> Of course, those are "bad" decisions that save a few penny from the builders, and stay hidden until they surprise the building owner with a huge unpredictable cost.
> "based on particular conditions at the construction site or other local circumstances" [..] happening precisely because the US does not have much expertise in this area that leads to exorbitant costs
Umm, the sites are the sites.
We're going to somehow attempt to leverage our one standard design and rule out the very existance of any local circumstances by adding enough expertise?
> You're conflating the complicated with the complex. Construction workers don't need Agile methods, which is why "there's a 60% chance the framing will be up by July" sounds so dumb. The physical properties of wood framing, electrical wire, shingles, and drywall haven't changed in decades.
When's the last time you saw a construction project that landed on time? Construction projects are a classic example of forecasting difficulty. Lots of things have to go smoothly at the right time, including supply chain, coordinating work from multiple organizations (including local governments), and the weather has to play nice.
> Nobody is going to put up billions of dollars unless there is some predictability in terms of cost and schedule.
The lack of predictability comes from lawsuits, not technical problems in construction. Plants that were completed and ready to go online on schedule were stopped at the last minute by lawsuits, and in many cases were never started up.
> Imagine a four-story apartment building going up in four days, and from steel.
That’s easy to imagine. Now something that’s difficult to imagine is them finishing the permitting and environmental impact studies in less than 3 months!
> It doesn’t feel very efficient, especially residential construction. My neighbor is building a garage with some finished space above. It’s sat without a garage door for literally months now - everything else is done.
If all you have to improve the construction industry is better scheduling and supply-chain management, that's something. But the poster above seemed to be hinting at things more like new construction techniques.
>With public projects there generally is no such accountability.
Public projects use construction contracts just like private ones, they are just as accountable to their clients in this sense.
The difference between property developers and politicians as clients is that developers can choose when, where and and what to build to optimise costs, whereas with public projects politicians are optimising for votes. Politicians very publicly decide to commit to a project based on an initial estimate and then order the civil service to procure it. Changes in specification that are big enough to significantly affect cost have to be approved by the political process which takes ages and is unpredictable. Different politicians get elected half way through the process and they will try to make last minute changes to designs and specifications. The later that changes are made to specifications the more they cost. If you make multiple late changes it causes massive confusion and it is extremely complicated and expensive to reconcile the redesign with all the existing information. Therefore this will cause cost overruns which can get out of control when the rushed integration of new features causes unanticipated consequences.
Unfolding events affect public projects more. The Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly buildings both had last minute design changes to incorporate airport style security after 9/11. The Welsh assembly introduced a TV studio and broadcast lighting into the specification very late on. The Scottish parliament added a whole office block with offices to accommodate 130 MSPs and their staff. Of course those projects cost a lot more than the initial estimates given when they were first announced to the public, and the opposition politicians made as much political capital out of this as they could by comparing the original estimates to the final cost without mentioning the fact that a different thing was built than was specified at the beginning. You can be sure that the politicians that opposed the cost overruns in Wales enjoy showboating on TV though, and you can be sure that the Scottish MSPs all enjoy their lovely closed plan offices.
Major privately financed projects can be just as bad though, believe me I have worked on a few. The key to a well run project is a quick and efficient decision making process. My theory is that because both the UK and the USA are effectively two party states they tend to suffer a lot more from a lack of a political consensus on whether it is a good idea to build something and how it is going to be done. This causes delays and inefficiencies because elections have much more potential to upset a project than in countries that govern by a coalition of consensus.
Lastly, politicians will spend whatever they can get hold of if will get them votes and it's not coming out of local taxation or they can hide the capital expenditure in a different budget by using PFI procurement.
To be clear, these wordings has no impact on what was to be built, that had already been decided at a separate set of meetings. This goal setting meeting was sheer process.
At some point, the cost of building not quite the right thing has to be weighed against the cost of spending literally millions deciding on what to build next.
Construction companies (on average) don't look further than the point of sale. It doesn't matter if a poorly chosen element of design in an apartment building will potentially affect thousands of people over the course of decades, the incentive/risk structure just doesn't exist to make forward thinking decisions.
Its basically got to be in the building code or (almost) no one will do it.
The concretes building are fairly recent. Not sure there was enough time to have a sort of "return on investment". And breaking down something of that scale is quite an undertaking.
> This is plainly false in every way. Firstly, buildijg is an expense - why would you build now if you can put off the expense?
It might be worth considering how, if that were true, anything that has a capital investment required of it ever gets done. Building is not an expense to a building company. What do you think the company does to generate revenue, if it's not building?
>Building construction is also fraught with unexpected events and project management issues etc., but I'd laugh any building who would propose that I just keep paying them until it's done,
In practice, though, this is exactly how building construction and civil engineering works. After all, if the bridge is half-built, what's the customer going to do? Walk away? When was the last time you heard about any large civil engineering project coming in on time or on budget? It's to the point where we're relieved when the project ends up within an order of magnitude of its projected cost.
> I'm not sure you would want your house built by the contractor that took short cuts and did shoddy work. You might have roof over your head, but there will be more expensive problems later.
You might want to pick a better analogy as you've literally described all roofing construction at this point
> Suddenly 500 years from now all buildings have to be replaced? And what's the cost of this 500 year building? Is it 10 times as much? Or is it 5 times as much?
What a weird argument. It's obvious for multiple reasons that all buildings won't fail at the same time.
Couldn't that be paraphrased to "last minute changes"?
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