In 2007, I might have said "no."

All of my friends joke about going in together on buying some property and starting a commune. It’s a passing joke but in the back of our minds I think we’re all seriously considering it. Logistics is the only reason it hasn’t already happened

I'm trying to get a mortgage atm. Long term disabled / self-employed with low income, got dad as a guarantor, I feel amazed we managed to get a single lender, we now have a mortgage in principle.

I'm also horribly unlucky so I can predict with near-certainty that yes house prices will crash immediately after I'm on the hook at 7.5%, at which point interest rates will also plummet.

Can't put a price on having my own space and not being evicted on the whim of a greedy landlord though (my current situation, 13 years, £70k in rent, not so much as a thank you or goodbye, just off you fuck so I can get someone in paying more).

Fate will decide whether we see this in out lifetime, and it will depend a lot on where you live. Several factors affect these prices, and I probably don't have an exhaustive list but here are some.

There is the boomer bubble. Boomers possess most of the houses. When they die, a lot of house will enter the market. Fortunately for us, heat waves and pandemics should accelerate this process.

There is the financial bubble. Housing earns money, and all actors ensure it stays this way. To solve that, you need to kill housing as a finance product. The most effective solution (and I think the only effective solution) would be ceiling to location prices. And with that, forbid, through taxes or rule, empty houses. Let the landlords deal with market shit. This would instantly crash the market, which is an excellent thing for everyone but people who rent houses or plan to sell their house.

There is the actual market: we usually need more houses, but building too fast would crash the market. So if you let building to the market, it will never build enough for prices to go down. You need a government that will force construction. You also need laws or taxes against empty houses.

A note on empty houses: it is a very important factor because it allows landlords to control the market by removing or releasing houses on the market. The only empty houses that should be allowed should be for repair or hostel.

There is the globalisation, especially planes. Planes make connected cities kind of neighbours, which means their house prices will become similar over time. This means that changes in plane traffic, laws or airports can affect local housing market. It's not such a big deal though.

There is probably more to say about finance. Loans are probably a factor too, but I don't know enough of it, and what I say in the finance part will affect it too, an probably in greater proportion.

Tl;Dr is simple : you need a brave government to apply simple and known solutions to the problem. Landlords will be ruined and that shouldn't be a concern but that will probably be the reason why nothing will be done.

It's just gonna get worse until everything crashes completely in a way that nobody will own anything they can't carry on their back.

Not until people quit buying them. And it's not sarcasm or trolling or whatever. There are tons of cheap housing, but it's in places people don't WANT to live. Until people start wanting cheap housing more than a certain location/ job, prices won't come down.

In Australia, they are bringing in a shared equity program that has given me hope. Roll on 2024...

I think it is achievable. But someone has to start doing the economic planning to make it happen in each local area.

One approach is to take political control of each city and resolve the problem by applying sufficient government. Either you make enough housing for the people who are there, or you seize enough stuff for the project that people start leaving. But that can be hard to muster the political will to do.

Alternatively, "housing" per se is not unaffordable: at whatever reasonable fraction of a normal wage, there is somewhere on Earth that you could pay to live. Plenty of empty space in small towns scattered across the US, for example. The problem is that you can't actually live there, because you also need to have a job to pay for the housing, which isn't where the housing/empty land is. Also many of these places are so under-served by municipal services as to be practically uninhabitable: you can afford an RV and you can afford an acre of desert with no electric, water, or sewer service, but you cannot combine the two to create acceptable housing.

If the people who control the cities where the work and services are are unwilling to accommodate residents, then work and services need to be organized in places not under the control of these malicious actors. Ideally with new mechanisms in place to prevent the same failure modes from reoccurring.

If curious if "affordable housing" has an actual definition? Like is there some formula that we could use?

If we have affordable housing, that would lower the prices for landlords, and we can't have the leeches hurt

Yes. Housing prices have always crashed about once a decade, ore or less. Also prices tend to plateau for 10-15 years until Incomes catch up. I don’t see why this won’t continue to happen

The only difference is this time we have clear lack of supply, along with impediments to building more housing in places people want to live. There’s a profit incentive to building more and I wouldn’t bet against overcoming those obstacles. Money always wins