Can These $20,000 Houses Save the American Dream?

[LeftyMom]

17. I don't know who you're lecturing,

but rest assured I'm in no danger of being able to afford a mcmansion, on the off chance that I wanted one, which I don't.

But living in a glorified garage kit without cabinets or closets or interior walls is not a reasonable or especially livable housing solution. That poor man in the photo in the OP hardly has a thing and that place looks painfully cluttered.

edit: FWIW, my grandmother lived in way more than 2000 square feet. Old farmhouses are enormous, since people used to have hella kids, but so are urban Victorians and even Craftsman bungalows are decent sized. Small houses didn't really become the norm until the postwar housing boom, and the driving force behind that architecture was fitting the selling price in right under the maximum for a GI loan. Also those houses tended to have attention to interior detail which modern homes lack, so comparing them to a scarcely-finished people coop with $50 worth of modular shelving and exposed pipes is silly.