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Comment on Why home values may takes decades to recover

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Comparing median household income to median house prices is probably 80% of what you need to explain the housing market, and this article does a pretty good job. The essence is that you can't sustainably spend more on a house than you make, so there is no reason to expect the historical ratio to change more.

The only way you can reasonably expect that ratio to change in a dramatic way the way it did is if there was some underlying structural change in how people live. For example, a massive migration to dense cities where you're not spending hundreds a month for a car means you can, spend a larger proportion on housing, pushing that ratio up. But of course, we know that hasn't happened and will take decades if it ever does.

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