How to make high quality and cared for housing that's still affordable?

The natural inclination, I'm sure, is to fix affordable housing problem by making cheaper homes. We can make cheaper homes by scaling designs, buying cheaper materials, doing more labor ourselves. But this approach has historically resulted in homogenized and uncared for homes.

Shelter is crucial to human-life. (We might also consider how human-life can solve this need with better respect for other life) Homes are central to our feelings, ideas, security. They don't require grandeur but they do require character. This approach lacks character.

My ideal home aligns with some of the principles of Christopher Alexander. Homes should: - Respect the land - Respond to the environment - Provide simple joys - Be a living part of the environment - Embrace imperfection Is this possible to achieve at scale? Probably not.

But then what is the right balance? If scale is our lever of reducing costs, what is the most amount of homes one could make while keeping integrity? 100? 50? 10? 1?

A good thought! As a parent, I’m curious if there’s an in between. Like if having better third spaces results in single family homes needing to provide fewer functions, thus creating a smaller floorplan/footprint?

Single family homes are more intensive/expensive to maintain from an infrastructure perspective so even without better third spaces (which is still good) mixed use/dense neighbourhoods will have a smaller footprint.