Right, but the point there is that you have some of these inconveniences until you "move up" in socioeconomic status and you can afford a detached home. People

Right, but the point there is that you have some of these inconveniences until you "move up" in socioeconomic status and you can afford a detached home. People may not like sharing walls, but they probably like that more than just not having a house. Personally I went from the barracks, to a rental house for college with roommates, to my own apartment near where I worked, to a condo, and then to a SFH. Had I not gotten married I'd probably still be in the condo. Even in this "traditional" path you can see the variety of living arrangements. One problem is that these (as you call them) stopgap options are mostly non-existent or if they exist they exist in good neighborhoods that were built properly and are economically out of reach. Another problem is that it probably doesn't make economic sense for everyone to be a family in a single-family detached house. Plenty of young people or widowers or whatever may not want to live in a single-family detached home with all of the associated maintenance and work that goes into it. We need options, and a variety of living arrangements available for different lifestyles and different economic factors. Frankly, nobody is going to build cheap SFH. It's a contradiction. Focusing on that just means you build houses for the extremely wealthy or the extremely poor. If you are wondering why, it's because home builders like any business chase ROI so they're going to build homes with $350,000 in materials and labor that they sell for $600,000 and then the poor don't have housing but the government has the political capital to build low-income housing, so nobody in between has great options. Home builders unfortunately aren't going to buy land and then build $175,000 3br/2ba homes and turn around and sell them for $250,000. It just doesn't make economic sense for them to do so. They can build condos, townhomes, and other mixed modality living arrangements and make enough money on them, but that's about it. And naturally they're not going to build in the middle of nowhere because they have to find workers and also because people still need to live near jobs.