> even though we've been in a bubble for the past 20 years
what is a "bubble", to you? the last 20 years includes one of the greatest housing crashes of all time, and a period of some of the cheapest housing costs we've ever seen.
We can call it a housing pause at this point, because all of that money was put back into houses. I think it is unbelievably important to remember as a baseline that world housing prices tracked inflation for 400 years. In the US they tracked inflation, there was a bump up with government housing subsidy right after WWII, then it continued to track inflation until the dot com bubble burst
After which there was hockey stick price growth, a crash, massive government intervention and transfer payments to the wealthy, mass evictions of people who couldn't pay after their ARMs moved, massive buy-ups of that property by large investors and funds, and the restoration of hockey stick price growth.
> a period of some of the cheapest housing costs we've ever seen.
Where? Are there any places that fell back to the 380 year trend line, or are there places that are reasonable compared to their price in 2006 considering inflation. We're still in a period of the most expensive housing costs ever. They've grown to precisely what they need to be to take away any disposable income, along with education and healthcare. They're completely detached from physical considerations, they're simple financial instruments. And property owners have tricked people into thinking that it's a supply problem.
Because it's certainly true that there have been real (not just nominal) housing cost increases, but my understanding is the increase is much less extreme if you compare apples to apples.
Americans have just decided to consume a lot more square-footage of living space than they used to, is a large part of the story outside of tightly constrained markets.