[joe_the_user]

The thing about the housing bubble is that while housing prices didn't decline to a normal level, the way that decline was prevented was through the massive injection of money into the system as whole (qualitative easing) and government loans to the largest banks.

This permanently broke the house-buying process as a whole to various degrees in that most people can no longer afford to buy a home to live in.

But also, it's plausible that the flood of money coming into VC is a part of this general flood of money - a flood that supports the US economy but not a "healthy" condition but with jobs around growing these inflated capital assets taking up a large number of well paid jobs, etc.