Sears Homes 1915-1920

But nothing's stopping you from buying one of these and hiring a professional to do the build. Would still be much cheaper than buying a property with a home on it already.

Connecting to the grid might be different though - I've never had to mess with that.

In Michigan, you are absolutely allowed to do your own build on your own land. It just has to pass code inspection, and it has to pass at every stage. (i.e., they want to inspect structural/electrical/plumbing/hvac/etc, before you put drywall up, to ensure things are actually OK underneath, and then inspect it again after drywall is applied).

Getting utilities can be hard and expensive if you are building off-grid. But there are so many vacant lots that already have power+water+gas at the street, that you don't really have to do that unless you really want to live in a specific off-grid location. (Suburbs and some townships make a lot of their money from this, so they usually want you building near their pre-existing utilities and hooking up to it)

Sewage tends to be the hardest part -- some places have "most" utilities, but not waste & water. And people assume they can just put in a leech field "septic tank", but since most of the state is already swampland, you have to be careful of how and where you put that, so you don't poison the water. (They will make you get a land survey to prove your location is safe to leech from, and they will inspect your install, and yes people complain all the time about it, but when they didn't do this, people did poison the water all the time, and then accidentally drank their own waste water and make themselves sick, or accidentally poisoned their neighbors water and made those folks sick, etc).

People complain about the licensing and permitting and inspections, but honestly, it's all been extremely fair and pretty quick and cheap. If you aren't passing your inspections here, you're likely doing something grossly negligent (or are about to do something grossly negligent).

The rules vary by state (50), by county (Ohio alone has 87 counties), and municipality (if in a city) or township (if rural), and/or other AHJ. There are thousands of combinations of rules so it's hard to generalize beyond "Yes, it's possible."

Some areas have very strict zoning, building codes, and inspections. These can be challenging to build in, with oversight over many details, but it can be done and people do accomplish building homes all the time in these conditions.

Meanwhile, some other areas have no zoning at all and only the most rudimentary of building codes (rudimentary like "There must be a working sewer connection or septic system" and approximately no other requirements). As a practical matter, in these places a person who owns some land can build what they want and nobody is empowered to tell them not to.

And, of course: There's a myriad of in-between variations.

https://www.muji.net/ie/tatenoie/

Yes, but you're at the mercy of the discretion of and have to pay rent (metaphorically) to potentially a ton more parties than you would have 100yr ago. You're gonna need several (local, but perhaps 1-2 state depending on situation) government inspections all of which may involve having to track down some licensed professional and then pay them a fee for inspecting your work.

I think in a "normal" case you can expect to shell out for electrical, plumbing, sewer/septic, HVAC, plans/engineering, environmental BS depending on distance to regulated stuff (wetlands usually) inspections and sign offs. There's probably one or two things I'm forgetting and perhaps one or two can be omitted on a case by case basis. A bunch of municipalities are gonna add their own BS on top of "the usual" stuff, like permits for tree cutting, permits for a construction dumpster and whatnot.

And keep in mind, some of these parties are likely to go out of their way to try and f you one way or another and/or give you the runaround until you go away because they don't want to deal with homeowners, they want to deal with businesses.

Also worth nothing that some municipalities expect strict goose stepping compliance. Some really DGAF what individuals engaged in noncommercial development (i.e. building your own house with the intent to live in it) and so long as you're not building rickety garbage they would rather you just not call them until it's done (though obviously they can't say that).