This is a really good point that honestly I've been neglecting considering. I try to help and push my friends to be better than most (because honestly most are quite lazy and entitled) but still you can't ignore the societal ramifications of most people getting less than they expect.

If you read Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Schumpeter, published at the end of the depression and during WW2, most of his predictions were spot on economically besides solving the housing problem.

There was a housing problem then too that he thought would be solved in time by the market. He thought we would see something like assembly line, prefabricated housing at some point that would drive down prices.

What I suspect is that once people own real estate, the last thing they want is something that drives prices down and everyone making the decisions needed to solve this problem owns real estate. That plus the margins won't be that high so you have to do large volume and the red tape is too much to be able to do that at scale. So instead of we do nothing and we will keep doing nothing for another 100 years.

Yeah that's a really good analysis.

It feels emotionally true because when I buy many terabytes of high quality SSD, I have no preference to "keep the valuation" of my SSD investment, I just want more faster for cheaper! If the price goes down tomorrow and my friend gets in for less than I just paid, it's not screwing me over. In fact I'm probably buying more on the future so I love the increased supply!

This is not true at all for housing lol. As someone who bought Manhattan real estate, I can feel the shitty incentives every day, and it's really destructive of a system.

This has nothing to do with earning a livable wage. It’s not like the top 2% are only earning enough to barely get by.

Top 2% maybe not. But top 10%? In a lot of economies the property ponzi scheme has reached such levels that even a top-10% salary is barely enough to actually afford decent accommodation (and employers collude with real estate interests with things like RTO/etc meaning you need that accommodation and don't have cheaper alternatives).

In almost every major city in the US, a regular old “senior” enterprise dev with 5-7 years of experience should be making at least twice the median wage for the city.

Which just means the housing prices can increase to match. Where else are people going to go?