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Housing prices
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Materials require labor. Labor requires inspections. The more material the more everything else. And those materials cost more because they are to much tighter specifications than they were in the 70s. The lumber might be cheap but a fire suppression system in a 4000 square foot house costs a lot more than no suppression system in a 1200 one.
But as you point out it's not really about materials though. It's about square footage. You don't get a bulk discount for buying a 5000 square foot house instead of a 1200. You pay even more. And zoning won't let you build a 1200 anymore because they tax based on square footage so they jacked up the smallest house size they will approve.
There is no single cause for houses being more expensive. It's a whole host of them and that's why prices climbed faster than inflation.
Per sqft? You absolutely do. Buying one 5000 sqft house will almost certainly run you less than buying four separate 1200 sqft units, all else being equal. If anything, larger houses are a result of cheaper material inputs. PVC and compressed lumber make manufactured homes easier to produce than their historical brick and mortar and copper pipe counterparts.
So I think you have it backwards. Houses have expanded in size to justify their inflated costs. But the real price inflation is happening at the ground floor.
Privatization and financialization are both but-for drivers of price-inflation. Cheap lending means more dollars are chasing the same number of goods, despite flat wages. The functional extinction of public housing means there's no price ceiling for entry level housing units established by the state. So prices compress around the median purchase rate, while low-income households are entirely priced out of the marketplace and middle-income households are larded up with debt.