I have come across some very safe, efficient, and cheap building designs that I would love to build on some land. In the U.S., it is very hard to go through all the paperwork to get it built. If I had someone put a rickety frame in the ground and slap on some drywall, it would be easy as pie to get the paperwork done.
The U.S. building code seems broken from my perspective. Cheap homes are not hard.
I built a strawbale house in 1998. Cost of the strawbales was about $1000, and the cost of the rest of the house was another $85,000..... it was 1400 sqft. Amazing how much the rest of the "necessities" cost.
The house had 2000 ft of CAT-5 in it, about 1000 ft of co-ax.
The U.S. building code seems broken from my perspective. Cheap homes are not hard.