All these hurricanes might kick off a new modular house trend.
All these hurricanes might kick off a new modular house trend.
I don't mean double-wides, I mean quality modular houses.
Modular would be more popular if it didn’t cost as much as standard construction. It’s bizarre how expensive it is.
Lots of processes need to be sorted out. Need steady demand. It's an interesting business.
There really oughta be a hurricane-proof trend, like dome houses, and for the coastline, domes on stilts.
Pensacola Beach, FL. It's survived loads of hurricanes since the 60s.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/pensacola-futuro-house
OTOH, so have the single-story cinder block houses(the three in the middle and top left) from the 50s. Slap a new roof on and scrub it out, good to go. The stick houses are total losses. Apparently no one read The Three Little Pigs.
South Florida is full of these small cinder block houses because everything else gets wrecked and these survive. Sure, they might need some new roof sections, and maybe the drywall cut 4ft from the floor, but porcelain tiles on a concrete slab with cinder block walls is going to last until the rebar rots.
There's a house that just went up I saw which meets the recent Florida keys codes, and it is a goddamned fortress. It's on a lot that is raised 4 ft, the house is made of concrete and sits on 15+ ft concrete pilings, ceramic roof, and high impact windows all around. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/374-Mahogany-Dr-Key-Largo-FL-33037/104218949_zpid/
The coast should be empty
Modular or not, when there's 10-12' of storm surge and/or river flooding, it doesn't matter. Houses built today generally handle cat 3 and even cat 4 storm winds without much problem. It's the flooding that's the killer.
People have been trying to make modular housing work for awhile, with limited success. For various reasons, it's a lot more challenging than it seems like it should be. One of the problems is that the US doesn't really have a single national regulatory regime for building codes, they are mostly local and regional. You can't really design a house that works everywhere so the economics are a lot different than selling something like a car or a washing machine.
I think a large part of it is consistent demand, and that must be regional because of the size and shipping of the final product. Hurricanes solve both to some extent.
Why? there isn't much difference in cost possible as site built is mostly using pre cut materials as well.they go up faster but don't save that much when you demand quality. They also are very limited in floorplans. Anyone actually in construction understands where the real problems are and they are not things modular can solve.
If you can make modulars out of concrete instead of balsa wood that would be great. Otherwise, bring on the shipping container houses...
Shipping container houses are terrible ideas. You want insulation, windows, plumbing, etc. They don't work well in those small steel containers.
"It is possible to insulate the outside of a shipping container instead of the inside.
This method of insulation is known as “over-cladding” or “external insulation” and involves adding a layer of insulation to the outside of the container before covering it with cladding or other weather-resistant materials"
I was hoping for a trend in less green house gases but this sounds like the next best idea.
