After WW2 an enterprising building firm called Levitt and Sons developed a system of mass producing houses and creating suburbs in double quick time. The first example of this was Levittown, New York, and the way they did it was to do basically the opposite of the current government and its socialist methods.
What Levitt and Sons did was get everything down to a fine art.
- Plans for creating an entire street of houses would be laid out.
- They went directly to manufacturers of everything, cutting out the middleman and reducing costs.
- A concrete truck would come along and lay down the concrete: the foundations, basically a concrete slab on each section in the street, were allowed to dry.
- Whilst that was happening, everything needed to build the house would be delivered to that particular section: the precut timber, the plumbing pipes, electrical wiring, benches, walls: everything.
- This would be repeated all down the street, so every proposed house had everything in front of the concrete slab foundations awaiting the tradesmen. A pile of timber, a pile of pipes, an oven, a washing machine, a pile of windows, etc.
- Once the concrete was dry and ready to be built on, the various tradesmen were lined up in almost military fashion outside each house.
- At a certain time a whistle would be blown and the builders and their labourers would move in and erect the framing. This had to be completed within a specific time (we’re talking a couple of hours here).
- Then at a specific time a whistle would blow and the plumbers would move in and install the pipes.
- In due course the electrician chappies would get a whistle and do the wiring.
- The chaps to construct the benches, or install the appliances, or the windows, or whatever, all came in at a specific time and completed within a specific time.
Levitt and sons also only paid their workers if they completed the job – to the correct standard – within the time agreed upon. Do the job properly, on time with no stuff ups, and you got paid quite well; screw it up, slack off, take a coffee break, take a cigarette break and you got nothing (nor a second chance). Before long Levitts were building 30 houses per day without any difficulty and had a large crew of well-paid workers earning twice what they would earn on any other construction project – many of whom actually bought houses in Levittown!
The point, dear reader, is that instead of farting around building one house at a time they were building 30 houses at one time, in a single day. So there would be a crew – builder, plumber, electrician, cabinetmaker, plasterers, labourers etc – outside each proposed house along the street awaiting their specific whistle to blow, ready to immediately move in and get the job done smartly.
There was also a crowd of people at the sales office, deposit cheques in hand, ready to buy the houses. So an empty paddock first thing in the morning was a street of completed houses by 5 pm and the buyers could move in the following day. It really was that simple folks! Compare this, which amounts to building an equivalent of Whanganui every year, with the failed socialist house building projects such as KiwiBuild or its subsequent failed reboots and renames. Perhaps if Ardern got over herself, her view that she knows everything, and cast a glance at history, we would have the housing crisis solved fairly quickly.
