Example: an acre in Detroit is significantly less than an acre in the Bay Area. The cost of the building is somewhat the same..maybe a little higher due to labour cost differences. But Home Depot stocks the same things across the country.
The manipulation happens at state level to ‘manipulate’ how much tax levies can be extracted from properties. That’s why higher value properties are preferable. And people who can afford to pay millions of dollars for a dwelling are generally the kind of people who would not like to live in a co housing situation.
This is an affordability issue. The affordability issue is also partly because people insist upon living in areas where they cannot afford to live. It is as simple as that. With remote work and soon to come automation, low wages jobs are simply not going to be necessary. And if they are like manual or menial labour, it will be built into the larger landscape. An example of this is Singapore. Singapore is a city-state where housing is very clearly segregated by wealth. And in the wealthier parts of town, it is mandatory to build in a room for live in help.
So there is no such thing as a need for affordable housing in the tony part of Singapore. It’s a system that works. Home prices rival or exceed Bay Area prices in parts of high density Singapore, but every single home beyond a certain price range must have a room and bathroom for live in help. In America, we are very allergic and sensitive to segregation of any kind because of the rather nasty history. In most other countries, it is not and in higher density cities, it works and things move on smoothly because the system in place gives more important to resource allocation and quality of life than social justice. But in a way, there is no greater social justice than providing a safety net and reasonable quality of life for everyone. In Singapore, for example..there are no homeless people on the street or the economically vulnerable struggling to be sheltered. But housing is wealth segregated. And it works.
Other problems in America: technology is not democratized and there is no public transport network. Technology is not cutting edge. Not consumer technology but tech for living. (Example: how we deal with our trash and garbage. Compared to Sweden or Norway or Singapore is just embarrassing). This country runs on job and employment stats. There is sprawl. Which is bad and unsustainable. But the solution is not high density. The real solution is low to medium density that is well networked with other low to medium density. For this we need a good transportation network. The interference of federal, local and regional governance into each other’s territories make a mess of everything and nearly impossible to get anything done. (California’s High speed rail disaster is a great example). Big Gov fails if it gets too complicated. Small self sustainable communities networked with each other and having autonomy over their governance is the way to go. The future is not nations, but city states.