Cheap housing is either substandard (see the phrase "Tofu dreg project" used in China [0]), or located in places that aren't very attractive (you can buy a whole house in a semi-abandoned Italian village for 1 euro [1]), or available during a certain time-limited period when some place started to grow rapidly (say, the Silicon Valley in the early 1980s), but not everyone realized it yet, so there is a window of opportunity there. People who bought property in San Francisco of the 19th century definitely bought them cheaply.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu-dreg_project

[1] https://1eurohouses.com/