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Large parts of the Western world have embraced the idea of home ownership as an investment vehicle (IIRC Japan is an interesting exception). In the last few decades this has worked as prices have increased, but it creates crossed incentives between current owners and people who want to buy a house. IMO my house's value to me (beyond the sentimental) is almost exclusively as a dwelling, and day-to-day it's price doesn't impact me.
I don't know that the idea was completely wrong, but there does seem to be a theoretical limit of residential property values in terms of wage-adjusted incomes before the average family can't afford to own anything ("and be happy"?).
But actually unwinding the model (reducing prices) will probably hurt a bunch of middle-class voters pretty badly, which seems like political suicide so I expect it to be put off as long as possible and maybe an attempt at gradual deflating.
Really, for most owner-occupiers it would be a wash: the value of your home goes down, but the price of your next home goes down too. The people it really hurts are the elderly who are ready to give up home ownership and reap a windfall profit, or their heirs.
The price of your house going down is a really big problem if you:
People make 1) work with vehicles, and 2) is, well, not exactly a sympathetic example.
I don't understand what you mean with this: "People make 1) work with vehicles"
And yeah boomers living off housing wealth are not sympathetic but they are a massive solid one-issue voting bloc and it is almost impossible to form governments in the West without their approval.
People make it work that they lose money on their cars. Cars depreciate, they don't appreciate, you eventually have to buy a new one, and you won't turn a profit on it.
Cars cost 1-2 orders of magnitude less than real estate. They are fragile machinery produced en mass in gigantic heavily automated factories. They have lots of moving parts exposed to huge amounts of wear and tear. None of these things apply to houses. I don’t see a valid comparison here
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The situation is totally fucked and is not going to improve until this stops, because this is the description of a ponzi scheme. You can't have house prices going up all the time and have the remain affordable to entrants in the long run. The math simply is not mathing.
Unfortunately the hole is dug really really deep and there's very little appetite to stop digging. The situation in Canada seems even worse than in the US - at least here the market deflated after 2008 so people who had the good sense to be born in the 80s or earlier could pick up some nice deals. In Canada the market has just kept going up.
Australia is only slightly behind Canada with this same issue. /r/ausfinance practically became a single issue subreddit about housing affordability before the mods had to enforce a 'personal finance only' rule set.
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