Took my parents 20 years to pay back their home, with a 6.5% mortgage, barely 15min from the center of the capital.

My generation, they need a down payment of 50k Euro, just for the banks to even talk to them. And to borrow for a decent house, within 50km of a job location, people need to deal with 30, 35+ year loans.

The problem as i see it:

* The older generation live longer and longer, and this combines with a generational change where people want to live by themselves (and not with the kids). This creates a issues where homes are off the market, for 80 a 90 years. Reducing supply.

* Ground prices have gone up because zoning laws made tons of buildable land, zoned differently. Speaking from experience as a large part of land that our family owned was altered into agricultural 50 years ago. Only for the government to disowned it (and pay out) as agricultural for their own building projects.

* What used to be a easy to build home, has now tons of regulations regarding isolation norms, what you can build, how it can be build, this increases the construction costs.

* Immigration / foreign capital. This is often also overlooked. Maybe this is only a local (my birth country) issue, but we had a strange situation of people from different countries immigrating here, and buying homes in the smack middle of the capital. How? Because the foreign banks of those immigrants considered owning the property as a investment, resulting in them easily giving loans. Much more easily then the local banks gave loans. This created a situation where entire areas turned into immigration zones, pushing out the locals, and reducing supply.

* Second part of the foreign capital is that large investment companies or oligarchs just buy up tons of homes, apartments etc. So we get insane tower projects with 100's of apartments that no local can affords but sold to foreign capital as "investment". What in turn drives up the prices all around the areas', creating a massive bubble effect that expands to all around the areas.

* Then we have the issue that if somebody wants to sell a home, they are going to charge the max they can. And with a more limited supply then demand, it keep driving up prices. To the point that we see absolute ruins being ask insane prices for. Because the owners think "we own XXXXX in value". No, you own a ruin that costs you nothing beyond the land tax, but forget about them dropping prices. The ironic part is, despite a lack in supply, its easy to find empty homes because of this investment/holding on issue.

Owning a property is cheap, so cheap that companies see it as landbanks, and the people who own one, are going to keep a occupied until their 80 or 90s. Combine that with a increased population in all countries in the world (beyond maybe russia etc), and the country flight (people moving to cities because the jobs are there).

The ironic part is, a lot of the home prices is because people need a home, to be within reason of a job location. They are the people earning money and spending it on a home. When you look more country side, you find TONS of cheap homes but no work.

THAT is the main issue in my mind. We allow too much companies to be placed in central spots, this means everybody want to live there for the work but that drives up ground/home prices (and infrastructure costs as roads get congested). The places where its cheaper, lack the investment from companies/population growth, so price are stable or drop.

We do not run out of land, we have tons, but so many villages in so many countries died out, because jobs are not there. Nobody invested in those smaller villages and put all the good infrastructure in those top10 cities, resulting in them ballooning even more and ... Now combine that with the other factors...

Ironically, the work from home/pandemic movement helped for a short time but it created such a rush, that we had not normal price increases but ballooning effects. Too much people buying country homes in a short time, again, sellers market. In a more normal society, we have work spread around. More cities, lower work density concentrated on specific spots. But that requires government involvement (good luck with that) and LONG term planning. Not a few years, no, 20, 30+ year plans.

But the work from home movement is already under pressure from so many companies, despite the clear benefits for employers and employees. Because how can you be a manager when you can not oversee people in person... There is something phycological in people with power position about them having fine control over their employees.

Anyway, its a mess everywhere, not just the UK. We are still renting here in our 50's. The only people benefiting is the people who owned the rental properties as their capital goes up and up (rental income + property value increases). But as a middleclass, it really starts to hurt them. And no right wing "we solve it with simple solutions or its the immigrants fault" type of stuff is going to solve that. But people are desperate and yea, then we have a increase in ultra left and ultra right parties.

Worst part is that a lot of politicians are personally invested into keeping higher property prices, and have no incentive to deal with the issue, as it hurt themselves.