Some perspective from the Netherlands... We've had more demand than supply since WW2. Which follows that price will be as high as the people can afford at a ma

Some perspective from the Netherlands... We've had more demand than supply since WW2. Which follows that price will be as high as the people can afford at a maximum. And with "people", I mean not the general people. If supply is low, you only need a small subset of people to be able to afford a house. I want to stress how the supply/demand dynamic is leading, and how a lot of well intended policy has a counter productive effect. For example, when we bought a house 20 years again, there was whopping 8% "transfer tax". That's tends of thousands of EUR in pure tax. The government figured that it would make housing more affordable by reducing this tax to 2%, and sometimes 0. The market immediately seizes this extra price room. Hmmm, another try. Old people have capital and it should be possible for them to transfer a tax free amount to their children, to aid in purchasing a house. The market immediately seizes this extra price room. An idea not yet executed is to raise the standard mortgage period from 30 years to 40 years. I think you can guess what that will do to prices. It's not an issue you can fix with a tax tweak. You can't even fix it with the nuclear option of drastically increasing interest rates. I repeat: If supply is low, you only need a small subset of people to be able to afford a house. You can raise it to 10%, it doesn't matter. Increasing supply is very difficult and no permanent solution in already dense areas, which is why I believe managing demand is the answer. We should stop organizing society around these "black hole" cores of very crowded countries or cities.