“Could” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Many parts of the world are experiencing a housing crisis, with demand in urban areas often outpacing supply, leading to soaring prices.
In countries including the UK and the US, an aging population of builders combined with a drive to fill the housing shortage means there is a need for more construction workers. The UK’s Construction Industry Training Board found that the country will need 250,000 more workers by 2028 to meet building targets but in 2023, more people left the industry than joined.
UK technology company Automated Architecture, or AUAR (pronounced “our”) believes it has a solution. It makes portable micro-factories that can produce the wooden framing of a house — the walls, floors and roofs. Co-founder Mollie Claypool says the micro-factories will be able to produce the panels quicker, cheaper and more precisely than a timber framing crew, freeing up carpenters to focus on the construction of the building.
Despite the focus on automation, Claypool insists she is not trying to put anyone out of work. “Automation isn’t replacing jobs. Automation is filling the gap,” she told CNN.
At least in the US it hardly seems a lack of building capacity, but that the final prices are bid to levels outside for the reach of the average person by investors. I live at the edge of nowhere and in just the past half decade there where at least two fairly large developments of not too special copy paste houses stood up. They all entered the with prices on the upper end of $300K and seem to have gotten snapped up right away. Statistically I make more than the the average by a decent margin, but there’s no chance I’m paying for an almost $400K place. Even if I had the old 20% down it’d approach somewhere around $3000/month.