Or you can think differently, 4 families can buy a 1 acre land plot, 5 or 6 children and a couple dads then start building a modest house (maybe 1200sqft) and then resell the entire thing in about a year for 4 times the land-only price. Suddenly 4 families that were making 25k each per year have $1.3m from some tiny plot they bought in the Santa Cruz mountains. Then they do it again and again and again. This is LITERALLY not even that hard to do today.
The step of building the house for your family at an incredible discount vs buying can work a lot of places. It's not very repeatable to do it commercially though. I DIY'd my entire house for extremely cheap but even in one of the most generous spots in the USA they only allow me to build a house once every 5 years and I have to file a sworn affidavit I do not intend to sell or profit off of it. If you want to do this as a business proposition as a random unlicensed person you'll be fronting all your own capital and then looking at about 5-6 year turnaround per time, and the buyer likely won't be able to use a mortgage, plus (in my case at least) I'd be subject to prosecution if it came to light I was doing that for a living. The smaller scale version of this is motorcycle/car curb-flippers that don't spend a gazillion dollars securing a dealership license, probably a bit more accessible but again as soon as the state or real dealerships get a sniff you're fucked.
I can recommend doing this to make a house for your own family but I think you have to be a bit insane to front your own money to build houses in almost anywhere in California as a business proposition unless you have a contracting license, which is to say, you already were able to make a decent living. I only got away with doing it for my family because all the people who could have brought the insane rules down upon me were kind enough to realize it was just a family trying to survive, they'd have fucked me with all sorts of inspections, shenanigans with the utility company, having trouble getting water, trades licensing, engineering stamps and plans, etc if they'd have gotten a sniff I had done this "again and again."
This kind of stuff did work fairly well up until in the 60s/70s before developers got in bed with the regulators/planning and zoning boards. Back then a guy and his truck could become a developer easily.
Sure, may be more difficult in Santa Cruz, but fairly typical in 90% of the country. And families that would dare do this, probably know 5 GCs that stamp their name.
If you know 5 GCs well enough to sign off for liability on your work, it's not necessarily a bad plan, but at that point, you're already bootstrapped enough to squarely make it into the middle class, as you could have just been offering to the public under that license or as an unlicensed sub to those 5 GCs.
I don't hate the idea but it's not a bootstrapping plan. It's a plan for someone already bootstrapped.
You could probably get away with it without much money once per county or maybe state, max out every loan imaginable, buy shit land (probably 50% financed at best on vacant land), declare you're owner-building your own house for non-commercial reasons. It's possible in my state. By the second or third time though your creditors and the planning board will be on to you and you'll be chased out of the county and you'll have to relearn all the bureaucracy again, which is the hardest part.
