Spend some time looking at county zoning maps. There are huge legal barriers to developing affordable housing. Zoning, minimum offsets, covenants, height restri

Spend some time looking at county zoning maps. There are huge legal barriers to developing affordable housing. Zoning, minimum offsets, covenants, height restrictions, usage limits, land use regulation, etc... If you want to re-classify some land you will need to go through extensive legal procedures and you will never get through them without HUGE amounts of capital. In addition, large swaths of land in the most popular states is owned by the federal government. All of this is in opposition to one or more of the most powerful lobbies in the United States. There is a reason the only homes you see being built these days are massive single family homes and luxury apartments. It just isn't economical to build low income housing. If people could move to Greenland, Svalbard, Antarctica, or the Sahara they would have. But those places just don't support human life. If we used technology to make them livable, they would cost an order of magnitude more than living in California or New York.