The message: Live in one of these or you’re not welcome

A quick note to the folks complaining that large single family detached houses are sometimes used as apartment buildings: YOU ARE WHY HOUSING IS OVERPRICED!

There’s a dearth of affordable housing in virtually every metropolitan region in this country with a healthy economy. There are a multitude of reasons, but the most important one is that we have systematically made real affordable housing illegal in almost every conceivable way. Apartments above shops are illegal. Granny flats in the back yard are illegal. More than 3 unrelated persons living together in a house is illegal. Even small single family detached homes are frequently illegal. The list goes on and on. In much of America it is illegal, or at best very difficult, to build anything that’s not a luxury detached house for the upper middle class. Until that changes there will always be an unsolvable affordable housing crisis, and there will always be groups of people pooling money to live in the only kind of housing the law permits there to be enough of.