I'd consider why housing prices are high. The reason is of course pretty simple - there's high demand at current prices driving prices even higher. Why is there high demand? Supply is certainly a part of the equation here, but in this case it's secondary to the primary reason. That being that the economy is in a crazy boom phase and there are lots of jobs paying disproportionately more than the rest of the nation.

So what about Japan? I think the big way they 'solved' this problem was by going through a 30 year recession. I don't think realize how extreme Japan's decline has been. In 1995 Japan was still a tech behemoth that many thought was on track to become the world's leading economy. They had a skyrocketing GDP that was $5.5 trillion at the time, compared to the US' $7.7 trillion. Today Japan's GDP is $4.9 trillion, the US' is $20.4 trillion. They've had an ongoing problem with deflation that's more recently been met with extreme measures including very heavy handed quantitative easing.

If the US economy just suddenly collapsed and stayed that way for decades, you'd also start to see the real cost of living stagnate or even decline, especially in areas that were being driven up previously by a sky-high economy.