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Unfortunately, not only housing, but yes.
It turns out people want house prices high (maintain property values) and low (affordable housing). It is rather difficult to deliver on both of these at once.
One group wants higher prices, the other lower prices.
Therefore stable prices are best.
What was allowed to happen during Covid, where governments injected tens of trillions of dollars into an already hot economy was criminal. Especially the post 2020 stimulus.
In less than 2 years, the median U.S. house price increased by 36%: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/
Just another way that young people were thrown under the bus during Covid.
That does not follow. One group wants lower prices, another wants higher prices is always true (there's always a buyer and a seller), but you want, as a country, the cost of things to be going down and productivity to be going up.
It seems to me that all central banks and almost every economist under the sun wants inflation.
What you want is for the cost of things to go up but for productivity to go up even faster.
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Compared to the rest of the Anglosphere Americans still have it good (while simultaneously earning a lot more).
Lot of that is the sheer amount of productive US metro areas versus other countries.
In Australia for a lot of professional roles you've only really got a serious choice between Melbourne, Sydney and maaaaybe Brisbane. The first 2 of which have 10x income multiples for a reasonable house and the later racing quickly to catch up to them. Those equivalent markets do exist in the USA but they're largely focused around the world class cities like NYC and San Fran. Still plenty of scope to pick a mid-tier city and get a reasonable property for 3-4x income.
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