In a master-planned community called Tartesso, homebuilder D.B. Horton is building and selling homes for as little as $82 a square foot. Considering that the city of Portland, which is hardly the nation’s least-affordable housing market, thinks that $651 a square foot is “affordable housing,” how does D.B. Horton manage to build homes for less than one-seventh of that cost?
Tartesso is located in the Phoenix suburb of Buckeye, which is the biggest city in America you’ve probably never heard of: at 392 square miles, it’s has the fifteenth-largest area of any city in America. But many of the bigger ones are more counties than cities; really, only Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix itself occupy more land. Continue reading
