[cheald]

Surely there are options besides the most prime locations, though. The problem we're describing isn't fundamentally an issue with price inflation, it's an issue with supply constraint. Price is how we decide who doesn't get a scarce good - more people want to live in those prime locations than we have supply for. You could cap prices at $1 and there would still be people who couldn't live there, simply due to lack of supply - we'd have to have some way of deciding who doesn't get to live there, and regardless of the mechanism, there will be people who desire to live there who are unable to.

We can either build more housing - which is a solution in some cases, but has constraints because of the realities of physics, and/or some people choose to live in a less prime location. That doesn't necessarily mean rural Wyoming - it maybe means a less accessible, attractive, or high-fashion suburb, or a midrange city.

IMO, it's helpful to view first houses as a stepping stone to another house - that $300k house in a nice part of town close to transit is a lot easier to get into when you have $100k of equity in your smaller house in a less nice part of town. My perception is that a lot of first-time buyers tend to have this idea that they must either buy in the perfect location or nowhere at all, then find that they can't meet the prices needed for that location, then just decide that owning is impossible. I don't know how true that is, but that's how this continuing discussion on my generation's home ownership seems to come across to me.

[wbl]

What's the point of buying just to own a house? It's not diversified and correlated with your job.

[cheald]

Historically it's been one of the most stable stores of wealth and predictably dependable forms of investment. You're going to live somewhere, so if you can capture your cost of housing as equity rather than paying it to someone else, you have an opportunity to build wealth reserves.