I am glad a few people get this. High housing prices are an unmitigated disaster. They are sometimes a symptom of something good (a robust job market) but often not even that.

For that, high housing prices have more to do with supply disruptions and destruction than with demand, because housing prices are extremely inelastic. A 1% drop in supply can push rents or prices up by 20% or more. (Ask New York.) Mouth-breathing bourgeois fuckheads clap their fat hands together when prices rise and say, "People really want to live here!" No, fuckface. What actually happened is that all those stupid NIMBY regulations made it impossible for anyone to fucking build, and so there's a supply crunch, making prices and rents three times as high as they should be.

This also explains why New York real estate prices went up after 9/11 (except for Lower Manhattan, which dipped for a few months and then went up) and will probably do so after Sandy. It was speculation driven by the possibility of future supply destruction, which would be bad for the few thousand people affected but increase overall price levels.