[anonuser123456]

In most 'unaffordable' locations, land is way more expensive than housing.

My house, to build new, would cost 250k. The land it sits on is another 750k.

The right answer would be to demo my somewhat old house and rebuild 6 units on it. But you can't; setbacks, height restrictions, parking spot requirements etc. make that impossible. Why? Because everyone in the neighborhood already 'got theirs'.

But from a usage standpoint, my million dollar/ property neighborhood is at that price point because of the land use, not because builders don't build 'affordable housing'

[jandrese]

You can't build cheap housing, it would drop property values!

That's not too far from the truth either. Comparing "comps" is a lazy man's game. They don't look that closely at the houses they are comparing.

[anonuser123456]

Ugh.. this is so true. When I bought my house I used a rudimentary linear regression to decouple land price from home price. My realtor thought of that as unworkable black magic. I was like well, if I know the build quality and know the cost of construction, why wouldn't this work?

I think the answer was "pride of ownership, location, location, location!"