Our society prioritizes the narrow interests of rentier capitalists over the working class. Unfortunately this means the US is losing international competitiveness across more and more industries. For one thing rent extraction ultimately gets financed by employers through higher wages, thus productive business loses out to business from a region like China where costs of employment are lower. Rather than making economies more efficient like productive business is supposed to do, rentier capitalism means cash flows from the debtor to the creditor class, which forms a feedback loop as the creditor class is able to use this cash to buy more assets and extract more rent simply by expanding its circle of ownership.
Real estate prices are controlled by supply and demand. If you want a lower cost of living than desirable places in the US, alternatives (like China, or the Rust Belt) exist.
And if you think housing prices are bad in the US, you should look at the rest of the developed world.
