Not connected to the real world
An New York Times article on a pretty modern house boasts that it's When a Small Budget Thinks Big, and goes on and on about the design compromises that were done to make the house fit into the tiny budget. And it is a nice house; all sleek modern lines (and real windows! with windowframes!) with what looks like very few of the classic stupid mistakes of modern architecture (the big one being that it's got a flat roof. In New York State. Leak city, here we come! The nasty open balcony to the second floor is redeemed by not being ostentatious. But other than that it's a very comfortable space that I'd [but not the best] would feel very happy to live in.) So, how much did this experimental, light-filled and relatively cheap house cost?
US$500,000. (Including land!, the article breathlessly adds. The land cost US$36000, which leaves the house costing, um, US$464,000, or approximately US$171 a square foot.)
Umm, okay. And here I was thinking cheap was something on the order of US$25/square foot (or US$60 square foot if I hired people to help me with house assembly.)
The article gives some idea of how the NY Times figures something is cheap. Sliding glass doors; 3 x US$2500. A custom-made bookcase-stairs that cost, um, US$35,000 (and looks like it cost about US$1500, but perhaps I was involved with high-end audio for long enough to trust the value of hideously overpriced components.) Heated floors; US$15/square foot, or what I'd guess is about US$22000 (and this isn't a luxury; I suspect that warm feet means that you could dial the thermostat down a lot and still feel comfortable, which would mean that you wouldn't burn off as much energy while the New York snows are slowly collapsing your flat shed roofs.
But, and this is important, there's still several hundred thousand dollars floating around unaccounted for here, and even in the Northeast you can get tracthouses of comparable size for less than US$464000. Where does the money go? A house like this is, just from an aesthetic point of view, infinitely superior to the modern crop of faux-colonial minimansions with 5 car garages, but you can buy brand new fragments of suburban hell that are cheaper than this, and people who aren't project directors at the Guggenheim will bite their tongues and buy the cheaper house.
If the New York Times had stressed the beauty of this house instead of going after the pretend economy of it, the article would have been less annoying. But that's a curse of modern design I keep seeing; people gush about how affordable modern design is, and it turns out that their idea of affordable is 3x the average cost of new houses in that area.
You're not going to get people out of their tracthouses that way. If you want to beautify the suburbs, you're going to do a lot better if you don't sell city-style house prices as the bargain of the century.
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If you want to beautify the suburbs, all you have to do is limit the size of development corporations.
If you have the work being done by fifty small firms, you don’t get 3 house designs repeated across a hundred and fifty houses; you get something relatively like diversity in development.
Throw in an insistence on a village center, and voila, something other than a warehouse for the sleeping.
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My current idea for affordable, and interesting, housing is to convert a Pullman sleeper car into a house, with the possibility of later adding on a caboose for an extra bedroom and study. The problem is finding a sleeper car that is reasonably nearby as the cost of transporting these things can get rather expensive.
In Wyoming, railroad workers used to build affordable houses by using railroad ties for a foundation and using whatever material they could scavenge. Some of these houses are actually rather attractive and still standing 110 years later, although they violate most of our current building codes.
As for the $500,000 "budget" house, I will say that it is more attractive than the McMansions that most people in this price range tend to favor. It is not a solution to the evils of tract housing.
I like the approach in Curitiba, Brazil, where the city government has a staff architect who will assist working people with designing and building their own home. There is also a project in New Mexico to teach people to build with traditional adobe.