Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I'd tentatively define it as a situation where a typical family (yes, I know it's a fiction but that's the only way to create a generally applicable definition) can eventually pay for a culturally adequate housing without incurring catastrophic long-term financial risk or heavy financial hardship.
Best I can tell, this is just a less specific version of the response that @disk_interested gave, which was followed up by agreeing that if we hold wages constant for a conversation about the price of housing, then it just cashes out as saying that the aggregate number for the price of housing should go down. Should I be interpreting it differently?
I'm not sure "agreeing that if we hold wages constant for a conversation" makes sense. I mean, sure, if you exclude everything but house prices, then it's house prices. But that feels like hollowing out the problem's complexity. These things are inter-related, and the relationship is not uni-directional - the house prices influence wages and the structure of other expenses. And most of the normies can not really appreciate the full extent of all those factors - I am not sure I truly can, for example. I just want to be able to live in a decent house and pay for it from my earnings without working three jobs or trying to win the lottery. How to arrange wages/prices/costs/regulations to achieve this is quite complex, and I don't think "just make houses cheap!" is going to answer it.
Do you think it doesn't make sense to do this for any other product, either? Like, we can't talk about healthcare prices or education prices, or car prices, or apple prices, without discussing every other aspect of the economy? Or maybe it's that we must at least discuss wages to talk about apple prices? I'm really just not sure how I'm supposed to think about this.
In some very theoretical and "well, akshually" sense yes, the price of apples is connected to everything else too, just less strongly. But we can say close to 100% of adults participate in housing marked in one way or another (maybe excluding prisoners, the military and such, but these exceptions are tiny) and for an average family, housing costs influence daily life and family budget significantly more than apples. Same for employers - many large employers literally have separate pay scale for "high cost of living areas" - which is mainly driven by housing costs. Discussing whether this arrangement is good or not will take us too much off course, but the huge influence of housing prices must be obvious. Not so with apple prices. If by some quirk of economy the apples become prohibitively expensive, you can just eat something else. If housing becomes prohibitively expensive, you have a society-wide problem on your hands. Having no access to apples for a year is barely an inconvenience. Having no access to housing - even for several days - would be catastrophic to most families. So if we approach it practically, housing is not "any other product" due to its oversized importance in the life of an average family and the society as a whole.
And sure, if we lived in an alternative word where you could buy a house (or any housing solution, however you call it) for the price of the week's wages (you still could buy a car for $1-2k - it'd be an old crappy car but it will get you from point A to point B for a while) then the picture would be completely different. But we aren't living in that world.
Everything in this comment is about the price of housing. The number. The aggregate number. So, we can kinda still discuss whether it should go up or down?
I agree that it can influence pay scales and such. I sort of fail to see how this matters? I don't see why this means that we can't just talk about the price of housing.
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