A weekend topic starting with the Times-Independent in Utah. "For Kaitlin Myers, the developments were at opposite ends of the Moab Valley but signaled the same trend. One was a small subdivision just a mile from the San Juan County border in Spanish Valley. The other, ensconced in downtown Moab, was a block of condominiums next to the Center Street Ballpark. Miles apart, one in unincorporated Grand County and the other in the heart of Moab, the two luxury developments connoted to Myers the crisis that would — had already begun — subsuming or intensifying all other crises: housing. 'We’ve always kind of seen luxury subdivisions come in, but for me … those were two big indicators that that is firmly the direction we’re heading now,' said Myers, the executive director of the Moab Area Community Land Trust."

"Those developments took shape in 2020 and 2021 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic when real estate values in Moab and throughout the West soared. Two years later, local housing experts agree that the sizzling market has fizzled somewhat: prices have plateaued and inventory is rising, partly due to an influx of construction projects. That’s not to say that housing was particularly affordable in 2020 or 2021. At that time, Moab — alongside many other Western communities and rural resort towns — was experiencing a booming real estate market. '2021 was just a shotgun market,' said Rachel Moody, an associate broker with Berkshire Hathaway. 'Everything was just moving so fast you couldn’t keep up with it.'"

"According to data from the Utah Realtors Association and Zillow Home Value Index, housing values and sales prices both skyrocketed about $100,000 from 2020 to 2021 alone. Previously, it had taken four years for values to rise that much. But much of that behavior changed abruptly in spring 2022. That’s when the Federal Reserve started a roughly yearlong hike of its interest rates from near zero to higher than 5%. The resultingly high mortgage costs stifled buying. 'You’ve gone from a complete seller’s market to pretty much a buyer’s market,' Moody said. '…Everything just changed. It was a total whiplash.' Since that boomerang moment, local housing experts agree that Moab’s home prices have plateaued as the real estate market cooled. 'A lot of people put brakes on,' Moody said. She estimated that much of the Moab market has dipped about 10% in price."

"'We have a lot of new construction right now and the new construction is from pent-up demand,' Moody said. She said her brokerage now has 133 residential units for sale, compared to 12 to 15 in early 2022. '2023 is definitely the year of inventory,' she added. And there’s likely more coming. Elissa Martin, the director of Planning and Zoning for Grand County, said there’s an 'astonishing' number of approved but unbuilt units in the Moab Valley."

The Mountain Times in Vermont. "Trailside Drive in Killington has turned out to be a popular place for homebuyers, given the proximity to the ski trails and the opportunity to ski in/ski out — a type of real estate that’s rare in Killington. Multiple homes on Trailside Drive in Killington have sold for over $2 million and one, listed and sold by real estate agent Bret Williamson, broke a record, selling for $3.75 million in October. In fact, Trailside has been so popular that Nathan Mastroeniof Sotheby’s International Realty has nicknamed it 'Millionaire’s Row.' The Trailside Drive homes reflect the overall market in Killington. The median price of homes was $735,000 over the past six months — that’s almost double the home prices in the same period in 2018, when the median home sold for $371,000, according to Mastroeni."

From WPBN. "High rents and even higher home purchase prices are nothing new. We hear about it around town. We talk about it, but unless it is you that is paying the price, you may not realize the impact it has here now and may have on our economic future. It is a graphic created by Patrick Bowen that stops most people in their tracks. He is hired in communities like ours to dig deep into the data and find out what the housing situation is really like. Sometimes he presents at events like the recent Housing North Housing Summit in Traverse City. 'So, we looked at the most common jobs or occupations in Northwest Michigan. We took the top thirty-five occupations and then looked at what their wages were, and then ultimately looked at what can those folks afford to rent or what they could afford to buy' says Bowen."

"He took the top 35 jobs in our area, across 10 of our counties, took the average pay and then the average rent or cost to buy a home and on the graph, a green check mark means it's possible and red x, impossible. 'Virtually no one could buy a house in these top 35 occupations on their own. But the other thing that was interesting was it is like what if we doubled it and said there were two wage earners in the household? They helped on the rental side to some degree. But that also said you better have somebody else in that house, earning a wage with you, where you better get a second job' says Bowen."

"Buying was out of the question for every job in nine out of the ten counties with Wexford County being the exception. That may be understandable as the data uses a single income earner, but Bowen says even if they got a huge pay bump the results were not much different. 'Triple that income of a typical worker that's holding a cashier's job or retail job. They cannot buy a home in virtually any case across the entire ten county region' says Bowen. 'Housing is not a housing only problem. This is an economic problem' says Bowen."

The Review Journal. "Apartment rental rates in Clark County dropped this year, but 2024 will likely be another story, according to data from the Nevada State Apartment Association. One of the biggest trends currently hitting the rental market in Las Vegas, and across the US, is the rise of rental concessions. Data from the Nevada State Apartment Association shows that approximately 40 percent of apartment landlords are now offering some type of concession, be it extra perks or a free month’s rent, to lure renters during the rise in vacancy which came about from a pandemic construction boom within the multifamily market."

"The future is most definitely uncertain, said Robin Lee, executive director of the Nevada State Apartment Association , given the current macroeconomic climate of high interest rates and construction costs largely stalling the pipeline for apartments, outside of luxury builds. 'I don’t feel like the municipalities are necessarily trying to restrict the development of affordable housing,' she said. 'They just need the ability to open things up, and a lot of it is our neighbors, our neighbors need to be open to the idea of building affordable housing in their area. The only thing really out there right now for developers to build are those luxury units, which is the only thing that pencils in for them these days.'"

From Money Sense. "The Toronto real estate market has experienced remarkable growth over the past two decades. The average home price in Toronto surged by a staggering 489% from 2000 to 2022, according to the Toronto Real Estate Board (TRREB). This rapid price growth has raised concerns about the future of affordable homeownership. For instance, the average Toronto home in 2021 was $1,095,175, while the median household income was $84,000, which equates to a price-to-income ratio of 13. To put that in perspective, the price to income ratio in 2010 was 7.4. The fact is: wages have not kept up with home prices. For future generations, the goal of owning a home in the Greater Toronto Area is looking more like a pipe dream. This has prompted many who live here to wonder: are we on the brink of a bubble ready to burst, or is this simply a passing phase of the Canadian real estate landscape?"

The Guardian Australia. "My parents were married in 1951 and, with a war service loan, bought a block of land in South Oakleigh, eight miles from Melbourne’s central business district.I don’t know what my dad was making then, but apparently the average wage in 1951 was about 6 pounds, 11 shillings a week, or £341 a year. And judging by average prices back then, they would have paid about £1,000 for the land. (By the way, the median house price had more than doubled in 1950, recovering from the big fall caused by price controls during the second world war, on which more later.)"

"Dad was a carpenter and built the house himself, including making the bricks, working on weekends and at night, and Mum and Dad lived in a garage, to which I was brought home when I was born and where I spent the first three years of my life. But if they had bought a house and land package, which was rather more common than building it yourself, they would have paid about £1,250. So, like the median family at the time, they would have paid about 3.5 times household income (Mum didn’t work) for their first house, which was about average for the time."

"When my wife and I bought our first house, in 1980, we paid roughly the median house price of $40,000, and I was making around the average weekly earnings as a young journalist – $220 a week, or $11,500 a year. So we also paid about 3.5 times my salary for the house, although we were better off than my parents because my wife was working, for about the same salary as mine, and my mum didn’t, which was normal for both times. Workforce participation for 30-year-old women had increased from 32% to 50% by 1980, as a result of the social/sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s."

"Over the past four years our three children and their partners all bought their own first houses. They’re doing it later than we did, and much later than my parents, so they’re making better money, and both partners are working, of course, but they paid about 7.5 times each income for their houses. That is typical: in August 2023 the median Australian house price was $732,886, which was 7.4 times annualised average weekly earnings."

"In other words, my children – and all young people today – are paying more than twice the multiple of their income for a house than their parents – and their grandparents – did, and it’s only vaguely possible because both partners work to pay it off. It is impossible to overstate the significance to Australian society of what happened then. The shift that began in about 2000 in the relationship between the cost of housing and both average incomes and the rest of the economy has altered everything about the way Australia operates and Australians live."

"Six per cent compound annual growth in the value of houses over the past 23 years versus 3% annual growth in average incomes has meant that household debt has had to increase from half to twice average disposable income, and from 40% of GDP to 120%. High-priced houses do not create wealth; they redistribute it. And it’s meaningless because we can’t use the wealth to buy anything else – a yacht or a fast car. We can only buy other expensive houses: sell your house and you have to buy another one, cheaper if you’re downsizing, more expensive if you’re still growing a family. At the end of your life, your children get to use your housing wealth for their own housing, except that we’re all living so much longer these days it’s usually too late to be useful. And much of this housing wealth is concentrated in Sydney, where the median house value is $1.1m, double that of Perth and regional Australia."

From Mises.org. "In contrast to mainstream beliefs that monetary authorities can successfully iron out business cycles via interventionist policy, the Austrian school of thought recognizes such efforts to stimulate growth as inherently counterproductive and ultimately destructive. Inflationary booms inevitably sow the seeds of their own destruction and systemic collapse. Fear the booms, not the busts."

"The Core of the Theory: Artificial Booms Lead to Busts. The cycle begins when central banks artificially force interest rates below their natural market level, disconnecting the cost of credit from genuine consumer time preferences and real resource availability. Artificially low rates strongly incentivize increased investment spending and highly speculative borrowing fueled by easy access to cheap debt. Businesses are thus induced to embark on new projects that would normally be entirely unprofitable under rationally higher financing costs. This surge of malinvestment driven by inflationary credit creation leads to overexpansion in various sectors, driving up asset prices and further feeding the frenzy of the boom mentality."

"In this way, tampering with interest rates profoundly disrupts the critical balance between savings and investment in the real economy. The volume of investments funded by inflationary credit creation far outstrips the pool of real savings available. This leaves the boom without firm foundations, as monetary inflation creates an illusory mirage of prosperity. The seeds of collapse quietly take root under the surface during the boom years."

"Eventually, the credit expansion fueling the artificial boom decelerates, and interest rates rise back to natural levels that reflect actual resource scarcity. The monetary illusion fades away as grim economic realities reemerge from their slumber. Investments justified solely by cheap money begin to fail without their inflationary propellant, exposing their underlying unprofitability. Speculative bubbles pop as expectations of endless monetary expansion confront reality. The economy initiates its long-delayed convalescence by finally purging the accumulated distortions and excesses seeded throughout the boom."

"These lessons remain highly pertinent in the present day, as decades of ultraeasy money have possibly inflated the largest asset bubble in modern history. Policymakers face continued pressure to reflate the bubble to avoid economic fallout. Yet, Austrian theory offers a stark warning that market forces cannot be ignored perpetually. Artificially stimulated booms only set the stage for even harsher busts when the unavoidable correction finally culminates. Therefore, understanding the seeds of collapse inherently embedded in inflationary booms provides urgent insight into our precarious economic trajectory. Despite its political unpopularity, the economic downturn remains an inescapable presence on our journey, a path lined with reckless enthusiasm and the false promise of easily accessible credit."