Adaptive Homes and the Other Housing Crisis
Most of the homes built each year fall short of delivering a best-in-class experience for their owners and fail to address modern design standards. Here in the USA, there are more than 800,000 single-family homes built each year. Our homes signify our accomplishments and become our most important investments. They nurture our families and create healthy communities. Today we know that we need to build more homes and build them more efficiently. Most crucial is that when those homes are built, they reflect the best of what we can do.
"We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us." — Winston Churchill
Home construction is nothing like it was 100 years ago. What was once custom built to each place and its family is now mass-produced in large numbers. This shift has tremendous benefits. Manufacturing technology enables us to make more spacious and less expensive homes rapidly. Several companies produce more than 100 homes per day. Building codes have evolved to set a minimum bar for safety. As a result of these and many other related factors, the design of houses has suffered.
The architecture of homes#
The design of a home by an architect approaching the project with care will take months or years. The designer will visit the home site repeatedly to understand the surroundings. They will study the views, existing foliage, solar studies, winds, climate, and history of the land. Great designers develop a deep understanding of the homeowners. This process enhances the land, the community, and the lives of their inhabitants.
Most houses do not receive this level of care. The average sales price of a new home in 2019 was $381,900. Consider that the average home is 2,700 square feet in size. If you're involved in homebuilding, you know that you can't nail down a price per square foot, but simple math brings us to around $135 per square foot. This figure includes the land, builder's profit, and any labor. That doesn't leave a lot of cash left over for quality materials, let alone the design of each detail.
The average senior-level architect charges around $200 an hour for their services. In a project that is well-designed from scratch, it could easily add up to hundreds of hours. Because of this dynamic, genuine custom homes end up in high-income areas. One can easily spend $50,000 on design services for a custom-designed home.
D.R. Horton is the largest homebuilder in the USA, completing more than 50,000 homes and earning $16B in 2019. Take our estimate for custom design. At $200/hr, it would cost more than $2.5B to satisfy the design needs of this one homebuilder last year. If each of these homes were custom-designed, it would be wonderful for our communities and towns. However, this cost exceeded the net profit for the firm by nearly $1B annually. It's not going to happen.
The architecture of community developments#
In the 1940s, a company built a town outside of New York City called Levittown. Levitt & Sons created "planned communities" and innovated in prefabrication and off-site construction. They could make a home in 8 hours and produce up to 30 homes per day. The Levitts decided to design a few houses that would meet the needs of most. They then mixed them up to avoid a monotonous streetscape. The model was successful.
This strategy of land development has become the dominant way to produce homes today.
The production of homes had become systematized. There was then pressure to squeeze out more homes at a lower cost. Quality suffered, and as a result, building code has grown in scale. Building code sets the minimum standards for legal dwellings. There are national, city, local, and community codes. Many places have established monotony codes to restrict the "sameness" of homes.
With a proper design process, 500 hours would go into the design of one home. With community architecture, the creator designs hundreds of homes at the same time. The number of codes that apply means that meeting the minimum bar takes up the majority of this time. After developing a new home product, it becomes costly to make changes. Updating small changes across many documents requires expensive labor. As a result, builders discourage change.
Customer demand has aggravated these issues recently. The portrayal of dream-like design and build experiences is typical on television. The fantasy portrayals give buyers the expectation that contractors can meet every desire. Professional animators earn hefty sums to create visualizations of every change and detail. Buyers come to the table with lofty expectations for the most significant investment of their lives. Misaligned expectations are creating problems for most homebuilders. The homebuilding pioneers leading a new era see the growing opportunity.
The housing crisis#
As a nation, we are building massive numbers of inadequate homes. There are several factors at play, including:
- Ignorance of architectural design standards (ugly homes)
- Improper consideration of future maintenance issues
- Unsafe or inappropriate planning for disaster
- Inadequate efficiency and energy performance
- Ignorance or destruction of the natural landscape
- Poor function and fit for the inhabitants
Ugly homes negatively affect the surroundings and everyone who sees the house. The community suffers the wrath of the home until someone destroys it. A lack of understanding of maintenance issues accompanies ugly dwellings. This means water problems, rot, and harmful mold or pest infestations. Both of these issues are inexcusable given the vast library of knowledge in the proper design and construction of homes.
Building code handles a majority of issues related to safety and natural disasters. Often it is at the discretion of the designer and builder to take precautions.
Our homes use a lot of energy. Heating, air conditioning, and lighting consume nearly 60% of the energy in a typical home. Minor changes in the orientation of a house relative to the sun's path have a significant impact on energy consumption. Community homes give little or no attention to the ideal orientation. Most community homes include the minimum legal windows on the sides, at the expense of natural light and views to the outside. Consider that a majority of new home developments are clear-cut to simplify construction. This process erases the natural landscape.
I have heard large builders say they "don't love" any of the hundreds of homes they build each year. Cost-sensitive homeowners come for the location. They are priced out of more competitive, well-designed homes. The buyers make a compromise for a home, and the builders make a compromise for the home. The community suffers as a result. Living in a home that is not a good fit for your family can have a lasting negative impact. Scientists have long studied how the space you live in affects your wellbeing.
Why have homebuilders accepted building homes they aren't proud of? Often it boils down to the cost of change. One large regional builder maintains 15,000 AutoCAD drawings to reflect the 30 "master plans" they build. Even small changes in direction can add up to hundreds or thousands of hours of work from trained professionals. This is compounded by the risk in coordinating those manual changes and ensuring 100% accuracy. Builders can lose 1–2% of their total revenue due to variance — the error in what is drawn on documents or purchased and delivered to the construction site.
Homes need to adapt to the land and their occupants. The beautiful thing about houses is that people will change buildings to meet their needs. Renovation of relatively new homes comes at great expense and waste. Making all changes to improve the design before building is always the best solution. At the volume that we build houses, this level of customization to suit the environment and homebuyers has never been possible. Today, adaptive homes are bringing the comprehensive design of homes to large-scale developments. What was once only possible with an architect is becoming simple to automate at massive scale.
Adaptive homes#
Manufacturing technology for mass-produced consumer goods is fascinating. Supply chains change rapidly. Products are continuously re-designed to address cut-throat competition and demanding customers. Companies have adopted software for parametric design and product lifecycle management (PLM). This affords the ability to make changes and instantly update connected documents and purchasing data. These capabilities, which are commonplace in manufacturing, have always been out of reach for the homebuilding industry.
Adaptive home plans look like any other home at a glance, but there is an intelligent system beneath the surface. These virtual homes can change to support hundreds of variations. In one instance, the occupants need an additional bedroom while preserving the footprint. In another, the foundation needs to step to follow the contour of the landscape. These changes can now take place without manual effort. In real time, all associated content is updated. Finally, the technology to drive the design of houses has caught up with the technology to manufacture them.
The long-term impact of adaptive homes is hard to estimate. Countries with advanced building requirements regularly produce net-zero energy homes. If we implemented passive heating/cooling and lighting across the nation, we would reduce total energy use by 10%. Buyers' increased power over design means homes will fit families better. Better homes lead to better communities, towns, and cities.
In the Higharc Product Development Platform, the logic behind every decision is embedded. Homeowners can experiment with the home and visualize the results immediately, like playing a video game. Adaptive homes can flex to meet the needs of their occupants and the environment. They will stop short of breaking. Builders implementing adaptive homes see homeowners having delightful, transparent experiences co-creating their dream.
The technology that we are developing at Higharc has the potential to bring a new level of care and craft to hundreds of thousands of homes. If you are a homebuilder who wants to build better homes, I hope you will consider partnering with us. If you are a homeowner who desires more control in your future home, let us know. Our collective investment in the quality of our environment is the most important one we can make.