The article mentions that land is scarce. It is often the case that the high cost item is not the obvious one, but the scarce one. California had very high ho

The article mentions that land is scarce. It is often the case that the high cost item is not the obvious one, but the scarce one. California had very high housing costs, not so much because construction costs were high, but because land costs were. I would surmise that, in the case the article mentioned, a $300 house would not help much, because the cost of acquiring the land to put it on is so much higher. My town is a bizarre case of scarcity pricing. Just before the crash, larger houses were going for well over a million and more modest houses were over $500K. Land was cheap. A lot could be had for $15K-$30K. The scarce item was water hookup. A Chevron station with leaking tanks had contaminated the water source and there has been a decade long moratorium on new hookups. To build a new house you needed a cheap lot and a $350,000 water meter. One man had actually accumulated 15 of them.