I live in an unregulated county and I just built a house for $60,000.

I've found a few plots of land in San Francisco where you could put my house on where the land itself is under $200,000. So $260,000. So why doesn't anyone do this? It's $200,000 in profit easy since you could sell it for $460,000+ easy. Capitalists just hate making money? Clearly there is regulation stopping it, otherwise developers would be buying $50k boxables or the cheapest manufactured house they could drop down off a trailer and making an absolute mint on all the slivers of cheaper land you can find for sale in these upper priced cities.

When I was in the planning phase of building my house I quickly identified only a few counties in my state where it was even possible to build a house all myself without regulatory inspections. The only reason why I have a house is because I found a place with no regulatory inspections for owner-builder housing which allowed me to bypass codes, engineering, building plans, and licensing.