This is bit overblown article. Certainly bad zoning laws can help inflate prices and there are several other factors like investors using real-estate for invest

This is bit overblown article. Certainly bad zoning laws can help inflate prices and there are several other factors like investors using real-estate for investment. However the major cause of real-estate price increase over long term is plain and simple: heavy urbanization of entire world. If you look at graph of population moving to urban centers over centuries it looks like literally almost vertical line in recent decades [1]. I'd heard that 90% of Earth's population is concentrated around just 40 urban centers! The real-estate in rural area has remained same or took nose dive while in urban areas it keeps going up. Interesting question is how fat this trend will keep going? My guess is that this is black-hole effect, a larger city attracts even larger population towards it. Japan has recently became outlier because of economic issue as well as population decline. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization