markets are neat mechanisms, but no market exists in a sociopolitical vaccum, so such blind faith in them is misguided (to put it charitably). without getting

markets are neat mechanisms, but no market exists in a sociopolitical vaccum, so such blind faith in them is misguided (to put it charitably). without getting too far into the weeds, and because housing is a durable and necessary good that's proportional to both population and productive capacity, in a free and fair market you'd expect housing prices to track with inflation. that's the reasonable expectation. over time, we've seen housing prices detach from that baseline for a variety of reasons unrelated to its core responsibility of sheltering people. see, for instance, the case-shiller index. those detachments are distortions to the idealization of a free and fair market to ensure house prices continually rise for political and personal gain, despite the lack of sound economic principles underlying that distended rise.