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A house is not only an investment, houses have cash flows so large it burns the Treasury's butt that they can't tax them. Second largest "tax expenditure" after medical premiums and just before 401Ks is "Exclusion of net imputed rental income". Of course, you might object that these aren't real cash flows (which they aren't, hence "imputed")... but they are spending avoided. They also provide a one-time inflow when sold, of course.
But in fact houses generally gain real value with time. I expect this to change in 10-15 years, but for now, they gain, not because any intrinsic properties but because of good old supply and demand. Well, that, and the fact that people do tend to fight entropy by doing maintenance and sometimes upgrades, which you need to account for.
Im gonna be pedantic and state the obvious. Most homes are geographically fixed, which is what causes the supply imbalance in areas that are desirable for whatever reason. This is a fairly unique property that introduces a lot of inelasticity that other markets in the consumer sector don't share.
Even if you could teleport houses into LA you still wouldnt fix house prices there because you'd have to find land to put them on, and thats before we even look at other factors that keep the housing market on a death march upwards such as inflation.
I imagine at some point urban population density will have a ceiling on how desirable it is to live in megacity block 13-A (formerly west village) but even the US's most dense cities like NYC are too nimby-ed up to actually let the market build the amount of vertical living space that the city currently could handle, let alone a scifi amount that plateaus the housing prices.
It’s actually very easy to create more land. Tokyo keeps growing and being desirable and housing costs haven’t exploded. The big thing that makes land for housing desirable are the public services. If you make it safe and provide transportation options you can just create more land.
Chicago for example has a neighborhood with all the characteristics of places with expensive housing. The University of Chicago is surrounded by very cheap land. At one point in history this was a very desirable neighborhood. It’s cheap because they shoot people next door. If you made it safer and improved public transportation then it would literally be building new land in Chicago that is highly desirable.
I think this is the most extreme version in America but I think every major city has some form of these issues that would unlock a large amount of land if you just fixed the provision on public goods. Extending subways in NYC would unlock a lot of land.
Some of these issues come down to not being allowed to do explicit segregation. People don’t want to build better trains because then the wrong people would enter the neighborhood.
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