TL; DR: Sometimes “exit” is your only vote. Consider exiting inflated property value regions. I bought a house recently. Dealing with the mortgage and properly

TL; DR: Sometimes “exit” is your only vote. Consider exiting inflated property value regions. I bought a house recently. Dealing with the mortgage and properly industry really brought home to me how deeply entrenched the housing as investment mindset is. When houses were shown to me their likelihood of appreciation was highlighted before qualities of the house like it’s construction or the social health of the neighborhood. It was a bit frustrating because the latter types of things were what I wanted to know about. I bought the house to live in and it all goes well our family plans on staying indefinitely. IMHO it will never change without a brutal prolonged housing crash and recession that wipes out the savings of millions, and the government will not allow that because homeowners tend to vote at the highest rates. 2008 showed that the government will burn down the rest of the economy to save property prices. The history of this power dynamic is actually quite deep. In many ancient societies and even early America property owners were the only ones with a voice or in some cases were the only true citizens. Civilization has always revolved around property owners at least since the agricultural revolution. There is only one rational response that I see, especially for younger or lower income people: leave areas with absurdly exploding real estate costs. The phenomenon is nationwide but it is definitely worse in some areas than others. When we bought our house we took advantage of the virtualization of software and left California for Ohio where we grew up. Now housing is exploding here, but less than it is on the West Coast. Not everyone can be this mobile but more people probably can than you would think. If you are in a blue collar profession there are good jobs to be had (and sometimes a shortage) in rural and small city areas with industry. Many such areas also have shortages of lots of professions due to the many decade trend of everyone flocking to top tier cities. Politically America really needs a rural renaissance and this could help drive it. The geographic concentration of wealth is a major driver of our political lunacy. I am a bit older but if I were starting out I would include the real estate cost constraint in planning my career path. Yes there are great jobs in big cities but the RE cost means that when you want a family you must be either get rich or leave and while you are there all your surplus will go to the landlord. It would make sense to avoid career paths that shackle you to high cost real estate. For techies that means maybe choosing industrial IT or coding for industrial or mining or farming concerns over Silicon Vallet cloudhipster stuff, or refusing to work for companies that are not remote first.