> What are we supposed to do about it? This situation is a smaller economic stage upon which the same script is playing itself out on the larger economic stage

> What are we supposed to do about it? This situation is a smaller economic stage upon which the same script is playing itself out on the larger economic stage. The FIRE economy [1] and its accompanying regulatory capture apparatus that enabled the pricing out of your and younger generations relies upon capturing the value derived from the network effects of aggregating people into the same volume of space over time. There are ways for non-accredited investor actors in this dynamic to get out from under the feedback loop, but they all take more time than most are willing to put in and in some scenarios, more trust within larger groups than is usually culturally feasible. Some of the backlash is already inexorably unwinding in the baked-in demographic collapse in many areas of the world, but that will take at least a couple more decades to impact housing prices in a material manner (to within 2-3X median annual income). Mass population-scaled solution implementations are still currently quite out of reach, but you can see lots of people reacting with solutions that fit their individual profiles at the margins: intentional communities, co-operatives, vanlife, tiny home, etc. Anyone who is not directly, daily working in the real estate industry should be commoditizing that complement of their lives, but the real estate industry has successfully convinced most to work for that industry with the "your home is an investment" canard...periodically (on average once every 7 years in the US)...with a ~10% round trip transaction fee after all is said and done (better than 2 and 20 in many scenarios per unit effort, however you want to measure it). Most people cannot stand against the allure of "your home went up in value!!!", but it's a clever trap. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_economy