Americans don’t want to live in small apartments, and large portion haven’t had to do so for 50 years. Building more small units with no yard to replace the hou

Americans don’t want to live in small apartments, and large portion haven’t had to do so for 50 years. Building more small units with no yard to replace the housing that is most desirable is not something Americans will be willing to accept. HN is biased towards tearing down beautiful old high quality of life neighborhoods for more multifamily housing. I think that’s fundamentally the wrong approach, because that isn’t what the market wants. What we should be asking is: * how can we construct new neighborhoods similar to early 1900s single family neighborhoods? Walkable urban cores surrounded by houses in small lots? * can we decentralize jobs over more area to enable less dense housing options for more people—Why aren’t we building new cities? * How can we make housing construction cheaper? Low density housing is generally the cheapest to construct by square foot excluding the land (see above on decentralization of jobs). Still, what makes new construction so expensive is extremely high labor and material costs. Why did a new house cost a few years’ average salary in the early 1900s, and 6-10x the average salary now?