4 korrents from this piece
Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.
Their wordsDiscussions of housing policy often focus on issues of zoning, regulation, and other supply restrictions which manifest as increased land prices, but for most American housing, the largest cost comes from building the physical structure itself.
Their wordsWhat is different about construction is the level of coordination that takes place: whereas in a car everything is carefully designed to tightly integrate together, in housing construction the work can be done (and often is) with surprisingly little coordination between the various trades.
Their wordsBulk building materials are already mass-produced in factories, and are among the cheapest materials civilization is capable of producing.
Their wordsIt’s only in dense urban areas that the cost of land begins to dominate the cost of new housing, driven by regulatory and zoning restrictions that limit how much housing can be built in a given area.