As far as I can tell the minimum common standard in much of the US is only for heating [1].
Depending on your house layout and where you live that could be satisfied with a few portable electric radiators.
Anyway, I'm not singling out HVAC in particular, but using it as an example of something that's not strictly required, but people demand. It's death by a thousand cuts.
Heat pumps mean that heating and cooling are provided by the same device, so the cost of having cooling as a well as heating is zero, having one means having the other.
Zoning costs are not well accounted for by the article since it’s based on all the housing that actually got built. Zoning cost to society also includes all the homes that didn’t get built because it was illegal to put a shovel in the ground.
I'll leave the comparison to the historical population of the states you mentioned as an exercise for the reader. I'll just say that I don't think you can convincingly argue that AC is required for human habitation in those places.
Have you traveled much outside the US? There's plenty of places (e.g. in Africa and the middle-East) that are much hotter than that, and where AC is a rare luxury.
If you don't have AC there's plenty of places in the US where you wouldn't really need heating either, or perhaps only a small space heater.
Once you're at that point you'd drop all the fixed cost of having a heat pump setup. So no ducting etc. Don't take my word for it, read the article we're discussing here.
But yes, if you've already paid for the fixed cost of installing all of the infrastructure required to have AC throughout your house the marginal cost of adding just the cooling component itself is trivial.
But that's a really strange point to make, why would anyone want that if we're discussing dropping AC (for cost comparison purposes)?
If you only want heating then running water-heated radiators on a closed loop is much cheaper. That's what we do in the parts of Europe that only really need heating, and not cooling.
That or electric radiators, as is ubiquitous e.g. in Norway. The water-based systems are better if you're heating them with gas.
Having said all that I wouldn't be keen to buy a house in the states you mentioned without AC, I also wouldn't like to buy a house where I don't have easy access to electric sockets etc.
All I'm saying is that you need to factor those shifting preferences into the equation when asking why something's expensive.
1. https://blogs.sas.com/content/graphicallyspeaking/2019/10/02...
Water based gas radiators are absolutely not cheaper to install in the us than forced air. They are uncommon and expensive. Heat pump forced air is slightly more expensive to install than heat pump forced air. The a/c part is basically “for free” these days
We're discussing how certain changes in the last 100 years contribute to overall housing costs.
If something has become ubiquitous it might be more expensive than to just go along with the flow for any individual house, e.g. I'm sure most new housing plans in the US are designed to account for running HVAC ducts.
Instead you need to look at what e.g. a typical house in western Europe is spending on the heating system as a percentage of overall construction cost.
I don't know that offhand, but I'd be very surprised if it even reaches 2%, whereas apparently US HVAC systems cost 6%.
A 100 meter roll of aluminum coated PEX pipe is around €100 (all you'd need for a typical house here). You can run it directly through structural beams (only requires around a 20mm hole). The rest is just the central gas burner (maybe €2000) and some radiators at say €150 a piece. If we very generously call that €5000 with plumbing/installation that's 1% of a €500k house.