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 -
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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