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Instead of artificially giving out loans to people who can't afford mortgages, tax breaks could go out to construction companies to develop smaller homes. The average house size has doubled since 1950 but families are smaller. There's no reason a starter home needs to be worth half a million dollars.
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The free market tends towards mild deflation - except when the government gets involved like education and Healthcare. You can buy a PS5 & Switch for the equivalent of a 1980 Atari console if you adjust for inflation. There's no need for minimum wage spikes if the government policy would stop pushing for 2-5% annual inflation
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College is so expensive because the demand is outstripping the supply thanks to government loans & scholarships. Most people should never go to college unless studying law, medicine, STEM or possibly some humanities and finance.
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Our houses are expensive for lots of reasons. Government building codes and regulations is one. Foreign investment in American real estate is another.
Sure, but the bottom line is we are willing to pay the bill. Why charge less when people are willing to pay more? We voluntarily enslaved ourselves to debt.
We used to self build starter homes, labor is the bulk of the cost of the house. Then slowly upgrade from there. Now we skip the starter homes completely and don't even know how to build anything.
The market supports these industries then complains that these industries keep getting bigger and more powerful. Just stop supporting them.
The land itself is about equal to what my house would cost to build. In a lot of places it’s way more. Dirt is crazy expensive most places. And one major cause is foreign real estate investment. I don’t a free market for non Americans to buy up our country.
And people don’t skip starter homes. Starter homes are always higher demand and the market for starter homes maintains value way better than high end houses when the market dips.
I’m sure less people build their own homes now. That seems uncontroversial. I think increased regulations and permitting costs are probably a major factor. And as land becomes more expensive the proportional cost of building relative to buying land becomes less and it starts to make more financial sense to have professionals build it.
This is another flaw in society. Things aren't expensive everywhere, people just want to live where it's insanely expensive because everyone wants to live there.
In a way property price/taxes helped stabilize housing costs. I lived in rural NY for a while and they didn't have the housing bubble because with the already high property tax people wouldn't pay housing bubble prices. Even in NY the land was not as expensive as the build. The property tax could easily match the mortgage though.
The bottom line is, no one put a gun to our heads and forced us to live this way. We chose this lifestyle and somehow expected it to produce the same results as a completely different lifestyle.