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Fwiw in places like parts of the midwest housing is below cost of labor and materials. An existing house might be $70k and several bedrooms at that. You just can’t get anything built for that even if you build it all yourself.
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I intended to make a weaker claim of ‘in general long run / maintainable’ circumstances and should have done so.

Many low cost areas have bad crime problems, there is another little phenomenon where the wealthy by doing a poor job in governance can increase the price of their assets by making alternative assets (lower cost housing) less desirable due to the increase in crime.

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It depends. There are people and businesses today who even make negative dollars each month, but they still purchase things every month.
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> Housing won't drop below cost of materials and labor

Only if every person born needs to have a brand new house constructed for them.

Not if - you know - people die and don't need a house to live in anymore.

But considering how it's been the past 20 years, I'm starting to expect that a lot of the current elder generation will opt to have their houses burnt down to the ground when they die. Or maybe the banker owned politicians will make that decision for them with a new policy to burn all property at death to "combat injustice". Who knows what great ideas they have?

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