This is planet money from NPR.
Let's talk about houses in America.
I'm gonna go out on a limb, and I'm gonna say houses in America are too expensive.
Bold words from Jacob Goldstein coming in hot.
And there are a lot of reasons for this, right?
There's the zoning.
There's land prices.
But one reason we do not hear much about one of the things driving the cost of housing, the process of building houses is just really slow and inefficient and expensive.
There's this thing I heard a while back, years ago, that really made me realize just how inefficient it is to build a house.
And it goes like this.
Imagine we built cars the same way we build houses.
You'd have a meeting with the car designer where you tell them what kind of car you want, and they'd drop plans for your special car.
Then you'd go to the city council, you'd get a permit.
Then you'd go around town, you'd call different car builders, show em your blueprints, and they'd be like, yeah, sure, I can build you your special car.
It'll cost, I don't know, a million dollars.
It'll be ready in, say, a year and a half.
And sure, there are developers who build whatever, like, 100 homes at a time, but even building 100 homes at a time is this wildly slow and expensive process.
It seems like we should be able to do better.
We know how to make things cheaper.
We've been doing it for hundreds of years.