The US as a whole has low housing prices. But that is including all the homes in Nebraska and other places most HN readers don't want to live in. The home prices in the ~10 cities people on HN actually want to live in are much higher and not affordable for most people. And the good jobs are only in the expensive places, unless you're a doctor or something like that.
See section 4.3 Urban and rural prices move together. Urban prices may be unaffordable, but the data suggests they haven't inflated faster than rural. Perhaps urban/rural is too coarse a distinction to reflect the effects in major coastal cities, but the return to coastal cities didn't begin until the 1990s. Price inflation indeed accelerates in the 1990s in the U.S., but excepting Japan[1] it accelerates in all the other countries even faster; likewise for the 2000s.
[1] Presumably still reeling from its 1980s property crash.
