Investment is a terrible way of thinking about homeownership. In the markets that are most affected by this phenomenon like London, SF, and so on, for the vast

Investment is a terrible way of thinking about homeownership. In the markets that are most affected by this phenomenon like London, SF, and so on, for the vast majority of individuals, it's the only thing that costs money anyway. Anything else can either be binned as 'trivially cheap' (e.g. groceries+bills+transport combined) or 'luxury fun' (e.g. nice clothes, expensive holidays, etc). To the point that money in the abstract is basically irrelevant (vanishingly small numbers of people have liquid wealth, but tons of families with modest jobs own 500K, 1M, 2M homes in London). If you don't want a house or apartment to call your own, a place to make good and have suit your needs (with nice fittings, a layout that suits you, neighbours you know well and so on) then you don't want it. Young people barely ever want this stuff (I sure didn't) and the Internet has only exacerbated that. Money has less to do with it than people think, I reckon.