Dramatic Improvements in Home Building

Since the end of the Second World War, the construction industry has changed dramatically. The leading catalyst of this change has certainly been the expansion of suburbs and the economies of scale that go with them. In addition, technology has dramatically changed design and in exclusive enclaves such as Beverly Hills and Pacific Palisades custom home builders have pioneered processes that now benefit everybody.

Since World War II there has been a fundamental change in our view of what a home represents. A house used to be a highly individualized living environment. It was permanent, and it was the focus of family life. Today, we look at a house as an investment first and foremost, and we tend to see home ownership is transitional. This is our home for the time being, until we move on to something better.

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.

When a builder constructs a single home, the cost is driven up by numerous factors. In addition to the cost of materials and labor, the house has to be designed, the design has to be engineered, and the project has to be planned and managed. Each of these aspects of building a home costs money, which results in the sometimes astronomical cost of building a truly original home.

The creators of the suburbs changed all that by bringing the efficiency and economy of scale of an assembly line to the construction of homes. Rather than building one house for one client, they built hundreds of similar homes, after the fashion of the old company towns. Those homes were designed to foster a certain lifestyle, focused on the family and the neighborhood, which became fundamental to the ideology of the baby boom.

The dramatically increased efficiency of large-scale home building allowed these builders to dominate the industry. And as subdivisions became the place where a young family could find a decent, affordable place to live, Americans began to change their attitudes toward the homes they owned. The home became a shell for the raising of a family. It became an investment vehicle, a pathway to building wealth. Home ownership lost its singularity and intimacy, paving the way for a new era of building.

Computer-aided design has expanded the concept of the subdivision to virtually any piece of property. Now, architects have designed hundreds of floor plans, which can be modified on a computer in order to create an essentially unique design - but one created from a pre-engineered template. This allows the builder to construct the home for much less than a truly original new home would cost.

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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