Cindy Hamilton wrote
zeez wrote

For starters, outlaw real estate speculation, at least the out of control kind.

Actually, I was most curious about this:

Welcome to housing in America. Let's build these rigid structures,

I like rigid structures. Rigidity helps keep me and my stuff safe.

Or safer, anyway.

I would not have wanted to live in a tent when the
temperatures dipped below 0 F this past winter.

Plenty have done tho, most obviously in the gold rushes etc.

price them to hundreds or thousands of times
what they are worth, and fleece the populous,

Housing prices are pretty much set by the buyers.

Nope, they're actually set by the surplus of the building rate over the purchase rate.

Anybody who is foolish enough to spend $1 million
on a three-bedroom ranch deserves what they get.

In some places the land alone costs half that.

As far as new housing goes... In 2006 my husband and I built a
20- x 40-foot workshop from a kit. It cost about $20,000, and
was basically a garage, slab on grade. Building houses isn't
cheap. Nobody is going to build them and give them away.

Quite a few do give away older houses.

If you try to live anyway else, or we feel your home
is not up to our codes, we are going to get you.

I assume that the OP wants to eliminate building codes, which would
result in buyers having no protection from incompetent builders--unless
buyers become experts themselves in the construction trades, and
oversee the construction process. Not likely.

Plenty do, including me. I actually had the hilarious result where the
code inspectors told the local builders to have a look at how I had
done my concrete slab, because that is how its supposed to be done.