U.S. home prices are the most unaffordable they've been in nearly 100 years

These things happen in high COL areas. Of course the rents are going to rise when people are willing to pay more. This is supply demand. In a lot of cases, property taxes are assessed based on the value, and the people renting and paying the higher rent are actually making more money than the landlord. Also you don't blame companies for charging you for a product that you like the price they do, considering that it takes much, much less to actually make it - are those companies being greedy?

People get displaced, move outside of the area, and find places to live. In some cases, they buy houses in rural areas for a lower cost, and then 5-6 years later the gentrification radius grows and their house goes up in value. Look at Northern Virginia for example of this.

The main that is missing is good public transport system (or government level investment in autonomous driving). In Europe, its natural to commute about an hour or so to work, often from a different town to a bigger city. In US this happens as well, the difference though is that you have to sit in traffic in a car.

Yet I've seen many reports[1] of occupancy rates dropping precipitously, despite increasing users, because of increased competition.

[1]: https://time.com/6223185/airbnbs-empty-short-term-rentals/

But now that the second mortgage is so much more expensive, fewer people will be able to do it right? More specifically, previously you could borrow against the increasing value of your home, at a low interest rate, to fund the next purchase. This is what everyone on the investment side was doing. With neither of those factors true any longer, it seems this scenario will be less common.

At a higher level, I think this is what the transfer of wealth looked like for the past decade.

A lot of what you are describing is regional issues for costal cities. My specific comment was pointing that {Base land + Materials + Labor} is very expensive, and while addressing these fees and red tape might be important, it's not the whole cake. I was also targeting a more modest experience.

In Texas it might be $40k land (varies by size and location), $250k for construction ($115/sqft * 2250 sqft), and maybe $50k for utilities/landscaping/driveway/permits etc (varies by taste and location). So $350k for a house in a state with a $70k median household income. With a 20% downpayment and a 6.5% interest rate this median family for a median house would spend 1 year salary on the downpayment and over a third of their gross income on the mortgage. If they had a typical amount of debt from cars, credit cards, or student loans their DTI would be too high to qualify.

EDIT: To my original point. Saying "Build more homes" is an oversimplification. Homes are largely priced such that they equal {Land + Building value}, and new homes are largely priced at { Land + Construction costs + reasonable margin for developer }. If you want to build more homes, look at how building can be cheaper. There are some clear low hanging fruit you are describing in your LA experience, but even where the regulatory environment and labor costs are more reasonable the numbers don't crunch well. Let's have conversations about how to reduce the cost of producing housing. Getting cost low enough that the median household income can afford new construction would absolutely drive up the number of homes being built.

Every bathroom was finished with normal drywall instead of the water resistant stuff. The vents in the upstairs bathrooms just vented into the attic space leading to moisture issues in up there. There must also be an issue with either the framing or the foundation because we have the ceiling separating from the drywall in almost every room in the house in addition to cracks developing in the drywall. I know some amount of settling over time and cracks are sometimes normal, but I’ve never seen them this frequently. Our floors are also uneven and you can feel them moving as you walk across them.

In the bathrooms they also picked the cheapest bathroom fixtures imaginable. They looked decent at first, but it was also quickly corroded and the lights literally fell apart. We have one of those fancy three head shower setups and we discovered that the main shower head corroded and broke off inside the wall when our youngest innocently asked us why it was raining in the dining room. We also have water hammering issues when running the washing machine because they didn’t bother to put in a flow arrester.

On the exterior, our driveway and sidewalks were all laid with insufficiently packed base material. These gaps and buckles are reaching the point where we have to fix them or risk liability when the mailman trips over them. Our gutters were incorrectly installed and they have been slowly leaking down one corner of our house and we’ve found water damage in the basement due to this. The foundation in the garage also has done some settling because the stone work at the base has large cracks developed in it. In addition, our windows and doors are really just polite suggestions for the wind to stay outside because they picked such cheap options. You can literally feel a breeze through most of our windows.

I’m sure there were other minor things which I’m not thinking of, but the quality between our first house which cost 1/3rd of this house is night and day. The only thing the inspector found was the the cracks in the garage brick walls but those are a facade and the inspector told us it was cosmetic damage and the sidewalk was easily fixable via mud jacking. Those were issues we were willing to take on. There’s no way we would have bought the house if we’d known that there were so many issues. As we’ve been trying to address the issues we’ve been finding, we always seem to uncover another problem that needs to be fixed. Feels like a race we are losing.