I think it's because house construction techniques haven't improved. Look at cars: back in the old days, cars were hand-built, one at a time, and were horribly

I think it's because house construction techniques haven't improved. Look at cars: back in the old days, cars were hand-built, one at a time, and were horribly expensive. Then Henry Ford utilized the assembly line process and made car assembly much more efficient: instead of laborers sitting around waiting for other workers to get their part done, everything was organized to maximize labor utilization. Houses aren't like this: they're still made with the same primitive construction processes used centuries ago, by people who are all semi-independent contractors and not an organized labor force. If houses were made in factories the way cars are, you wouldn't be complaining so much about construction costs. Sears tried addressing this problem over a century ago with their famous kit homes, to an extent (by standardizing and factory-izing much of the carpentry work and then delivering the parts to the site to be assembled more quickly by local labor), but those are gone now for whatever reason and the industry returned to doing all the labor on-site.