In the last post of this series, I waxed enthusiastic about prefabricated affordable dwellings. Cheap to manufacture, easy to install, and sufficiently profitable to give developers an incentive to build them.
Good News! Just last night, while I was singing the glories of these tiny housing units, the Berkeley City Council voted unanimously to move ahead and solicit bids to build them for housing homeless and low-income residents.
Now the bad news: across the bay, San Francisco rejected the same kind of micro-unit proposal Berkeley's City Council decided to pursue. The deal breaker? The fact the units would be “made overseas, in China, and not by U.S. unionized labor”, despite the developer's assurances that he would use unionized labor for the onsite buildout, which accounts for most of the project costs. So we have economic illiterates hurting the poor, once again.
A couple points: trade is not a zero-sum game. Another is that there's a labor shortage in the US, both in manufacturing and construction. Meaning the US doesn't have enough "pre-fabricated dwelling" manufacturing capacity to meet demand. So just about everyone loses in San Francisco: union labor for the onsite job, Chinese manufacturing workers, and - especially - the poor and homeless.