If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

I think the disruption will come from the civil planning side of the equation. When we can figure out how to build a city on the edge of Arizona that people actually want to live in then we can begin to leverage more efficient and automated building techniques like 3d printing houses and stuff.

It takes more than houses; also entertainment, food, infrastructure, jobs, etc. Otherwise, you're 100% right, location is king and nobody wants to move away from a fun/profitable/valuable city to live in an abandoned mining town in Oklahoma just so they can own a home.

As dystopian as it might sound, I wonder if there is some way to "crowdfund" or "preorder" a new township location. Everyone signs up, pledges like 1,000 USD or something with a lease extending at least 3+ years. And developers can use that money to build an entirely new township in a location with cheaper land. This might help alleviate the problems that come along during a cold start with requiring critical mass adoption before a location is desireable to live in. (Not suggesting this exact course because having an entire town owned by a single developer sounds like a capitalist hellscape; just thinking out loud, I don't know what the actual solution would be)

I believe something similar is already happening with something like the Culdesac project. (I have no affiliation with this project, just so happen to live near it and have heard about it a few times) : https://culdesac.com/

I agree that we need to stop treating houses as investments, because they're a basic fundamental need everyone has.

IMO, the problem could be fixed by having stricter laws prohibiting people who aren't residents from owning homes in another country. The requirement to become a resident is only to live in a country for over 6 months out of the year. Before that, you can just rent. We could also do things like limit the number of houses a person can own, and tax every house sale based on capital gains (even primary residences).

However, another problem we have is that interest rates are too low, and there isn't enough construction. Those are harder problems to solve. I really think we should build more, but we'd need denser construction as well. What do you do if you need land to build and there's already a house there, or someone already owns the land? Maybe it's kind of silly to have this idea that a person can "own" a piece of this planet we all live on, but we probably don't want to live in a communist country where the government owns every home and everyone is renting either.

As for interest rates, this is driven by our current economic policy and money printing. Maybe there's a way to somehow detach the interest rate used for mortgages from that in other areas. Surely, the government could print stimulus money and direct it where it's needed without interest rates being artificially controlled? The main problem with these near-zero interest rates is that they completely kill the free market. We keep zombie companies alive and we allow people to speculate on home prices endlessly. That's not natural. In a "true" free market, there's a natural equilibrium between offer and demand, both home prices and rents will fluctuate but they will balance out. My ex's parents bought a home in the 1970s, they only had high school education and were both making minimum wage. Said home is now worth over a million and out of reach of anyone not making 200K+ household income.

Nothing to see here, the central committee has told us there is no inflation. Better discuss really important issues like pronouns and the patriarchy.