It must be mentioned that houses carry a huge location premium, everyone knows this. You can buy a big beautiful home in the middle of nowhere for the cost of a studio in the middle of NY or SF.
Living isn't all that expensive, living close to where jobs are, or close to the 'heart' of a vibrant local culture, that's expensive, and it looks like the actual cost of building isn't the most significant part of that equation. Land is expensive, so you need to go up, and building up and space-efficiently (i.e. reasonably tall buildings with smart, space efficient units) is where a lot of these 'open-source plans for cheap rural houses with materials from Home Depot' completely do not apply.
It's a bit like building your own PC. Yeah you can build a much more powerful machine at a cheaper rate than a Macbook... but you're forgoing all kinds of factors like mobility which are extremely essential to many of today's consumers. Similarly, you can build a cheap rural home and completely forgo on extremely essential factors like proximity to jobs, culture and infrastructure.
http://www.artsatl.com/2016/01/serenbe-rural-studio-artist-r...
It must be mentioned that houses carry a huge location premium, everyone knows this. You can buy a big beautiful home in the middle of nowhere for the cost of a studio in the middle of NY or SF.
Living isn't all that expensive, living close to where jobs are, or close to the 'heart' of a vibrant local culture, that's expensive, and it looks like the actual cost of building isn't the most significant part of that equation. Land is expensive, so you need to go up, and building up and space-efficiently (i.e. reasonably tall buildings with smart, space efficient units) is where a lot of these 'open-source plans for cheap rural houses with materials from Home Depot' completely do not apply.
It's a bit like building your own PC. Yeah you can build a much more powerful machine at a cheaper rate than a Macbook... but you're forgoing all kinds of factors like mobility which are extremely essential to many of today's consumers. Similarly, you can build a cheap rural home and completely forgo on extremely essential factors like proximity to jobs, culture and infrastructure.
It's great for some people, but not for most.