1. One size fits nobody. There are a variety of housing options succeeding in the marketplace. This variety exists because a variety of lifestyles exist. What is your lifestyle today? What will your lifestyle be tomorrow? Literally, "tomorrow" as in the day after today. It can change that fast and that often. How does your weekend use of housing differ from your workday housing needs? Before asking what kind of housing someone needs, first ask about their multiple lifestyles.
2. What kind of housing is popular? Why is that type popular? Affordable housing or giant mansions, it still has to be sold. Do some market research.
3. If you cannot afford housing, you definitely cannot afford private transportation along with your housing. Much of the affordable housing crisis would disappear if useful public transportation were widely available. Inexpensive housing tends to be pushed away from concentrations of jobs. The ability to move yourself and enough stuff to where you need to be is more important for survival than any one shelter. To thrive you need a secure place to store and use your accumulated stuff.
4. Private activities and public activities need separate spaces. You can limit your housing to private activities if there are places for your public activities in your neighborhood. Fewer public services and activities in the neighborhood means you need a more multi-functional, thus bigger, house.
5. Over time, the simplest shack may be built into a mansion. Then it becomes unaffordable to maintain, everyone moves out, and the accumulated resources, in the now mansion, become waste.
Conclusion: Give up on stand alone "affordable" housing. Build affordable neighborhoods instead. Save resources by sharing activity spaces and services. Keep travel distances to a human scale instead of automobile scale. Mix it up so that when someone changes their lifestyle, thus changing housing needs, they may be able to continue living in the same neighborhood, in a different house. Reduce, reuse, recycle, on a human neighborhood scale.
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