Honest question: why does affordable housing needs to be 3 or 4 bedroom? Shouldn't they be mostly Studio and 1-bedroom apartments, and at most, 2-bedroom, that too rarely?
4-bedroom sounds like a luxury apartment and not an affordable apartment.
From there, people should be able to decide for themselves; "decide for yourself how much housing unit you want to buy" was common, until the '70s: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-...
No. It's not an intuitive result, but it makes sense when you think about it. Bedrooms are cheap to build. Kitchens and bathrooms are expensive to build. Building 3 units with a total of 3 bedroom, 3 kitchens, and 3 bathrooms is a much less efficient setup than building a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom unit. If you incentivize people to have roomates or co-habitate with extended family by building bigger suites you can make housing cheaper overall.
Regarding 3-4 bedroom, yes for most of the world they will be luxury.
This is not really true for most values of "most", and the places it is true, the culture tends to be much different than you would find in California, eg) you are generally not looking at children being assigned hours of homework to perform in which they have no space to work on it, nor ability to work on it without distraction while the rest of the family lives on top of them.
> If one is looking for subsidized housing, isn't that a reasonable compromise?
You may want to look up the history of tenements in the US. Broadly speaking the answer turns out to be: no, this is not a good compromise.
What if a grandparent or two lives there?
More bedrooms meaning more people makes kitchen and bath more efficient.
Of course, for many people today kids sharing a bedroom is tantamount to child abuse.
Well, then they should not be looking for affordable (as in subsidized by other taxpayers) housing, no?
Where, necessity = roof over head. Comfort = a warm, safe place with simple amenities, people sharing bedroom and so on.
So, for me, Luxury = anything beyond that, as in no one shares bedroom, guest bedroom and so on.
In some countries, cultures or communities, a family of ten might be living in a single bedroom. Maybe anything more spacious than that should be your standard for luxury. Or further maybe; any shelter that keeps you dry is the bare minimum. If it keeps you dry and warm, that's luxury. Why not? If you get chilly you can use a blanket; furnaces are luxury. Do you really need anything more than a primitive FEMA tent? Running water plumbed straight into your home is a luxury, you can bring a water bucket to a community spigot every day. If you think that's too much work you're just being entitled.