In the 1950s, the average new home was about 1200 sqft and held about 3.5 people. Today, it is over 2400 sqft and contains about 2.5 people. Meanwhile, we tore down something like 80 percent of our Single Room Occupancy units over the course of a couple of decades.
The lack of affordable housing has been severe and growing worse for decades. This is why waiting lists for Section 8 housing is routinely measured in multiple years or even more than a decade in some cases.
I will add that these comments about "It is just big cities that have expensive housing" are a red herring. That's where the jobs are. If you have no job, you can't afford a place to live. Jobs in small towns typically pay less. Moving someplace cheaper works for the privileged few with portable income and/or passive income. People who still need to work for a living cannot magically solve their problems by moving someplace cheaper.
This would have been easily doable. Hell if the political will were there building that many units in a year would be feasible.
But you can't zone that, you can't mandate it. You can't grant easements; you can't even used condemned public property.
Because our political system has been captured by greedy bastards like Vhinod Khosla and Donald Trump.
I dunno.
The city of Los Angeles had access to land and planning resources and they still arrived at optimal cost of $350,000 per barebones unit http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-prop-hhh-qa...
As the linked article politely notes, those costs are likely to overrun once the construction starts "A Times analysis of projects funded by the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee, which includes most permanent supportive housing projects, shows that recent projects have usually cost more, averaging about $420,000 per unit in 2016."
Even if land is semi-free or government-owned, the zoning has been taken care of and the architectural designs are obtained pro bono, it still costs money to get building materials, hire labor, provide parking spaces, develop infrastructure and build the residences on a code-compliant way.
And let's just say that $420,000 a head goes a long way in many non-coastal areas of the United States.
That's quite a blanket statement for the entire US. Can we confidently claim that no affordable housing whatsoever exists in Detroit, Baltimore, rural Pennsylvania, non-metropolitan Texas, or Midwestern states, where in some places http://freelandks.com/ one can still get free land?
The problem seems to arise when everybody is vying for roughly the same space - large coastal cities with mild weather, proximity to public transportation, beaches, decent restaurants, some entertainment scene, job growth and economic prospects.
Same coastal cities also seem to be earthquake-prone and therefore require more expensive (than aforementioned Midwestern states) building codes and safety regulations. As the cities are dense, there's a set of regulations in regards to mandatory parking, green zones and other stuff that's just peculiar to large cities. Combined with higher than average cost of labor, the construction and compliance costs alone command a premium, and that's before we get into land prices.