We’ve been taking part in a GGW comment thread about affordable housing, and want to carry over a point here.

One of the reasons we still have an affordable housing problem even after the burst bubble is that we don’t have the right mix of housing types. Too much big and luxurious, not enough small and functional. Why aren’t developers supplying what’s in demand? Because counterproductive density limits and community NIMBYs push developers to build a small number of expensive units rather than a large number of cheap ones.

There are hundreds of thousands of people in the Washington area who would love to live in one of these:	Alas, most of the time this is what developers are allowed to build: