Salaries are relatively flat compared to costs of food, healthcare, education, etc, etc and especially housing. The income to COL ratio is what to watch.
You said it isn't due to high salaries, which is a relatively discrete variable, instead it's due to supply, which is an abstract variable related to many other things including the possible rate of supply change compared to who the existing supply is available to, and how much people making the supply are getting paid to make it compared to what it costs to be that person, each of which influences each other. Supply is simultaneously a very useful thing to measure, and a comparatively meaningless discrete part of a system.
Sounds like you're overthinking it? Fail to build enough housing for five+ decades and watch what happens. The situation is not a subtle one where we need to inspect the tea leaves.
Not to mention real wages have stagnated for almost as long with 1%ers taking a larger and larger slice of the pie. Trying to blame the housing crisis on workers getting paid too much is misguided to say the least.
Fire every programmer in the world and at most it might make a temporary minor dent in the housing market. Those "overly paid" tradesfolks would pick up the slack in short order.
> Fail to build enough housing for five+ decades and watch what happens.
True, but that's just an abstract measurement of what happened, not that interesting when trying analyze the parts that affect it. Particularly when it comes to different geographical regions.
> Not to mention real wages have stagnated for almost as long with 1%ers taking a larger and larger slice of the pie. Trying to blame the housing crisis on workers getting paid too much is misguided to say the least, especially programmers, who are already all fired.
Blame, particularly blame aimed at specific income earners, is a different thing than saying it obviously has an affect. Dismissing a part of the system that has an impact is as silly as suggesting it's the only culprit.
But I also wasn't necessarily implying it's workers getting paid too much, that's just one of the bits that varies depending on context, but there's more than likely an inflow cash that currently and will continue severely outpacing supply, and whatever supply is created is often so expensive to build for a series of other reasons that it can only be marketed to an endless supply of buyers with an endless supply of money. Especially because of the reason you mention—decades of not building—one has to think of it as the complex system it is, with the bottlenecks and winners and losers it has. The whole thing doesn't work.
