There were two major trends that started around 1980 and contributed to housing prices rising meaningful faster than inflation and natural population growth: fi

There were two major trends that started around 1980 and contributed to housing prices rising meaningful faster than inflation and natural population growth: first, women joining the work force and creating dual-income families, and second, the drop in interest rates from >10% in the early 80s to <4% today. Both leveraged prices up. Neither can reoccur. Very few people foresaw this potential third trend which is foreign money seeking safe haven in urban US real estate. If a large number of the wealthy citizens of every other country on earth decide they want to live in San Francisco and New York, that could continue to push prices up and disconnect them from local market fundamentals like wage affordability. The reaction to this should be to increase land value taxes but California and New York in particular have taken an almost completely opposite approach, taxing income highly and land and property very little.