Housing cannot be affordable if it goes up in real terms though. In an ideal world house prices would increase 1:1 with wage growth from an affordable baseline.
There are 2 ways to fix it: either crash the market or introduce policies which will cause either stagnation or below inflation growth in housing prices for at least 20 or 30 years.
There's only one way to do that - a command economy, with all housing owned and doled out by the government. That just doesn't work, anywhere, ever.
You have to work very hard to ignore the fact that some places are more desirable than others to live in, and sometimes those desirable places change. Also, different people have different priorities, desires, and ability to afford both for their housing. How do you accommodate that pressure without 100% control over the entire real estate market?
House prices and appreciation were basically the same throughout the US until something like the 1950s, when places like CA began to far outstrip other parts of the country. I don't think that CA became a desirable place to live suddenly in the 50s, but perhaps it did?
Supply and demand, combined with “rugged individualism” valued so highly in the states. That individualism is largely what drives NIMBY mentalities.
This is also ignoring sheer population growth, and the unrivaled economic behemoths that have come out of California since the 1950s and produced a ton of wealth for Californians.
Except for Vienna.
Nobody's trying to realistically get to the "ideal world". What you want is an "improved world".
Not necessary. A land value tax provides a market-based solution to this problem.
We need a shared definition of "working" then. There are plenty of ways to disincentivize low-density real estate development and incentivize high density and affordable housing, and all of them involve regulation and tax reform to control the market to some degree.
This post apparently assumes any non-free-market structure that "doesn't work" would be a worse outcome than we have currently, where there are more vacant homes than homeless people.
The real underlying problem is a lack of new housing stock, at least partly due to the decade long neglect in the construction trade following the housing bubble collapse.
Yes it can. It just cannot be better than other comparable investments. If single family housing appreciated, on average, 0.25% per year in real terms, we'd likely be looking at an entirely different housing market.