Well yes, obviously there will be a price floor on housing in a wealthy country. My point is that in recent decades the entire developed world has absolutely st

Well yes, obviously there will be a price floor on housing in a wealthy country. My point is that in recent decades the entire developed world has absolutely strangled their housing markets. Anywhere people want to move to, the wages:home prices ratio has gotten to unprecedented levels. In Europe the reasons are slightly different. A big one is marking entire buildings, their facades or even their ornamentation as historical landmarks on a large scale (sometimes entire neighbourhoods). Buildings codes are quite a bit stricter than in the US (in all aspects, especially energy efficiency and fire code) and permitting is just as slow and vulnerable to lawsuits-after-the-fact. The reasons I suggested midrises is because that is the style of building that was built in Europe during the late 19th / early 20th century population boom and it still holds up today (people want to live there).