You can buy a house kit today from places like Menard’s - my uncle purchased a garage and we assembled it over a couple weekends, I could see doing a house with much more time and skill
https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/books-buildi...
https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/books-buildi...
Bare land in cities doesn't exist anymore and isn't cheap. Labor is expensive due to high living standards. And politics can lower the supply of potential developable land even further, raise the cost of labor, as well as drive other differentiating concerns. Your neighbors can sue you (or compel the government or an HOA to step in) if they don't want you to build. And it's probably next to impossible to design a kit home that could meet the developmental codes of all fifty states, let alone all the municipalities.
It's why comparisons between say, Hyperloop and CAHSR are so infuriating. The technology is not the reason why traditional high speed rail construction in California is so expensive and slow.
The lawyer knows the prosecutor and the judge. The contractor knows all the inspectors and bureaucrats. They get favorable treatment compared to some nobody off the street. A huge chunk of what you pay them is compensation for all the time they spend building that professional relationship with the people who you need to appease. The fact that services are rendered is what blurs the line between business and corruption.
Seriously, good luck getting the subcontractor back to finish quickly when somebody who has been providing him with work consistently calls and needs a hand. As a homeowner you are back burner.
At least on the inspector side, I wonder if governments started privatizing home inspection if this would help establish a more "market-based" treatment of builders. The city could honor certain third-party inspections as being "reasonable" for permitting.
I could see this working even better if the inspection service bills the building owner rather than the builder. Then the incentivizes are aligned for a fair inspection and fair treatment of builders that is in the owner's interest.
You can buy 20 acres in Okanogan county, WA, in a very rural ranch area about 40 minutes drive from Omak for about $23,000.
By the way, if these prices surprise you, then you should have a look at the housing market in the vast majority of the U.S. that isn't near an ocean. The country is full of perfectly-fine housing in working-class neighborhoods for $150k or less.