most beautiful architectures the world has ever seen.  Even many parts of Europe have houses built from brick, which use an architecture not far removed from U.S. wooden houses.  This is evidence that we would not have to change the wood architecture much to get something more friendly to superior building materials.

There is a third hurdle, which is possibly the biggest.  Even if we get building codes up to date with modern technology, and even if people can learn to think beyond the modern wooden house architectures, our builders lack training to build out of anything but wood.  So, this is not entirely true, but for a majority of builders in the U.S., it is.  We build using wood because it is all we know.  Evidence that we are less advanced in this area than previous civilizations is that we don't have a robust stone masonry profession.  Bricklaying has become more of an art form than a building profession (we paste more bricks to the outside walls of wooden houses than we use to actually build walls).  I can hear some people saying that someone has to know how to make concrete structures, because that is what large buildings are made from.  This is certainly true, but they don't know how houses.  The small part of our building industry that makes concrete structures only makes big buildings.  We have amassed great amounts of knowledge of how to most effectively build wooden houses, but we know little about effectively making houses out of anything else.  Overcoming this hurdle is going to cost.  Training does not come for free.  In addition, to learn how to do things right, we will have to do them wrong a few times.  With concrete or metal, the cost of mistakes will likely be small, but they will be irreversible.  Even a big mistake is unlikely to result in the collapse of a house, but it could result in things like water leakage that requires regular sealing (water leakage in concrete or metal is far less bad than wood, but it can still cause humidity issues that might result in mold or damage to personal belongings).  That said, these issues already regularly occur in wooden houses, even if best practices are observed, due to the nature of wood as a building material.  If we don't start building with new materials though, we will never figure out how to do it right.

These three problems will ultimately be expensive to overcome.  Changing building code to make it keep up with technology will take a lot of political pressure, which ultimately will cost at least in time if nothing else.  Changing people's perception of architectural aesthetics will be even more difficult.  As with anything new, until the market for superior houses sees a lot more business, the cost will be fairly high.  Houses built from anything but wood will be treated as custom work until popularity increases.  Training is inherently costly, and this cost could be more problematic than either of the other problems.  When working with new materials, mistakes are bound to be made.  While the cost of these mistakes may be lower than the cost of maintaining wooden structures, they will be perceived as very high (we have gotten used to the costs of maintaining wooden houses).  This will hinder general public acceptance of houses built from new materials.  These three hurdles have a kind of synergy that will make overcoming them even harder and more costly, but the end result will be worth it.

As I mentioned before, most urban houses in Pakistan are built from concrete, and on the outskirts of urban areas, many illegal houses are built from concrete blocks.  These (fairly large) concrete blocks cost well under a dollar a piece to make.  The small illegal houses are typically made from twenty or thirty of these blocks, and they have only one room.  The cost to the "contractor" for each house is less than $30, for materials, and since labor is cheap, the total cost per house is probably well under $100.  The land is free (the land is technically owned either by the city or the province, which is part of why the houses are illegal).  In the U.S., we cannot get away with the "free" land thing, but if we learn to build using concrete, we could still reduce the price of housing dramatically.  One problem we have in the U.S. is high expectations for standard of living.  If you think that electricity, running water, and one bedroom per person (with a double sized master for a couple) is normal, you are deluded.  Most of the people in the world live in houses without running water, with little or no electricity, and with only one or two rooms for a family of four or more.  Now, I am not saying that we should live like that too.  What I am saying is, we should be happy enough to have electricity and running water, if our children have to share rooms, big deal!  In fact, most people end up spending most of their lives sharing a room with a spouse (or something).  If we give every kid their own room, we are doing them a disservice.  They need to get used to it (no wonder so many relationships fail shortly after getting into shared living arrangements).

Another problem is that we do not know how to handle concrete in a modular manner efficiently.  Our concrete building industry uses a technique that I am going to call "large casting."  This involves building wall molds, then pouring in the concrete.  Once the concrete is set, the molds are removed.  In essence, the walls are constructed by making very large custom molds, which are destroyed after the walls have been made.  We should all know that custom made anything is more expensive.  For buildings, large casting makes sense, because the height of buildings makes more modular techniques less safe and very difficult.  Houses are not large buildings though.  Even two or maybe even three stories will work with more modular techniques.  The Pakistani method of creating concrete blocks that are used to build will work fine if they are not stacked too high and do not have to be lifted very high.  The benefit of a modular system like this is that you can take the cement mixer to the building site, cast the blocks, then build the house, without needing to make a custom mold.  That last part is the key.  Making those custom large casting molds takes a lot of training to do right.  If the builder could just buy five or ten pre-made block molds (like builders in Pakistan), they would no longer need the labor of expensive concrete workers.  This is a big cost reduction.  If the block molds left holes in the blocks, rebar could even be added after stacking the blocks, to reinforce the structure.  In addition, concrete, in bulk, is cheaper than wood.  This is a further cost reduction.  Some of the cost reduction would be offset by higher costs for things like insulating (foam insulation would be mandatory to provide a vapor barrier, and because you cannot tack fiberglass to concrete very easily), but eventually the overall cost would be reduced as other industries scaled to the new materials.  In the end, houses could be built faster, cheaper, and higher quality, all at once.  With steel shipping containers, it is even easier.  Construction would be reduced to moving the containers, welding multiple container constructions together, insulating, wiring, and finishing (ok, HVAC as well).  Instead of building houses, it would be more like converting an existing structure into a house.  In short, once industry scales to new building materials, their cost will drop and probably to less than prices for current materials.

There is one other potentially major benefit to building with concrete and steel instead of wood: it is more green.  Right, I can hear you asking "how?"  Well, let me explain: Wood is a renewable resource (sounds like I am arguing against myself).  It has many uses.  Concrete is not officially renewable, but the materials it is made from are extremely plentiful and easy to obtain.  Steel is not so plentiful or easy to obtain, but there is plenty of steel in industrial waste, and further, I suggest that the ideal steel houses would be built from shipping containers that are no longer fit for shipping but still have a high enough structural integrity to build with (for shipping, they have to be able to stack many high, when full of heavy cargo; in contrast, houses would not stack more than 3 or 4 high and are mostly empty space).  So building with shipping containers is a form of recycling.  Now, we still have the wood thing to deal with.  A great deal of wood goes into building.  The processing for construction quality wood uses a lot of energy (sawing, drying, chemical treatment, creation of plywoods, etc...), and chemically treating wood introduces contaminates into the environment.  Instead of using wood for building, we could be using it as a renewable energy source.  Burning wood is a carbon neutral means of producing energy (so long as trees are replanted).  Coal power plants are already well qualified for burning charcoal, if not straight wood.  Technically, it would do no harm to allow non-carbon byproducts of wood burning loose in the atmosphere (these byproducts will mostly fall to the ground and be absorbed as new trees grow), but if people are concerned, the filtering methods currently becoming popular would work on charcoal smoke just as well as coal smoke.  So, building with concrete and metal reduces byproducts of processing wood for building, recycles certain metal products  at a very low cost, and frees up a major renewable resource for energy production.  All of this is in addition to the potential for reducing the cost of housing and making housing safer.

The only real things in the way of this are building codes and a high initial cost to get the industry going.  The benefits are greenness, lower long term housing costs, and consequently improved economy (reducing housing costs reduces long term debt, which increases discretionary income, which increases consumer spending, which, according to economists, is what drives a good economy).  We need to start pushing for our governments to extend or reduce building code laws to facilitate construction using advanced modern building materials.  The benefits of building with advanced materials clearly outweigh any costs.