I’ve noticed something about affordable housing discussions. Almost everyone agrees we need more of it, right up until the conversation reaches the decisions that might actually make it possible. Then somebody wants a larger minimum lot, someone else objects to a duplex, and another committee needs six more months to study whether people need somewhere to live.
Meanwhile, the builder pays interest, the prospective buyer pays rent, and the modest little house everyone said they supported gets more expensive without anyone adding a single square foot.
After decades of writing about this industry, I believe we spend too much time treating affordable housing as a construction challenge and too little time examining everything around construction. We need to build more homes. We also need to stop making modest homes difficult to deliver and pay attention to the affordable housing we already have.
The House Can Stay While the Affordability Disappears
When people hear that we’re losing affordable housing, they may picture demolition equipment tearing down an old apartment building. That happens, but a home doesn’t have to disappear from the neighborhood to disappear from a family’s budget.
Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reported in its 2025 housing assessment that the number of rental units priced below $600 a month fell by 2.5 million between 2013 and 2023. Its analysis explains that rising rents account for more losses of low-rent housing than demolition or conversion to other uses. A building can remain standing while the affordable option it once provided is gone.
That distinction deserves more attention. We can celebrate new construction across town while existing residents lose access to homes they could previously afford. Counting new front doors tells us something useful, but it doesn’t tell us who can afford to walk through them.
The Starter Home Has to Survive the Spreadsheet
I don’t believe builders have collectively forgotten how to build a simple house. Give a capable builder a sensible plan and the right conditions, and they can still build that house. The trouble begins when we ask whether the finished price works for the customer and leaves enough margin for the builder to stay in business.
A smaller house still needs land, utility connections, permits, financing, and site preparation. Those expenses don’t conveniently shrink in proportion to the living room. Reduce the house by a few hundred square feet, and you haven’t necessarily reduced the cost of the lot, the sewer connection, or the time spent getting approval.
Now consider the builder’s decision. If a modest home and a more expensive home involve similar administrative effort and financial exposure, the larger project may offer a better return. We can criticize that choice, but asking a small business to repeatedly accept inadequate margins is a poor housing strategy.
I’d rather ask what would make the modest home a sensible business decision again. That conversation leads us toward smaller lots, workable density, predictable approvals, efficient designs, and development costs that fit the homes we’re trying to deliver.
Everyone Adds Something Reasonable
One of the hardest parts of this problem is that individual requirements often sound reasonable. A community wants attractive streets. A utility needs adequate capacity. An inspector needs safe construction. A lender wants confidence that the project will be completed.
But somebody needs to look at the combined result. A series of individually defensible decisions can produce a house the intended buyer cannot afford.
Imagine a community asking for workforce housing while requiring large lots, extensive design revisions, and a lengthy approval process. At some point, someone should place the projected monthly payment beside the income of the people expected to live there. That would make for a more useful meeting than another discussion about whether the roofline has enough character.
Safety and durability matter. So does checking whether our preferred process is delivering the outcome we keep promising.
Assistance Has a Job to Do
I also think we need a more useful conversation about housing assistance. A subsidy is not proof that a home has failed, and families who need help aren’t an accounting problem we can wish away with better production methods.
For households with very low incomes, even efficiently built housing may require assistance. We should be honest about that. A factory can improve how a home is produced; it cannot determine what a retired resident receives each month or what a local employer pays.
The question I want answered is how much of the funding closes that income gap and how much is consumed by avoidable delays, duplicated work, or poorly coordinated development. Those are different problems, and they deserve different responses.
We need assistance that reaches people, along with a development process that makes each housing dollar accomplish more.
The Factory Has a Role—and It Needs a Workable Project
Anyone who follows my writing knows I believe in offsite construction. Modular homes, manufactured housing, and panelized systems give us practical ways to organize work, repeat successful details, and use available labor better. Those are substantial opportunities.
However, putting a roof over the production line doesn’t cap the entire project budget. An efficiently built module can still arrive at an expensive lot with unfinished utilities, an unresolved permit, or nobody scheduled to complete the installation.
Factories need approved designs, dependable orders, timely decisions, and ready sites. Without those conditions, the industry can manufacture inventory faster than the field can accept it. That creates storage costs and cash-flow pressure instead of affordable homes.
We should compare completed, occupied projects. What did the home cost after transportation, foundations, installation, connections, and financing? How reliably did it meet the schedule? What will the resident pay to operate and maintain it? Those answers tell us far more than a factory price quoted without the rest of the job.
Keep the Homes We Can Still Save
New construction deserves attention, but preservation belongs in the same conversation. An older rental property with repair needs may already offer something difficult to reproduce: housing on an established site, near jobs and services, at a relatively modest rent.
That doesn’t mean every building can or should be saved. It means we should evaluate rehabilitation before assuming replacement is the only worthwhile investment. The work also needs a plan for residents, because an improved building offers little comfort to someone who can no longer afford to stay.
Preservation rarely produces the same photographs as a new development. A repaired roof and updated plumbing don’t come with a dramatic crane lift. They can still make an enormous difference for the household living underneath.
Gary’s Observation
What concerns me most is how easily responsibility gets divided until nobody owns the final result. The factory meets its production target. The planning department follows its process. The lender follows its requirements. Everyone completes their part, and the family still cannot afford the house.
I’d like to see more projects begin with the household we intend to serve and a realistic monthly housing budget. Then bring the builder, factory, suppliers, lender, and local officials together early enough to determine whether the complete project can meet it. If it cannot, identify what must change before months of work and money disappear.
We have capable people and useful construction methods. We also have existing homes worth preserving. What we need is the willingness to organize those resources around a measurable outcome: more people able to afford a safe, decent place to live, with enough left over to live.
