In fact, it’s illegal in a lot of places. Often the most desirable and expensive neighborhoods in modern cities would be illegal to construct now due to setback requirements, size, density zoning, and parking minimums. So instead of building more of the houses that people clearly want, we just bid them up in price until only the wealthiest can afford them.

how do those kind of non-optimal zoning laws get on the books?

It’s hard to paint a coherent picture, because each of these regulations are put in place at different times for different reasons. The result is cumulative, but the motivations were fractured and complicated.

Humans have changed little over time. Zoning was the trendy new area of law in its day and was supposed to make cities and suburbs great. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

They've been on the books since the early postwar era, when we didn't know any better. The question is: how do we get them off the books?

They build all the modern houses with a smaller count of giant damn rooms than they built the older ones. And they don't think them through very well, so they're really inefficient with space. More hallways and fewer walk-through rooms, too, on top of lots of the rooms just having shitty, nonsense layouts. A 2,500 sqft typical suburban US house built after, IDK, 2005, may well not feel bigger than a 1,700 sqft house built with more rooms and more thought to how to best use the space. It'll look a lot better in real-estate photos, though! More wow-factor! Ugh.

> A 2,500 sqft typical suburban US house built after, IDK, 2005, may well not feel bigger than a 1,700 sqft house built with more rooms and more thought to how to best use the space.

It's too bad, because you can have tremendous wow factor in a smaller but very smartly designed space.

But indeed the cheapest form of wow factor is to supersize the house. This is cheap in design expenditure (AKA less "thought" in the design), but not cheap in in the amount of materials used.

In these cases lower quality materials - i.e. non-structural paper-based sheathing, flimsy weather barrier materials, etc - are often used to compensate for the huge size.

How much of it is an issue of policy versus being what the market wants? I don’t have a source for this, but my personal experience has shown that people buying houses prefer larger homes. Not to say everyone is looking for a 4,000 sqft house, but I haven’t met a person that isn’t excited by an extra room or a larger basement while house shopping. It feels like builders will continue to output houses that meet the desires of those that can afford these new homes.

There is still plenty of affordable housing. You won't find it near SF, but move out to middle of nowhere and you will discover cheap houses and jobs. They won't pay as much, but when you can get a house for less than $100k how much do you need?

> when you can get a house for less than $100k how much do you need?

Well, enough to afford the mortgage and down payment for $100,000 worth of house for starters.

Sure, but if you are reading this that isn't hard. Even if stuck on minimum wage it is possible for a couple, not easy mind you, but possible.

Most of us reading this can afford to survive in expensive coastal cities; drawing conclusions about the affordability of middle American cities based on the experience of the top quintile is a very bad way to reason about these things. A much more fruitful way is to use actual numbers. So let’s do that.

The minimum down payment for most mortgages is 3.5%, which yields a mortgage payment of $635 at today’s rates, according to Zillow. This includes P&I, PMI, taxes, and insurance. So far so good.

The maximum recommended amount of your monthly take home your mortgage should be is 28%. If we follow this recommendation then our hypothetical family needs to bring home $2,267 after tax to guarantee that their mortgage is no more than 28% of their monthly budget.

$2,267 works out to $13.07 per hour for one person fully employed, or $6.53 for two people.

So yes, it’s technically possible at most minimum wages, but boy are those margins slim. I think the biggest issue here is that assuming that both members of the household can maintain perfect full time employment forever in an area where houses are that cheap is a really dangerous assumption to make.

The towns (a few different ones, all with MSA populations in the 500,000 range) I'm thinking of has fast food starting at $13.50/hour. With two incomes it isn't out of reach, and that is before you work up the chain, or find a better job - there are lots of other jobs hiring in the area for better pay (they are harder jobs to break into though). While the areas aren't the best, they are still safer than many larger cities.

Margins are slim for sure though. That point should not be overlooked. I am not trying to claim it is easy to live at the bottom.