HOAs are even worse than county & state governments when it comes to building a house. Many HOAs have building codes which include a minimum square footage. Som

HOAs are even worse than county & state governments when it comes to building a house. Many HOAs have building codes which include a minimum square footage. Some HOA regulations require over a 1000 sq ft livable footprint (garages don't count). The problem is HOAs have an incentive to raise property value, which makes it far more expensive for people to build a home to live in. HOAs are incentivized to increase property value of the neighborhood & large houses increase property value. Small plots of land are dominated by HOAs. Finding small plots of "unregulated" (no HOA) land often requires one to live very far from a city & decent grocery stores. I'm not a big fan of the red tape of regulation & how regulations can be abused by large capital, but in the case of housing, HOAs are a bigger problem. Of course, there are also municipal regulations which require small plots of land to be more tightly regulated re: housing. A solution is to improve house design which can be modularly expanded as one gains more wealth. That way, a family can start small & gradually build additions or attach additional modules as time goes on.