Where is cost of living in this analysis? In the Midwest you can still have a nice quality of life with any decent job. Yeah sure, you can’t have such things in SF, NY or LA like maybe you could in the 70s.
There is no such thing as a free lunch and so reduced real estate costs bring with it an environment of potential poor local governance, poor job market, neighbors that do not share values that are conducive with rising home prices.
A most recent example is poor compliance with things that benefit the masses (ie. Vaccine, mask etc.)
I suspect the next thing will be poor compliance with switching over to energy efficient power generation as the world moves to clean energy + things implemented to discourage clean transportation (ie. extra taxes on EVs/banning solar installs without major caveats). All these boneheaded things drive down the cost of the real estate to its true market value.
