Single-family construction headwinds

I suspect that single-family construction will continue to face headwinds. Every location is a trade-off between transportation costs and structure costs, and the components of suburban transportation costs (cars + gasoline) have gone up a lot over the past year. Interest rates are up, and thus so are financing costs. Car insurance rates also up substantially. Cars are also becoming more capital intensive, due to vehicle electrification. People are bringing down their fuel costs by paying more up front but taking on more financing costs to be able to pay more up front.

Remote work won't save the single-family home market. The pandemic induced wave of remote work has crested and is receding. The tide is still coming in, but this particular wave is ebbing. And with it, the need for an extra bedroom to use as a home office. No one who bought a house during the pandemic is going to shift back to urban living, but the number of people making that transition is going to drop off.

The cost of reversing the transition from urban renter to suburban owner is forbiddingly expensive: Transaction costs of home purchase impose a financial cost, home improvement customizations create sunk costs, etc. But the cost of making that transition in the first place is also costly--a second car becomes a practical necessity.

Blight

Any town whose land values no longer support the rehab/renovation of existing SFD is in a bad way. If there is zero demand for existing housing that can be restored using sweat equity, there is zero demand for (new) infill housing. What could be saved is pretty much irrelevant. Non-market infill development makes things worse--competes with existing housing. New multifamily isn't feasible. NIMBYism preventing existing SFD from being converting into multifamily is making the blight worse, because rather than having duplexes you have abandoned and decaying single-family-detached.

Fighting blight through demolition just creates pockmarked areas. Demolition of blighted structures just changes the flavor of blight - from building to lot. The core issue remains - insufficient demand. You can't cure a lack of demand by adding additional supply. You can subsidize non-market infill housing in the name of 'neighborhood stabilization'. Which will work, but only by strengthening a political constituency capable of advocating for infrastructure investment near them, to the detriment of other neighborhoods, such as has happened in Chicago.

Sanitarium Architecture

Modernism is an architectural style based on Swiss sanitariums for traumatized war veterans, who found blank walls and empty spaces restful. It triumphed in architectural practice because simple geometrical models were more persuasive in convincing clients to build things than the 2D facade drawings of Beaux Arts that previously prevailed. It gelled with the 'out with the old' ideology of post-war building and pseudo-technocratic rationalism. And it triumphed financially because it was cheap to construct - concrete form work rather than carved stone.

When Robert Venturi's Post-Modernism arrived, and people were given an option, they took it.