A side effect that is vastly underestimated in its impact is: the housing racket makes virtually all Western economies vastly more uncompetitive with Asian coun

A side effect that is vastly underestimated in its impact is: the housing racket makes virtually all Western economies vastly more uncompetitive with Asian countries. With urban areas routinely approaching or, even worse, outright exceeding 50% of net income going away for housing, that's setting a pretty high floor on wages and salaries, and that in turn drives up the price for domestic Things and Services. And no, building housing will not solve the problem. At all. People keep whacking their cucumber over urbanisation because they deem it to be "cheaper" to provide essential utilities due to effects of scale/density - the problem is, space is still finite and denser housing costs more money to construct, especially once you build higher than the maximum usable height of a fire truck's ladder because now you need to invest into independent rescue/evacuation paths, and once you build above 10-ish (or less, depending on soil type and geological risks like earthquakes) stories you need to dig deep into the ground to build a foundation strong enough to keep the building from damaging during settling. Can't compromise on the fire safety regulations (otherwise all you get is a new Grenfell Tower style disaster), and you can't compromise with physics eithr. Western countries need to build out essential infrastructure like broadband Internet, mobile phone service and public transit in rural and suburban areas. That's the only path that doesn't rely on utterly insane investments.