The future of housing in UK

[Arnoldthecat]

When you look at much of the housing stock in the UK, a lot of it is old and in need of work or better still, demolition.

The only thing that is preventing the demolition of old houses that are long past their best is that they are retained as a tradeable asset. There are too many vultures who need them to make a living off them.

If ou had a car and it got so old that its paint was faded, it was damp,leaked in water, and was rusting would you continually patch it up to keep using it and try to retain its value? No you wouldnt. You'd scrap it and get a new modern one.

Modern new housing should be factory engineered to high standards. Super insulated and assembled on site on an insulated concrete base.

The days of men (and women) gluing clods of clay together on some rainy windswept site must surely come to an end! It is truly ridiculous. Its labour intensive, its archaic, there is too much variability and lack of quality control and its expensive.

For the future, where we seek to be cleaner, greener and more energy efficient, we must look toward engineered, system built homes. Made in the comfort of large factories hat can replicate high quality structures day in day out at much reduced cost and assemble them on site quickly.

They tell us they wish to stop using gas boilers and fossil fuels and we must all have heat pumps. HPs work best in well constructed, well insulated homes. Not houses that are 70 plus years old and are ready to tear down. I accept there are plenty of exceptions.

Of course this doesnt suit the agenda of having houses as a tradeable asset class.We must artificially hold the cost of housing high . Bricks and mortar have replaced the gold standard.

Was watching the first 3d printed house in Germany on YouTube last week. Was nuts, this robot was on site adding it from the ground up, layer by layer. Will be interesting to see if that technology can be scaled up.

Modern building techniques are a mixed bag. Yes they should now be more thermally efficient but the life expectancy is much reduced over that of traditional methods. The energy consumption of demolition and rebuild is a lot greater than building to a good standard and maintaining them. Japan has this problem, houses are built and then demolished after the incumbent dies and it is one of the reasons that the economy has stagnated.

Yes, often they don't last as long so in that sense are awful for the environment. Also some aspects of older ones are better for health such as free air getting in. It is never a simple issue.

@Arnoldthecat

Have you lived in the USA? Those factory made boards are standard there and houses do not last as long, a 100 year old house is very unusual and much younger ones are uneconomic to repair. Tatty shacks is how many looked. Wind got through the siding of our house whenever it got up

Give me brick any day!

Did you know that 84% of detached homes in Scandinavian countries are factory manufactured.

The problem is that planners regale against too many houses on a site of the same/similar style. To be able to factory produce you need to have a lot of the same product.

The problem is that the sort of homes that would be produced from modern factory methods have poor life expectancy. The experience if pre war prefab should tell us something; a reliable prefab needs to be simple and easy to renew! Multi story lightweight prefab are always going to be prone to issues. If you could design a modular system whereby any module can be replaced with minimal interruption to the rest, and further modules could be added as needed then this could work. This would likely suggest that each module would be individually roofed and connected by protruding collars. A standardised services connector could be developed for electronic, coms water and sewerage. Sewerage would probably have to be predicated upon local maceration units and pumps to reduce the requirements on local site topography. All of these things are possible and would provide lots of energy efficient homes quickly but in the long term probably not be very environmentally friendly or very individual.

If don't think life expectancy of these buildings would be poor , though depends how long you are talking about. Construction methods have moved on alot since the war , you'd be comparing apples and pears with today's pre fabs.

Modern building practices use engineering joists consisting of lightweight batten stapled to OSB. It's not going to last!. Modern insulation boards are generally PU bonded to OSB, as soon as it gets wet from a leak its structurally finished, changing a panel is expensive and almost never results in a watertight repair.
I didn't suggest returning to post war prefabs - I'd suggest learning the lesson that any prefab must be simple!

A decent life expectancy should be 150 years. Approx 3 generations of adult ownership.