I think a lot of it is this. A lot of our grandparents literally built their own houses, and while that's probably easier than ever nowadays, it doesn't solve t

I think a lot of it is this. A lot of our grandparents literally built their own houses, and while that's probably easier than ever nowadays, it doesn't solve the infrastructure problem. I won't save much money doing that if getting a road / electricity / water / Internet / sewer to the property will cost as much as (or more than) the house itself. IMO it's yet another network effect caused by fewer people being willing to work in these kinds of fields, and a decreasing birth rate. Infrastructure inherently requires maintenance, so as it increases, so does the amount of people required to maintain it. Yet we have fewer and fewer people to do it, so adding new stuff just becomes unreasonably expensive.