[gen220]

Not endorsing the view, just sharing lines of reasoning I've seen.

Paying money to the bank implies you financed your purchase of a home. This is not necessarily a morally-neutral activity, it's in fact nuanced but we've done a good job of handwaving away the nuance in the last 4-5 generations of Americans.

A small vignette to explain: financing allows people to leverage their credit history and income to make larger purchases than they could otherwise afford. This increases the sticker price of purchasing a home, which prices out people with low credit or income. Anything that increases the price of housing effectively increases the price of rent, which limits peoples' abilities to save to actually purchase a home – it's a nasty cycle. One could argue that by participating in that system of financing, you're perpetuating it, but most people immediately dismiss this idea, ymmv.

Building a house, and paying people to build the house, is not a problem. You're exchanging value for labor and assets. You're de facto increasing the supply of housing.

[themaninthedark]

So, I personally like the idea of someone working with a builder to build your house. I also like the idea of only ever buying something rather than financing it.

I also think that if that was only the option, housing prices would rise rather than fall.

Cash up front, I assume in an escrow so that buyer can't cheat builder and builder can't run away with the money.

This means that a someone who wants to build/buy a home is going to need around 150k saved up.

Assuming that 50k yearly salary and rent is immoral, they have to live at home until saved up. 1/3 put aside is 16.66k per year, 9 years before they can get a house.

In actuality, the cost is probably going to be more expensive as you would no longer have developments going up.

[gen220]

Not necessarily, you just might not build 100% of your eventual home immediately.

It used to be (i.e. prior to the postwar expansion of credit to the American consumer) pretty common to build a "starter home" that was intended to be expanded. You start with the basics (basement, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom) and expand modularly from there as your prosperity and needs allow.

In the midwest, they would start by building the foundation, basement, and a very modest first floor. As the family prospered, had children, and developed roots in the neighborhood, they'd expand the above-ground portion of the home in the summer months. You can find homes frozen at each stage of development from the pre-depression 1900s still around today, although they're of greater archaeological value today than housing stock value. A lot of present-day "colonial" housing stock in the Northeastern U.S. have evidence of this gradual accrual over the decades.

This idea of "build a whole mansion at once" was historically reserved for the truly wealthy, and has only been "practical" for a greater segment of society for the last 50 years (again, with the expansion of consumer credit, not because we can actually afford these things).

You could still choose to build things this older style. Our culture of "obtain everything all at once, immediately up to the limit of your purchasing power" is the main impediment. That, and building codes might frown on some earlier-phase iterations, though YMMV.

[themaninthedark]

My ~150k is for a starter home. That is what a ranch 3 bedroom, 2 bath with kitchen/dining and living room, no basement goes for in my area, based on 1990's code.

Current code is more stringent.

I know that people used to add on, that is however going to be more costly in the long term. Think about heating and A/C system, rather than buy the system once and keep it for 15 years as you expand you need to keep redoing duct work and adding capacity.

You will end up with insulation and vapor barriers between two interior walls.

Plumbing and electrical will become interesting as well.

I grew up in the kinds of homes you are describing, I like them but the building style does have challenges.

I also like the idea of people putting down roots, however this in turn limits people's opportunities.

This also limits the type of housing, what would be required in order to build a duplex or townhouse? A condo/apartment building?

Part of the current green movement talks about getting rid of suburbia and condensing into more urban areas. This would be a direct opposition to that as you would need to buy a lot size that guarantees that you can grow.