Isn't there another factor here? The 1970s was still immediately after a huge period of rapid home building. Home building has stagnated and fallen far below de

Isn't there another factor here? The 1970s was still immediately after a huge period of rapid home building. Home building has stagnated and fallen far below demand since then, leading to an outright housing shortage in some metropolitan areas. NIMBY politics are a major factor here. Another factor is that the expansion of the suburbs has hit the limits of practicality. Suburban size is limited by things like commute radius from major city and town centers, the ability of roads to take more cars, and whether or not mass transit is available. Housing too far out starts to become indistinguishable from rural housing. Coupled with NIMBY politics this creates an environment for scarcity to explode. If housing was going up during a period of otherwise tame inflation, it's possible that housing will now really explode. That's what seems to be happening so far. The only thing that is going to bring it down or at least tame the rise is taking on NIMBY politics and zoning and other artificial barriers to increasing the number of housing units. Edit: Of course yet another possibility is that there's some truth to the allegations of inflation hawks over the past 10-20 years: that inflation is actually a lot higher than we think and has been masked by the deflationary effects of technology and globalization. Tech and cheap overseas labor have held down the price of manufactured goods and kept the price of some consumables like food in check, but things not subject to these efficiency gains like college tuition and housing have exploded. In general anything that can't easily be automated or outsourced has gone up in cost. Personally I think all these factors are in play.