Buying a house is an investment. You're making a bet that worker productivity will improve near you. After all, what is the value of land? Some land can be farmed or house a factory. But usually, when we talk about residential real estate, we're talking about land that houses workers. So, the value of that land is directly proportional to the economic value those workers can provide. We refer to "economic value provi…
Urban areas experience an increase in population density with population and economic growth and this drives the higher demand for land.
Most likely the way to control individual housing costs is systematically lowering the cost of building vertically including regulatory and zoning changes as well as new construction methods.
There is a bit of a land-value cliff that needs to be smoothed over by socializing the costs as well; as single-family homes are replaced by highrises the immediate property value of SFH drops, and I think this is because housing is priced over ~10 year periods by residents and more instantaneously by the real estate market, so there's a dip in unrealized value for residents who can't sell their home for what it would be worth in their neighborhood until its value as raw land has reached the same level by being squeezed between overly-dense highrises and suburbia, effectively forming a very slow-moving barrier to densification. SFH owners want suburbia, they paid for it, and can only sell at the price they want to folks who can get the same. They're incentivized to wait it out because they already have a home which is also a huge investment. A financial instrument to buy out entire neighborhoods on the expectation of profits from higher-density housing sounds like the solution, and the risk probably needs to be borne partially by the government, and maybe a real-estate tax credit for SFH neighborhoods experiencing lower prices from new nearby dense construction which incentives them to vote for the zoning changes.