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This might be true in the US, but because of stringent building requirements construction cost definitely is a problem for affordable housing in the UK and in some European countries. Here in The Netherlands it certainly is not possible to build a house for $50k (or less) according to commercial developers. Municipalities have been complaining about developers only building houses at the $400k or more price point, and developers have been saying that due to the building requirements it isn't economically feasible to build houses for less.

Also, what's the soil like where you're building those $50k homes? I've often seen that being spent just on the foundation.

That said, I'm not sure this construction method is cheaper than existing similar techniques like for example structural isolated panels.

In Europe we have stricter building codes on average but it's still very much a non-technical problem. Prices of land are insane in Spain, and I bet in other countries too.

And taxes, and a myriad of other things that have nothing to do with actually building the thing.

I'm not sure by what measure Spain has high land prices. It effectively has the lowest population density of any sizeable (under 11 million) country in Europe [1]. It also has one of the highest rates of second property ownership in Europe [2]. I can't find figures but I suspect it also has one of highest rates of home ownership by non domeciles too.

Lots of factors contribute to all this and like anywhere it's always 'location, location, location', but outside a few major cities and popular holiday locations I think it's probably pretty cheap - in relative terms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_Europea... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Secondary-property-owner...

If it's pretty cheap, it won't be allowed to build anything residential.

What you described (strict building requirements) is, in fact, a sociopolitical problem, not a technical one. We used to build houses for much less. They were worse houses. Many people would not like them today. Others would. They are not allowed to have them, though.

In the US it's even worse - we have those older houses, but they're almost always in older parts of the city (duh) and their valuation is sky-high.

That's a real problem, but will correct itself eventually. In the oldest parts of the oldest cities in the US, mostly the nicer old buildings survive for the long haul unless they have historical significance. (e.g. Paul Revere's house in Boston.) Eventually the value of building a nice building on that land will surpass the value of keeping a shitty old one there. I'm more concerned with the explosion of shitty quality "luxury" 5/2 buildings being blighted and falling apart right when they stop inflating market value in their neighborhoods and pushing people out.

> We can build small, livable (for various definitions) homes for $50k (or less) today

Not sure I agree with this. If we assume a labor at a rate in the order of 1 worker-hour per square foot (this is highly variable, from 0.5 to 2 hr/ft^2), a 2000 sqf home would require 2000 hours. At minimum wage ($15/hour) that means $30K, just for labor. This does not include concrete, lumber, stucco, sheetrock, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, appliances, landscaping, etc. It also does not include permits and design fees. And of course, assuming $15 per hour would not be accurate at all. By the time you get a contractor involved and various trades you are paying significantly more than that, perhaps closer to $75 per hour on average. That gets you up to $200K, again, just in labor costs.

DIY is a different matter. And yet, it isn't. At some point opportunity cost comes into the equation. It would be silly for me to DIY a home until I am retired or unemployed. The loss of income --opportunity cost-- of devoting thousands of hours to home-building would be massive.

If we are talking about building homes at scale, except for some very specific locations and types (pre-fab?), I am not sure you could build something for $50K these days. For example, I have personally had to deal with LA County's Building for permits and plan-checks for my 13 kW solar array (yes, I DIY'd that). They easily added $50K, if not more, to my budget without reason or justification. The most grotesque example of this is that they made me put in 64,000 lbs of concrete into the footings for my ground-mount structure. An architect friend of mine told me I could support a four-story building with that amount of concrete. Why? Nobody knows. Once the plan checker made that decision there was no way to reason with him. Power trip? It was death by a thousand cuts.

"Small, livable" ... 2000 square feet ...

Low-cost building is something like $85 a square, so 50k gets you about 600 square. It is totally doable and that's with "current" setups (these are often built as "cabins" etc.

But the permits and other things destroy them (which is why so many "tiny homes" are technically mobile homes because then you just deal with the DMV).

And you can buy brand new homes including land around here for $300k so I suspect that they didn't cost $200k in labor. But maybe they do?

Of course, these are generalizations. Also, I did say that the labor per square foot range was wide, 0.5 to 2.

The truth of the matter is, as a percentage of the population, very few people live in 600 square foot homes. This is particularly true in the case of families. That's where you really have to start talking about double that space.

Anyhow, all-up home construction via traditional means is not cheap. These days transportation costs likely add a non-trivial amount of money to the total. Costs do vary across the country, and so does median income.

It would be interesting to find a comparison of construction costs of the kind of home the average family is looking for to the median family income for the area in question.

Ability to resell is also a huge consideration for most people, so almost everyone who is single or DINK lives in a house that ... would hold a family, because those resell the best.

I don't even know if many people are building 1 bedroom houses anymore; those only seem to show up as condos now and then.

Everything is built as a three bedroom and so all you have as an option is three bedroom.

You are right to a point. But one problem is that everyone is trying to cram into the same couple of places. Every country in the world tries to become effectively a city state. The housing shortage is secondary to this trend.

You may turn every block into kwaloon walled city and there will still be housing shortage.

I am not against density - I am fond of European 6 story buildings. But you have a fundamental demand problem. The big cities are bleeding dry the rest of the countries.

That's very, very incorrect.

At the population density of Kowloon in 1987, 1,255,000 per square kilometer, and today's population of 8 billion people, it would only take 6375 square km to house everyone.

That's less than five cities the size of Phoenix, Arizona.

Reasonable urban population density -- the kind where there is still green space and buildings are mostly just a few stories high -- would be about 7500 per square km, about 1.1 million square km for the world population. That sounds like a lot, but it's only about one tenth the metro area of Paris.

There is a clean water problem. There is a good sewage treatment problem. There are energy delivery problems. But people will happily live in much denser arrangements than they do on average, and cities make all of the other problems more efficient to deal with. These are policy problems.

In Europe we also have housing crisis in the capitals and other desirable places and there thr density already what the YIMBY want. If you want to solve the housing crisis don't ask why the rent is so high in NY, SF or London. Ask why there are so few desirable pleaces for people to live.

The main thing that makes a place desirable to live in is good infrastructure: water, climate, education, healthcare, transportation. A place that has all of those attracts people; work arises where people want to live; good work pays for the infrastructure and makes it more likely that people want to live there.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem, made worse by people who want to not pay for the infrastructure and maintenance.

The rent is damn high in downtown / midtown Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn because there is enough business people, movie stars, stock traders, even software developers who are willing to pay as much.

If you step back into southern Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, the prices go down to reasonable, while still being within < 1 hour commute by public transport from the downtown area.

Significant parts of eastern queens have no subway line at all. They might have LIRR service at twice the price.

France takes up 643801 km2, so are you sure Paris is in the 11mln km2 ballpark?

Thank you, I grabbed the wrong figure from Wikipedia -- population instead of area.

13,024,518 people, 18,940.7 km2

>> Why build 20 $50k homes on the land and make $200k profit when you can build 10 $500k homes and make $1mil in profit?

I don't understand this comment. This is the same profit margin. You invest 1 million (20 * 50k) and make 20% (200k) or invest 5 million(10 * 500k) and make 20% (1 million).

Depending on the amount of initial capitol you want to invest you may choose one over the other.

Because the constraints are time, getting Landon, getting permits, etc. Each additional house is more overhead from regulations you have to meet and permits, as well as area improvements such as roads that need to be made or improved, and more houses mean more roads and sidewalks.

Even if they have the same profit, o ly one of those strategies scales to allow you to pump more money in and get more money out without significantly changing the resources required to accomplish it.

Landon never calls me back either. I should stop blaming myself for these delays.

LOL, this was so confusing for a second. My son is named Landon, which is probably why my phone was so quick to auto correct to that. :)

As a contractor or manufacturing company that's not what you're investing into. You build the machines and process and design the house. So in one case you get 200k out of the invest, and in the other 1000k. At least that's how I'm reading this.

If you, as a single household, plan to build a 50k house on your land, you might be unable to find someone to build it for you.

Of course in larger cities/projects with a single developer reselling units it's a bit different.

As I said, that's how I'm reading it.

The land is a fixed cost regardless of what you build on it, so higher return structures will win out even if the margins in the structures themselves are the same. Also fewer jobs to manage, fewer customers to sell to, simpler sewage, water, gas, electrical to deal with.

It almost sounds like building one multi-tenant city building is more efficient than twenty single-family suburb homes.

Correct, although many municipalities (like Boulder, CO) have ridiculous zoning laws such that you can't make multi-story apartment complexes. So the choice for developers is just single family suburbia

Single family zoning has become the norm in most of the United States. It's so broken. Even simple duplexes or quad-plexes are not allowed in most single-family zones.

Homeowners benefit because it drives up the prices of homes, which has become one of the most important financial investment tools to normal people in this country.

A burger has small profit margin, a complex meal has a bigger profit margin. That's what I think he meant. Venture Capitalist don't like nickel and diming.

even in the US, i'm sure there are places where land is still cheap. Thinking globally, there's even more of them. That's the beauty of it being opensource: you can build in any part of the earth

It's cheap because noone wants to live there.

Nobody wants to live there because there is no local work. If you work remote it's an amazing value proposition.

It's not just work though. It's shops, supermarkets, schools, community groups, cinemas, bars, ... you get the idea!

I thought living in huge estates (or even suburbs) with none of those things was fairly common in much of the US? There are examples of it here (Australia) too and there still seems to be plenty of demand to live in such places, despite the fact that everybody who does so after a few months or years starts complaining about it (in fairness, often such facilities are sold as "coming soon").

Suburbs in US almost universally have these things, even suburbs of decaying cities like Detroit or Cleveland (which often offer more facilities than than the city cores themselves).

I certainly got the impression that there were newer suburban housing developments with many 1000s of houses and basically nothing else. I gathered Texas was particularly prone to this so randomly browsing Google Maps found "Ridglea hills" and suburbs to the south of it in Fort Worth which appear to house 10s of 1000s of people without a single supermarket and barely even a cafe etc.

I looked at this neighborhood. It’s around 1 mile in diameter, and there are many restaurants at its north edge, and a Walmart at the south tip. This means that residents can reach it in less than 20 minutes walk, or 2-3 minute drive. This is really rather accessible, and I can’t imagine how you can get much better than that while still living in a large house with a yard. Seems like a pretty sweet place to live, if you ask me.

Yeah I saw the shopping strip at the northern boundary, which is why I said Ridglea hills and suburbs to the south of it (not a single supermarket shows up in a 5x5 km area, though part of the problem is Maps, it seems quite inconsistent at what scales anything shows up). It may well not be as barren as it appears on Google maps, but it certainly doesn't appear "rather" accessible to me. I'm curious how it compares to the blocks of land in Florida mentioned a few posts up.

This whole comment thread is weird. That neighborhood is surrounded by shopping, probably more so than the worst suburb "developments". And that isn't a normal walmart, as you can see from the maps if you click on it: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Walmart+Neighborhood+Marke...

It's a walmart "Neighborhood Market" which looks like a grocery store to me. There's even pictures of the inside.

Ridglea Hills has a stinking Walmart heh! The "Acres of suburbia" usually mean that it's a pain to walk to the store, not that the store doesn't exist.

I'd be surprised if there are many suburban areas that are more than 5/10 miles from "stores" for some value of store. Taking some central place of Ridglea gets me a 2 mile walk to Walmart. But there are no sidewalks.

The surburban hellscape you're imagining is probably like this: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Granada+Hills+North,+Los+A...

The nearest grocery stores appear to be on the other side of the highway, and like an hour's walk from inside the neighborhood. Although literally no one here is walking to Trader Joe's. Just having a Trader Joe's here kind of implies that.

I've been to the San Fernando valley, but only really around Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks, which definitely weren't like that. But it wouldn't surprise me that parts of LA would be.

well, schools become irrelevant once kids grow up (that is, if you have any). A lack of shopping is good for the wallet, when you grow accustomed to buying in bulk and stacking food. the rest is all about your lifestyle preferences

There 0.5+ Acre lots that you can buy for something like 20-30k$ in Cleveland, OH and I'm planning to move there.

Here in Florida, large parcels were bought up by developers and then subdivided into .25/.33/.50 acre lots. These were then sold off to people who eventually wanted to retire here. The problem is the building codes here are probably the most stringent in the US. So there are a lot of these parcels for sale on the cheap ($10k-$25k) but it’s still not worth doing anything with them.

Would a prefab house (which normally satisfies various codes' requirements) be worth putting there?

Even with a fully legal prefab house, you're often looking at anywhere between 20-100k in "other costs" besides delivery and installation.

You have to connect to water, sewer, power (or build a well and septic), you still have to get it permitted and inspected, etc, etc, etc.

The issue with much of Floridas land is it’s wetlands. It doesn’t so much matter what you build on it as it is about minimizing impact to the environment.

This is the exact issue I've run into. Land in good location is cheap near me. But only a handful of counties in the entire nation have building codes loose enough that let you make use of it affordably.

I've heard that parts (most?) of Wyoming is pretty lax about requirements.

You may find land that is cheap, but you will only be able to build a single house on it. This incentivizes building large.

Your chance of finding a sub-dividable lot in a suburban area is essentially 0.

The real solution will look very similar to https://www.quixotecommunities.org imo. Get cheap land, build net-zero tiny home communities, along with regenerative agriculture. Solar punk style.