The most effective way to lower housing prices is to increase supply. Instead of artificially freezing rents, which discourages investment, policymakers should remove regulations that make building new units difficult. More construction creates more competition, which naturally drives down prices for everyone.

When the economic system, particularly the housing market, makes it impossible for the youth to get ahead, it guarantees the rise of populism. Desperation leads them to vote for any promise of change, however destructive, such as socialist policies that ultimately collapse the economy.

High home prices should not be interpreted as a sign of a healthy market. Instead, they indicate a system that is malfunctioning as designed, where artificial scarcity created by policy and corporate buying drives prices up. This reflects a structural failure, not robust economic demand.

Housing scarcity is a bottom-up cycle where homeowners' financial incentive is to protect their property value (NIMBYism). They then vote for politicians who enact restrictive building policies, turning personal financial interests into systemic regulatory bottlenecks.

While Spain's economy benefits from immigration, its housing supply has failed to keep up. With 140,000 new households formed annually but only 80,000 homes built, the resulting shortage disproportionately affects young people, delaying family formation and depressing the fertility rate to one of the world's lowest.

The current housing market is not a cyclical bubble that will pop, but a structural crisis. It's a permanent collapse of opportunity driven by policy failures, corporate consolidation, and demographic incentives that have created deep, lasting scarcity, fundamentally changing the nature of homeownership in America.

The history of rent control in New York City shows how price caps disincentivize maintenance and new construction. This leads to a death spiral of deteriorating housing stock, supply shortages, abandonment, and ultimately higher market rents for any new, uncontrolled units.

Politicians at all levels actively restrict housing supply through zoning and other policies. This is not incompetence, but a deliberate strategy to protect and inflate property values, which satisfies the large and reliable homeowner voting bloc, ensuring re-election at the expense of renters and future buyers.

Analyst Michael Howell's research shows a strong correlation between rising gold prices (a proxy for monetary inflation) and falling fertility rates in advanced economies. The mechanism is inflation driving up housing costs, which forces families to delay or forgo having children, leading to demographic decline.