>>508039648 (OP)This is never going to get better until we address the cause. There is no bandaid solution that will force our capitalist rentier model of housing to work long term. The BEST we could ever hope for, as this graph shows, is a series of catastrophic booms and busts. That's as good as it gets with this system.
The core issue is that we treat housing as an investment, primarily a financial instrument, rather than as a durable good. Every other physical, durable good you own depreciates in value over time and with use. That's true of your car, your electronics, your appliances, etc. But not your house. Because we treat housing primarily as an investment vehicle, it CANNOT ever be allowed to decrease in value. What is more, because it is an investment, it needs to constantly appreciate, and appreciate beyond the rate of inflation. If housing ever stopped outpacing inflation, the investors wouldn't make any profit and that will never be permitted. We have created a system where housing prices can ONLY ever continue to go up and keep going up. The concern of people having a place to live is wholly irrelevant to the market pressures at play here. The corporations buying all the empty houses and sitting on them literally do not care if no one can afford those houses. They are profitable to them sitting empty and simply appreciating as financial investments, with market activity driven by these corporations buying and selling these empty houses between each other. That's enough to keep the game going while the rest of us are left quite literally out in the cold.
The only way housing will come down to a point of sanity is by ending the practice of treating homes as investments and allow them to depreciate and lose value like any other physical good meant to be used.