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Comment by ty6853 | Hacker News Reader

Trades licensing, tightening codes, inspections,zoning, inspection, planning, environmental regulation, and water/well shenanigans are the reason for unaffordable housing. Plenty of cheap land near jobs, land not a meaningful constraint.

By bypassing most all these and DIYing a house I was able to build a house for well under 100/sqft.

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Where I live, land is a very meaningful constraint, there’s no cheap land near anything meaningful. We’re about at our limit in terms of transportation infrastructure, too, so additional housing has to be apartments right in town or our horrible traffic will become even worse. Unfortunately, everything they are building is tight single family homes.

Many of our immigrant families crossed the Darien Gap by foot for new opportunities. Fortunately there are roads to flyover country. If you have a thumb, escape is possible. Much of my family did it with far less resources and as many familial responsibilities as you probably have

I live on an overloaded island thousands of miles from anywhere else metropolitan, so no I cannot just hook my thumb and hitch a ride with a trucker across the vastness of some flyover states to get to new opportunities.

Go to the docks, eventually someone might need a hand on a yacht/sailboat, even if it takes awhile.

I might as well just lift my own boot straps and fly away to Utopia.

Not sure how that's utopic. I escaped an overpriced west coast hell hole by working on a fishing boat. Hard work but it works.

There is not in fact plenty of cheap land near jobs in major urban centers.

I can show you a fair bit in Chicago if you want.

Say more (here, or next time I see you).

https://chiblockbuilder.com/city-owned-lots/?

We also have liberal zoning around multi flat residential and it’s trending more liberal.

Chicagos housing price problem, if there is one, is mostly a school and safety disparity problem.

It's generally cheaper to buy land in someplace with shit schools then pay for a nice private school, especially somewhere like Chicago.

Sure. I get that. Last year, a group of activists bussed about 100 Venezuelan migrants into Oak Park, and we allocated a bunch of money towards housing and services for them. The math worked out such that we could have instead bought most of the families a free-and-clear house in a neighborhood like Dolton.

The problem as I see it is intensely localized to the inner-ring suburbs, which exist pretty much entirely to siphon money out of the Chicago school systems. Those suburbs are engines of middle-class opportunity, and they're deliberately designed to lock out the kind of people who would consider buying affordable houses in Chicago proper.

My only point in this is that, to the extent it exists, the housing affordability problem in Chicagoland is not primarily driven by availability of land. If it was we’d just do what we did in the past and make more.

It’s driven far more by history and public policy and the ugly confluence of those 2 things.

I'm knee-jerk about this because "the availability of land" is really the kernel of the housing affordability problem in Oak Park.

There's plenty of inexpensive, buildable land in Chicago. It just might not be in the neighborhoods where there's housing demand.

How many of those can you realistically bypass by DIYing? I understand it saves a bit on taxes and you don't need a license yourself, but the rest?

I’m wondering the same; I have friends who build houses in areas with virtually no zoning and the cost per square foot is $190. (They sell for $200, so on a modest 2,00 sq ft house, he’s putting up $400,000 in capital to build it and earns a $20,000 profit after the 3-6 months it takes to build).

If I did all the work myself, I might be able to cut the price down to $150 a square foot, because materials alone are expensive, and it would take me at least a year of working on it do so. Now I’m “only” spending $300,000, and effectively paid myself $100,000 to build the house.

None of this includes the cost of land.

I bypassed codes under an owner/builder exception. No inspections no building plans basically no regulatory costs. I found ultra cheap land with an unproven poorly documented but already drilled well share that turned out to be good (high risk but high reward) so nearly zero for water connection and well. I took some high risks proving electric and water and septic but after almost a year of footwork I proved them -- massively increasing land value for basically free.

Only graded the footing, no excavation under footprint of house, so one day rental backhoe, under $1k for entire dirt work. Poured concrete (300 bags) by hand one bag at a time without concrete truck. Transported blocks and built block crawlspace wall then ran dimensional lumber across, no engineered lumber or piers.

Frame light wood structure to minimum code following irc so no engineering nor architect. Plumbing almost all on single wall with only toilet/tub/sink/sink. All electric appliances, I diy connected to power grid running my own secondary mains.

These last year's prices I think if you exclude utilities I'm at about 70/sqft, you could probably do 50 with reclaimed material and a flatter roof. I double timed after work a couple years but took off maybe 3 months so well under 100k lost wages.

What specific owner/builder exception did you use?

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