Hedge funds and investors go and buy all the houses, because they need to park money somewhere and no Americans can buy houses. That's pretty much hilariously apocalyptic. More police, to defend (execution-style) the empty houses owned by literally piles of abstract capital!
Imagine your life with zero debt for university, a solid network for getting jobs/internships, a gifted car upon graduation, and a 20% house down-payment when you married your SO. With those things, you'd probably be on track for FI/RE by your mid-30s anyway, so inheriting a few million more bucks by your 50s isn't going to make a difference.
The fact that a handful of their age-peers (who are already quite wealthy because of the advantages of family wealth) will be fabulously wealthy on levels not seen before in history will not be of much benefit to the majority of people in those generations.
The whole construct has seemed to deviate into the fact that even mid to high earners have no ability to actually buy the thing at the price it is worth. I first felt like that once cellphones became mandatory around the time of the original iPhone and everything was roped into weird payment agreements instead of buy phone, and pay for service. You end up with people putting aside so much income to pay for even modest sized debts, and then you have them looking for cheap things to save money not because of frugality but because you still need these essentials like pants, shirts, and so on. Then since you are buying cheap you are in the same poverty mindset where you end up spending more than you should because the necessity of now exceeds the necessity of later.
So property prices go up from general want of property values to go up (feels not correlated), people 'moving to where the money is', and the lack of the people that should be starting out in life not being able to build/otherwise afford secure housing. Many of the stories I hear are people being effectively acting like squatters where they feel like they are going to have to move at a moment's notice. There is less people moving into an apartment/townhouse with the intent to live there for a 5 years, and this is not including people moving to chase opportunity it's people just trying to persist in the same environment.
These are also people that are making 75-150k and otherwise should not be having these same kinds of difficulties but when you are slicing the pie with ~60% going to loans, and a lion's share going to rent and other ongoing necessity services like cell phone, insurance, etc. This leads to just this swath of people being risk-averse where otherwise they should be financially stable, and then the services that are generally mandatory to keep the level of income to satisfy the loans end up eating the rest of any real gains.
In essence I feel like it already has taken plenty of effect now that people have most of their income already spoken for before they receive it. It's not massive credit card debt or some sort of aggressive consumerism, it's people that because of education are so over leveraged they aren't participating in the economy in the same way as someone who didn't have those hooks. Like the article dictates as well it also becomes you versus a constant changing set of loan servicers who manage to mess ordinary things up without recourse so whatever leftovers you had get eaten by penalties and could result in a cascade of penalties and costs just like how Bank of America was dinged for how they approached overdrafts (sort for biggest and fine for each one that goes over). So maybe the additional hidden cost here isn't even the loan + interest but loan + interest + unnecessary fines + legitimate fines which slurps up more of that critical income of someone first starting out.
As for the question for property prices I believe the problem ends up being a leftover of the boomer era and that general sense that 'property prices should rise.' From an investment/speculation standpoint real estate is a wonderful thing because of that sentiment. But it feels in general like the majority of money in that market isn't individuals buying homes or commissioning construction of a new home for themselves because of these loans preventing them from having the raw remaining leverage to do so, they end up having to take whatever they can get from the existing market or getting pre-recession leveraging. If the short-term beneficiaries of a real estate purchase is the banks and construction/real estate speculators and not the person buying the home why wouldn't they want to maximize that at expense of everything else? I feel that's another layer to the luxury home/condo/apartment construction trajectory. Because of these other beneficiaries I can't reason why house prices would come down from just the heavy debt ridden individuals- all they have to do is get them to agree to purchase something they can't afford and draw out what blood is left in either mortgage money or rent money it's just the best slice of pie from a student loan holder after the student loans to be paid from.