There's no reason for houses to be as expensive as they are. They are expensive because we've created incentives to make them more expensive. This is because we treat houses as investments, allow people to hoard housing, build the wrong tyhpe of housing (because it's more profitable), allow non-residents to use housing to park wealth, etc. So voters vote in politicians who put up barriers to build more housing and to defeat any kind of public transit infrastructure even though it would absolutely benefit people who still want to drive (by removing people from the roads who don't). Why? Because taxes.

Housing should be for residents of that city to provide a utility: shelter. Not as an investment vehicle.

It simply doesn't have to be this way. The poster child for this is Vienna [1][2].

Increasing house prices are an illusion of wealth creation. Let's say you buy a house for $200k but over the years it goes up to $800k. But every house costs $800k so you still have only 1 housing unit's worth of wealth. You've simply increased the barrier for younger people to buy houses.

Put another way: increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation and that money is really going to the already-wealthy and, to a lesser extent, the old. Just look at the median age of homebuyers in the US, currently 59 [3].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...

[3]: https://www.apolloacademy.com/median-age-of-all-us-homebuyer...