The construction industry has changed dramatically since the end of the Second World War, driven largely by the proliferation of housing subdivisions and by the evolution of technology-driven design. In addition, in exclusive areas such as Montecito and Pacific Palisades custom home builders have pioneered building methods for their well-to-do clients that have trickled down into the consumer market.
The post-war housing boom created an entirely new philosophy in home design because it created a new attitude in home ownership. Those changes were fundamental to the evolution of American housing from the individualized, permanent centerpiece of family life to the much more utilitarian entity that it is today.
Perhaps the biggest single cause of this change is the advent of the suburb, which was created largely by the path to homeownership provided to servicemen returning from the war through the GI Bill. By providing GIs with loans to buy houses, the GI Bill created a market for new homes, which builders responded to by putting up the post-war suburbs we are all familiar with.
Building a single home requires considerable expense beyond the cost of land, materials, and labor. An architect has to design the home. Once the design is completed it has to be engineered to ensure that it will stand. Then the plans have to be approved by regulators. And beyond buying materials and hiring labor is the time and effort required to find good sources for materials and good workers. Those costs quickly increase the overall cost of building a home.
Building hundreds of similar homes, on the other hand, allows a builder to share the cost of designing and engineering a home among many different iterations of that home. Building suburbs essentially brought the efficiency and economies of scale of an assembly line to home construction. Whole suburbs went up seemingly overnight, row after row of similar homes, designed to provide perfect environments for young families.
The suburb fundamentally changed the attitude that homeowners had toward their homes, setting the stage for big changes in the industry. As the subdivision became the best way to get an affordable, quality new home, people began to look at their homes less as statements of their individual aesthetic values and more as shells to raise their families in. Over time, they also began to think of them as investments, almost to the exclusion of all else.
Now, computer-aided design has allowed builders to take the same economy of scale that keeps construction cost down in a subdivision and extend that to just about any client\’s lot. Builders maintain hundreds of architect-developed designs, which clients can modify to meet their specific expectations. The designs have already been engineered, saving clients money. And much of the house is created offsite because it is built to computer-generated specifications.
Home builders today also benefit from innovations inherited from builders working for very wealthy clients. For example, in the Pacific Palisades custom home builders constantly have to innovate to meet the expectations of their wealthy clients. Those innovations work their way into design templates, which are shared with other builders and end up benefitting clients across the country..
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