Are We Getting Worse at Construction?
There is an opinion piece in the New York Times titled "The Story Construction Tells About Construction Is Disturbing." The Op Ed goes on to say,
"Here’s something odd: We’re getting worse at construction. Think of the technology we have today that we didn’t in the 1970s. The new generations of power tools and computer modeling and teleconferencing and advanced machinery and prefab materials and global shipping. You’d think we could build much more, much faster, for less money, than in the past. But we can’t. Or, at least, we don’t."
When you scan skyline looking across a major city like Chicago, it would appear this not the case. Buildings seem to go up quickly in our ever changing skylines but statistics say otherwise. This is an industry where participants held on tight to the paper, fax machines and even still so to this day, and where AOL email addresses were more common than not.
The Op Ed looks at a publication produced by Austan Goolsbee & Chad Syverson at the Chicago Federal Reserve and goes through the obvious factors; whether we are measuring it correctly, investment, and regulation. There is some correlation with regulation or building codes..
"The Wharton School of Business, for example, tracks building regulations across cities, and Goolsbee and Syverson tested regulatory burden against construction productivity. There was a slight relationship, but nothing impressive."
Is it the paperwork or administration side? That could be part of it. The amount of paperwork involved in any project is significant.
“The work we do today takes hundreds more people in the office to track and bring to completion,”
It does not appear there is a single cause. For anyone in the industry and we all know this, you can look at the decentralized nature of construction and maybe there is something there. It takes a lot of people from a number of different companies to make a commercial building of any scale. The gamut ranges from architects, engineers, building product manufacturers, general contractors, and many many subcontractors to make a project happen.
The Op Ed finally concludes that is something to do with all those people coming together.
It does not appear there is a single cause. For anyone in the industry and we all know this, you can look at the decentralized nature of construction and maybe there is something there. It takes a lot of people from a number of different companies to make a commercial building of any scale. The gamut ranges from architects, engineers, building product manufacturers, general contractors, and many many subcontractors to make a project happen.
“There are so many people who want to have some say over a project,” he said. “You have to meet so many parking spaces, per unit. It needs to be this far back from the sight lines. You have to use this much reclaimed water. You didn’t have 30 people sitting in a hearing room for the approval of a permit 40 years ago.”
One of the reasons Phase 1 exists is to solve this problem, We help you wade through it all and create efficiency in your projects.
We would love to hear what your thoughts. Leave a comment or drop us a note.
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