[geeky4qwerty]

While almost everyone seems to be fixated on various housing market minutia in justifiably passionate anger/frustration at the entire situation, very little attention is given to the causational elephant in the room:

The Federal Reserves monetary policy as a whole, but more specifically their authorization by the Federal Open Market Committee to buy Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) directly from the banks. The Fed had ZERO MBS on their balance sheet prior to 01/05/19 (1) and now hold an staggering $2.7 trillion dollars worth, which represents 22% of the entire MBS market in the US (3).

This is the dirty secret in the modern US housing market, we never actually saw the true bottom of the 2008 housing crash due to the FEDs MBS interventions.

(1) - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WSHOMCB (2) - https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/current/h41.pdf (3) - https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/us-mortgage-backed-...

[lalaland1125]

We know that monetary factors (like the federal reserve) can't be the main casual factor because rents are increasing at very low vacancy rates at the same (if not higher) rate as the price of housing.

If the fed was the primary factor we would see a divergence between housing prices and rent since the fed has minimal direct effects on rent.

Looking at the data, the primary driver is simply that more people are competing to live in urban centers as we have banned the construction of additional housing in most cities.