Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

People debating about what kind of housing to build are getting ahead of themselves. The housing crisis is intentional. Homeowners demand the value of their home keep going up and they vote. They way to do that is to keep supply lower than demand. The first step to fixing the housing crisis isnt to figure out what kind of housing to build, it's to convince enough of the voting population there is a housing crisis that needs fixing.

Here in Seattle, an eight-story mass-timber apartment building was recently finished, claimed to be the first of its kind in the US:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timberlab.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;heartwood" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timberlab.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;heartwood</a><p>This was built close to my house, so I got to watch the frame rise. It was an interesting process, and it makes a certain amount of sense to emphasize timber construction in this heavily-forested region. I have to agree with the headline, though.

If there is one industry that is the most resistant to change, it&#x27;s the construction industry. There are still people who have been roofing for 50 years and refuse to change a single thing they do and learned 50 years ago.<p>Saying a bunch of glulam will solve the issue is just incorrect. Wood is fantastic material. But using half a forest to build a 2000sqft house is certainly not the direction we should be going, we should be finding ways to build with 1&#x2F;2 the amount of wood we currently use. Or perhaps melt down all of that trash and form it into a house somehow...

I am building a house in a rural area, where land is cheap. Building is not.<p>Timber is certainly expensive, but you know what else costs a lot? All the other stuff, much of it subject to state building codes that get more restrictive every year.<p>Asbestos survey, assessment, abatement: $10k<p>Asbestos air monitoring: $1k<p>Tipping fees: 20k<p>Spray foam insulation: $27k<p>Foundation $50k<p>Solar: 40k (not including rebates&#x2F;incentives)<p>Requirements for outlets. Requirements for windows. Setbacks from a utility pole on our property, 50 yards&#x2F;meters from the nearest road. We have to deal with that mess and pay extra to site the foundation, not National Grid!<p>Even if we were getting a manufactured home (built to looser FEMA standards) we would still have to deal with some of these costs, such as asbestos, tipping fees and foundation. And the cheapest double wide is $300k.

Isn&#x27;t this obvious? I thought it is well known that zoning is the biggest problem. Add to the fact that land values in cities are out of control.<p>For example, I&#x27;d like to rebuild my old house, but it doesn&#x27;t make financial sense to build under 4000sf as I&#x27;d be losing out to potential value as well as matching the neighborhood. I can&#x27;t build a duplex or detached ADU. I don&#x27;t want to spend 2 million on giant house I can&#x27;t use.

I think that construction timber benefit as a Carbon sequester is too often downplayed or simply ignored while it could be significant.<p>Timber has many advantages compared to concrete, including longevity.<p>The housing shortage won’t last forever thanks to demography, but we’ll need to replace many badly aging buildings anyway, and it takes time to grow trees and build the whole infrastructure around this construction technique, we should try to not sit and wait for a change.

Of course timber won&#x27;t fix the housing shortage. The housing shortage is artificial. There are plenty of empty units across the country. It&#x27;s a distribution issue of: owners holding vacant units, people wanting&#x2F;needing to live in specific locations, and individual preferences for bigger, fancier, better school, sfh, etc attributes. With an almost stagnate population growth this isn&#x27;t really a <i>building</i> issue even if it is a supply side issue.

The article says it&#x27;s trying to rebut a recent FAS article - which starts with:<p>&gt; Mass timber can help solve the housing shortage, yet the building material is not widely adopted because old building codes ...<p>&gt; Mass timber can help with housing abundance and the climate transition.<p>And the FAS article&#x27;s call to action seems to be &quot;Congress needs to increase the USDA&#x27;s budget&quot;.<p>So, yes. Easier than rebutting &quot;warm water is dry and crumbly&quot;. One wonders whether the Federation of American Scientists has ever heard of &quot;NIMBY&quot;, &quot;zoning&quot;, or &quot;environmental impact&quot;. Let alone &quot;house-poor&quot; or &quot;local government&quot;.

Not a very convincing article. The fact that mass timber uses more wood is right there in the name. Everyone knows this. The point is you get a better building. The cavities in a wood-framed building cause all manner of problems with respect to heat, draft, cold, damp, and noise. Filling the cavity with solid wood variously solves such problems.<p>All the stuff about the capital cost of making laminated wood is irrelevant. Only the marginal cost of the assembly matters.

It’s not mentioned in the article, but the Brock Commons that was the tallest timber building is at UBC! I was there as it was built and finished. It’s an 18 story dorm building one of several nearly equally sized dorms (!!) on campus. It went up fast - it was started and done between the 2 years I was there.<p>UBC is huge for specifically timber engineering research, they claimed at one point to be the best in the world.

Playing devil&#x27;s advocate here. What causes housing shortage - more demand than supply. What causes more demand? - more people.<p>IMO an ever increasing population isn&#x27;t a good thing if the economy can&#x27;t absorb them at an equilibrium of demand and supply.<p>Canada a population of 40M bringing in 1M population in an year was a terrible move. Great for house prices but it takes it&#x27;s toll.

The housing shortage is so straightforward to solve, but government officials and citizens alike block most measures that would easily solve it. It&#x27;s very frustrating. Rents in Austin are down double digits, and the reason? They changed zoning laws and built more housing. Seems like every major city should be doing that, but apparently, it&#x27;s too complex.

I would argue that the mateiral is not the pinchpoint of the housing crisis. Its the lack of land, or permits to build on said land.<p><i>Edit</i> I should say _affordable_ land. Or land that isn&#x27;t blocked by nimbys

There are actual mass timber projects to look at. The article mentions one in Milwaukee. I am familiar with the T3 project [0].<p>It was delivered ahead of schedule and below cost relative to a traditional steel&#x2F;concrete plan. No huge issues of which I am aware in the 5 or so years since occupancy, but someone else may know better.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;structurecraft.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;t3-minneapolis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;structurecraft.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;t3-minneapolis</a>

Los Angeles has a housing shortage. It also has a car traffic problem a d argubly needs 40 train&#x2F;subway lines, tons of bike infra, and re-zoning so more small business can open in walking distance to people. building twice ssany homes won&#x27;t work if we can move around twice as many people

&gt; the mass timber framing uses four to five times the volume of wood as the light-framed wood framing.<p>I recall helping nail 2x6&#x27;s together into big composite beams, in the 80s in Florida. something like a 32 foot clear roof span was needed and I think we were doing 3 layers for a 6in x 6in final profile. Good job for a kid: &quot;Here&#x27;s a box of 150 nails. put them <i>all</i> in these boards&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve seen a meeting hall floor that was made by laying 2x4&#x27;s up side by side and nailing them together. They were knotted, warped, reject pile boards and someone collected a big pile and planed one side straight then laminated them into a 20ft or so floor over the basement of a church building. Big massive center beam under it and no other supports but the walls. 3+ in thick and that heavily nailed; no worries.<p>It was fine finished and lovely from the top; the bottom was moreso to my eye: you could see how woven together it was and how far from perfect the individual boards were.<p>In both cases the design was inefficient and used profligate amounts of wood compared to what could have been done with steel or other methods. In both cases the wood was extra cheap or free and someone was making expedient use of it.

<i>Of course</i> mass timber won&#x27;t solve the housing shortage.<p>The housing shortage is entirely a self-inflicted problem arising chiefly from insanely restrictive zoning laws that prevent construction of high-density walkable <i>neighborhoods</i>.<p>It&#x27;s not <i>only</i> about NIMBYism, though that alone is enough to cause the current crisis. Building an apartment complex in an area fille with single-family units is nearly impossible. Building a high-rise? Forget about it.<p>It&#x27;s also the fact that <i>mixed-use</i> buildings are still a taboo in the US (God forbid people could work and shop where they live, just look at the hell that is Brooklyn, the EU, and Japan, and ..!).<p>And sticking a high-rise in the middle of a suburban sprawl immediately faces the classic opposition of &quot;but what about traffic and parking&quot;, because we can&#x27;t build public transportation networks either (the opposition to those, of course, is &quot;but nobody uses public transport&quot;).<p>That&#x27;s why the article misses the point: housing shortage is not a problem about <i>houses</i>.

European here, I recently build my home in wood-frame with thick enough elements I suppose they fall in this &quot;mass timber&quot; category, well... It was NOT cheaper than concrete, I choose wood for various reasons but well, cheapness was not one of them at least not in France where this tech is not much widespread.<p>I have some advantages:<p>- much more personal future changes are possible, it&#x27;s far easier posing new wires&#x2F;pipes and so on since all I need are small tools, I do not made much dust with them and so on;<p>- thinner perimeters walls (with good insulation), in some cases they are a nice thing;<p>and some disadvantages:<p>- exterior exposed wood last far less than concrete and demand more regular upkeep work (though it&#x27;s relatively easy);<p>- eventual water spills might be more impacting;<p>- last but not least, noise insulation from the ground floor and the second one are far LESS good than concrete.<p>So well, I&#x27;m happy of my choice for various reasons, but I do agree with the author, only adding a point: homes need to change as tech change. Having homes we can &quot;recycle&quot; an create again after let&#x27;s say 50-70 years means having a kind-of industrial home evolution path that allow for well performant and well designed homes in the long terms, a thing we can&#x27;t much have with concrete. At a certain rates trees re-grow, rocks do as well, but in a sooooooo large timeframe we can&#x27;t count as &quot;renewable&quot;, so potentially a wood based civilization might be nearly circular, a concrete based one can&#x27;t (at least, seen the actual known tech).<p>Aside while light buildings suffer more extreme weather, they suffer less some kind of hydro-geological problems like soil stability, earthquakes and so on, all demanding far simpler foundations.

To solve the housing crisis you have to build up like the Soviets and Chinese have. They housed a lot of people, quickly.<p>It’s really not difficult; just takes some brave people to change the zoning laws and rethink some of the building codes combined with financing it.

Why not bricks - they are eco friendly, we are not running out of clay soon, amazing thermal buffers and isolation, while energy intensive to produce you could fire them with renewables eventually. Change the shape a bit so they are easier to lay fill the cavities and we are in the business.

I bet it&#x27;s less expensive in the PNW and more expensive in the midwest and southwest. There is a LOT of timber here and a lot of mills to take advantage of plantation-grown trees that don&#x27;t exist elsewhere.

I hope large scale timber construction doesn’t occur exclusively because of the impact on our forests.<p>Between the pine beetles, fires, the many many stumps from the last round of serious logging years… our national forests and surrounding un-designated forests could use a break from a possible sharp uptick in demand.<p>If you support ideas like this which help largely sub&#x2F;urban areas by using out of sight out of mind rural resources, and you also go out to Yellowstone and the West once in a while and see&#x2F;wish how our forests weren’t in such bad shape, then consider not supporting this.

Aircrete, Hempcrete, &amp; foam housing are alternatives. All are inexpensive, have good insulation, &amp; can form interesting single story houses.

Why would it? You can solve the housing problem with corrugated shanty towns and plastic tarps if right regulations eased enough.

All of the construction related solutions to housing problems are missing the point. Housing is not expensive because it&#x27;s difficult to physically build. We are pretty good at construction. A single family home could probably be put up in two weeks or less if all that mattered was doing the actual construction.<p>The problem is zoning and all the red tape and NIMBYism that prevents the construction from taking place.

I don’t get the impression that materials are the rate limiting element of the housing crisis

The &quot;Legal Mumbo Jumbo&quot; page in one of the linked websites is epic! LOL<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.woodtechsystems.com&#x2F;legal-mumbo-jumbo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.woodtechsystems.com&#x2F;legal-mumbo-jumbo&#x2F;</a>

Much of the conversation here derails the original post: we desperately need less expensive construction processes (overall, including permitting etc). Even when the local community makes it not-worthwhile to build affordable housing.

&gt; the mass timber framing uses four to five times the volume of wood as the light-framed wood framing.<p>So... basically &quot;buy more wood?&quot; I think I&#x27;ll pass.

I will take a house made out of mud at this point

How about converting offices to apartments?<p>Thanks to home office there should be many otherwise useless offices.

We learned from the great fire of London not to build all your tall houses out of wood

Obviously someone who is familiar with the field but it&#x27;s kind of strange that they compare these two technologies since they aren&#x27;t used for the same construction. You&#x27;ve not going to use glulam and CLT to build your one story house. It&#x27;s about building taller places.

What exactly is the housing shortage being discussed?

There&#x27;s a shortage of detached single family homes in desirable cities and suburbs.<p>If you just want to rent an apartment there&#x27;s an oversupply from overbuilding during the pandemic.

More building, less talking

&#x27;democracy can only last until a majority coalition realizes they can simply vote themselves largesse&#x27;

Every single major population center that has distorted (high) housing costs relative to income, also has very strong protections for the existing home owners (NIMBY).<p>&quot;There are no coincidences...&quot;<p>The solution is terrifyingly simple: don&#x27;t allow existing residents to block new housing developments. If they don&#x27;t like it, they can move.<p>This will probably never happen in the U.S., because the government no longer functions as intended.

It takes significantly less materials to build a multi-dwelling apartment&#x2F;condo&#x2F;townhouse structure than a single family home. In addition, the required square footage per person drops by huge amounts when people can walk to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars.<p>We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are not met by their community. Everyone has their own bar, restaurant, theatre, and community center. There are 8 unit apartment buildings that are smaller than some of these houses.<p>The housing crisis is an urban planning crisis.

I think this article is a great example of how technical people have become so intoxicated by the relatively few instances in which an advance in technology has genuinely solved an entrenched social or power problem by making a new thing possible or reducing costs that they basically only argue in those terms<p>The fact is, the housing crisis is and always was a policy failure and a &quot;distributional outcomes&quot; issue, and and no amount of improving housing construction&#x27;s speed, costs, or legality will fix it if we don&#x27;t both change policy and reduce inequality<p>There are tons of building that are or could be residential housing that are owned by massive investment firms as a speculative asset. The FTC&#x27;s recently published brief mentioned that keeping units empty rather than lowering prices is common practice among landlords. Even among individuals, an incredible amount of older, wealthy people own multiple homes and view most of them as a source of passive income. When I talk to people in that category, if they are doing well, they are often thinking about buying more homes to generate more income directly from renters or as a speculative investment (IE to hold and sell later)<p>As it stands, people are not homeless because there is nowhere they could live. Not even close. Increasing housing supply without making any significant dent in the financial and regulatory situation surrounding housing will more likely just put more real estate in the hands of the entrenched winners, who have already demonstrated the willingness and ability to hoard housing