eli5: Would making house’s cheaper fix the housing issue?
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It’s hard to make homes cheaper when we have an upper class that’s buying all the property it can get. Put up a bunch of cheap houses and some rich guys will buy them all and scalp them.
depends on how you do it. If you just have government set prices lower than they were, then you will have shortage of houses (because nobody will want to sell or build new houses), and excess demand because everybody will want to buy at newly reduced price.
building more houses could reduce the cost, but you need to build them where people want to live, and that is usually in established cities, which runs into zoning issues as u/JerseyWiseguy said.
you would also need to normalize buying condos and townhouses, which are perfectly sufficient for childless families or single people.
finally, since none of that will work, and we will likely continue suburbanization, then build public transport. Chicago has Metra, a suburban rail system that is different from urban subway. It gets you from suburbs to downtown in half the time of a car, it is clean and popular with professionals.
The homebuilding industry certainly thinks so, and fights to keep safety regulations loose. That’s why single-family housing construction is built to such a lower standard than, say, an apartment building.
There is definitely a happy balance to be had somewhere. We don’t want to live in cardboard boxes, but if all houses had to be designed as bunkers, then most people would be homeless.
150 years ago, houses were smaller and usually didn’t have electricity, indoor plumbing, garages, etc. Any reasonably handy guy could build a house by himself with the help of his 12-year-old son. Now, you need dozens of specialists in HVAC, electrical work, wood construction, concrete, plumbing, etc. to build a house.
TL;DR: It would help.
by far the biggest cost of a home is the land.
so the choice is, build smaller, build higher.
part of it is restrictions in zoning, you can’t build a big block of small apartments in an area of large single family homes with huge backyards, hell they won’t allow you have have an In-law unit in the backyard (some towns are now allowing them)
the other factor is most folks don’t earn enough to afford a place of their own.
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