Archive:000/Housing/footprint

How many resources does it take for people to have housing?

This is a page for some estimates.

Single-detached home

Labor

We could estimate labor by looking at some costs:

labor costs, obviously
material costs, because these generally reflect the labor that goes into producing the materials

We don't want to count other costs:

zoning permits and other bureaucracy - maybe these exist in our current society but they don't have to exist fundamentally - there are probably much more efficient & fair ways to make decisions about housing (or at least, the process could do without bullshit jobs) - so we leave this out.
land value - this depends on the location and it isn't a reflection of labor requirements. Also we will calculate land in another section anyway. So here we leave this out too.

Housing costs have gone up recently, but this is more a function of demand rather than any inherent increase in the amount of labor needed to build a house.

Quick estimate: How many labor hours go into a house:

house.typical_price_before_covid

400000 $

typical_wages_before_covid

18 $/hour

Average wage of workers in construction, materials production, and other relevant trades

what_fraction_of_costs_reflect_labor

70%

The percentage of costs that fit into the categories we care about (mentioned above)

hours house.rq_labor (calculation loading)

How about labor over time:

family.size

4 people

house.lifespan

80 years

hours/week per capita (calculation loading)

Shockingly low. Did I get something wrong?

Land

For one, there's the land that the house sits on: Quick estimate:

house.lot_size

7200 square(feet)

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-size-of-a-lot-in-suburbia-If-you-dont-know-the-average-what-is-the-size-of-a-lot-where-you-lived-or-live-in-a-suburban-setting

house.size

2600 square(feet)

house.lot_size (calculation loading)

But also the land that it takes to grow the wood for the house:

boardfoot

(1/12) cubic(foot)

Weird unit but ok.

house.wood_volume

16380 boardfoot

Amount of wood in a typical house

wood.density

0.8 g/cm^3

For converting between wood mass and wood volume

tree_farm.productivity

20 tons/hectare/year

Wood yield of a typical "tree farm" forest

Agroforestry Carbon Sequestrationhttps://www.sustainably.run/co2-verification
tree plantations of pine and eucalyptus can sequester an average of 10 tons of carbon per hectare per year.

Assuming that 50% of the mass of wood is carbon atoms, this means 20 tons of wood per hectare per year.

(calculation loading) Note: this last answer is wrong because we don't actually have the numbers yet!

If you have some idea how to estimate the land footprint of other materials, please start the . For now, let's hopefully assume it's small enough to ignore.