[forgetfreeman]

As popular as this narrative is it's all revisionist propaganda intended to distract from the actual culprits. "We" never stopped building houses. What we stopped building is 1k sq ft starter homes and made manufactured housing uneconomical, thereby effectively removing the bottom rung on the ladder of home ownership. These weren't consensus-based decisions made by older generations. They are changes to the real estate landscape that were intentionally engineered by a handful of massive developer firms. Even this ignores that a large part of the rise in housing demand is due to a flood of economic refugees from rural communities that have been gutted by a combination of pro-corporate neoliberal economic policies and the corporatization of the AG industry.

You correctly indicate that all of this is a transfer of wealth to those individuals who are already wealthy. Where you're mistaken is in suggesting this is a generational transfer when it is corporations and by extension the 0.01% of the wealthiest individuals in our society that are the clear beneficiaries.

[laughing_man]

Yes. A lot of this is down to environmental restrictions and building codes. Every rule a good idea in isolation, but taken together they mean you can no longer build an inexpensive house.

I have a builder friend who told me in the SF East Bay he can't make money building houses except for 4000 sq ft luxury homes on tiny lots.

[epistasis]

That's not environmental regulation that's just regular NIMBYism.

[laughing_man]

Nope. It's a lot of stuff like insulation regulations that require exterior walls that use 2x6s instead of 2x4s. That's not NIMBYism. Nor are all the taxes and fees.

[forgetfreeman]

Without nitpicking the unified building code to smithereens I would like to point out that labor costs on construction (excluding systems work like plumbing and electrical) typically run roughly 3x materials costs. Insulation requirements get pointed to for the switch to 2x6 or bigger studs but the ugly truth of the matter is lumber quality has declined to the point that larger boards are needed to make structural load requirements. Likewise a huge chunk of the increased cost of building comes from the sheer volume of products that have to be applied to keep OSB and engineered timber from reverting to it's native state (a pile of sawdust), which is again an issue being driven by inferior materials.