If we lived in a truely equal society where everyone was paid the same amount, you should therefore expect it to take 20 full time years of your life to pay for it.
(It’s a bit like with bread these days. If I can make a Tartine league bread for $5 in my goddamn home oven, including electricity, then why should I pay $8 for a bread that is much worse at a bakery outlet that sells stuff made at economies of scale? That’s not capitalism. It’s banking on people not being able anymore to value. It’s treating buyers not as competent individuals, but as dumb herd driven consumers. That approach is clearly working. But I’m attracted to those pockets and niches where it’s not true. Like HN.)
Most of the man hours are not in the crude house frame, but in everything else, particularly finishings. Also, the transactions costs for a large number of specialists are considerable.
[1] and indeed, looks like a careful bricklayer will be doing 4 a minute or so: https://youtu.be/jDgEqhz94-Y?si=oKxmQ-QAXEDC13h4
It includes almost all of the hard costs the article mentions except the foundation, brick laying, electrical, plumbing, windows, more concrete around the house, garage, and a myriad other things.
Sometimes we hired 1 or 2 people, once a month or something.
If all people were like my father, mathematician, polymath, expert in everything electrical, wood and metal constructions, with connections to many other engineers who regularly ask for advice, then the estimated total cost of building a 3 floor house is around 100.000 euros. That's the cost of materials, but probably less than that, 80.000 or something.
The estimated time for 3 adults (not children - teenagers), to build a 120 m^2 per floor building, all 3 floors, is 3-4 years.
Anyway, i think housing-transportation and many other things, will become free, once we move to carbon based buildings, vehicles and so on (see graphene). It is only carbon that offers us, strength of materials, flexibility, lightweight-ness, variety of materials so as to have everything in abundance. Abundance, like, personal skyscrapers, that kind of abundance.
Reasoning from first principles is great but building a modern code-compliant house isn't going to be possible for a layperson without guidance every step of the way. Move fast and break stuff isn't going to fly in real construction.