Skipjack wrote:There is no point in building structures with a lifespan of more than 50 or 60 years.
So if I were to buy a house that was built in the eighties, it will fall down on me in 20 years from now?
Hmm, all of a sudden houses in the US dont seem to be such a good deal after all.
When I first started looking at Australian housing I thought it was cheap. But then I realised these aren't double-brick tiled roof cavity houses, and there are various other construction details of a "nothern european house" that tend not to be followed, including fixtures like double glazing, central heating. I reckon that if you built a UK house in the US or Australia then it'd cost pretty much the same. And if you built a US/Canada style wooden construction house in the UK it'd come out pretty cheap.
'Self-build' in Aus is still very strong as urban land isn't fully saturated in many cities and one German chap I was talking to there who was having a house built for him gave instructions to the builders to add more wall thickness and more insulation, etc., and they basically flat out said "no" 'cos they didn't know how to build anything more than they were doing. I guess you only have to look at some of the kWh/GDP figures to figure out which countries use the most efficient building techniques.
There has been a move to build wooden houses with brick facia here in the UK too, but it is derided by the building industry, and they fetch a substantially lower price at sale, and "most" house fires in houses <10 years old are this type of house. I should add that the other feature of UK houses is that they have to be totally lined with fire resistant plaster board materials and doors that can resist a fire for X minutes, so the fire brigade get all shirty when you build anything else, as do the insurance companies. You'd probably shell out more for a wooden house in insurance alone here, over and above its cost when compared to a brick-and-mortar tile roofed house.
So you say there's no point building a house for a >50 year life? It's not a sensible argument because you're forgetting "residual value" - that's why a UK house is expensive - 'cos it'll have a good value when you come to sell it. There are very few "expensive" things that aren't also valuable as a used thing, especially houses.
Bottom line is - house prices are dictated by the cost of land (obviously more expensive in dense areas). We live in a global market and the actual build-price raw-material would be, I reckon, essentially equal if you actually built the same house, like-for-like, in most any country. Build costs aren't proportionate to floor space, and smaller houses can attract a "relative" premium price as they are cheaper to run! Why do you want a big house when your heating costs are already a huge fraction of your income?