Allow me to introduce you to Bryan Caplan - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1952223415
Apartments are a different beast.
This was an explicit goal of the designers of the early building code split: make single family homes as cheap as possible, and apartments as expensive as possible.
What does it take to get a more efficient building market? Lots of building, lots of competition in building. Low barriers to new contractors becoming builders, etc.
It's truly only the YIMBYs who ever talk about any of this stuff in my experience.
You would be surprised.
What? What?
I dare anyone here who's simping for regulation to try to develop from scratch something that does not benefit from the myriad of exemptions that apply to 1-few family residential development (because there'd be no political will for the racket if the average homeowner was subject to it).
Those $500k costs include $100k of which is engineering for a SWPPP that any sane site planner who doesn't want shit to erode in no time flat would have gotten 95% of the same effect of anyway.
And the dirt work guy's bill includes god knows how many extra hours it takes to get it all spot on to meet the plans. He could've shot from the hip and done the job but there were plans and had to hit them.
And of course the lawyer has to go rounds with the town over what level of maintenance detail needs to be specified in the SWPP.
And of course the rent has to cover the landscaper who comes once a month to mow the ditch grass and stuff because that contract is how they cover their own ass.
The reason every goddamn modern property looks the same with the same shitty corporate bland sidewalks and same planters and same parking lot and entry way with the same five styles of door and the same light level and same everything is because every party involved if formulaically trying to meet the regulations related to their trade as cheaply as possible. And everyone knows this stupid. Every single party in the chain of developing a building from the initial survey to specing the lightbulbs knows they could, without even getting close to underperforming solutions, deliver infinitely more value if they could just exercise their goddamn professional discretion.
The guy delivering a rented trench box to a construction site that's chiseled out of bedrock knows what he's doing is wasteful and stupid just as much as the guy signing the check and the guys wasting their dime dropping it into the trench but hey, the rules are the rules and they're all billing the next guy down the line for it so it all goes on.
Used to be, the contractor would rent a trenchbox at his discretion. But that means "almost never", because the contractor that doesn't has lower prices than one that does, and just has to pay the occasional OSHA fine. But workers keep dying in trenches, so the government has to step in and make a rule "thou must always use a trenchbox".
We can't go back to "contractor's discretion", because then people die in easily preventable ways. The other alternative is MORE regulation, and the contractor has to do a soil study to know if they're required to use a trenchbox for this particular trench.
