The problem is hundreds of years old, Tolstoy wrote about it, he was an advocate for Georgism, and there’s also the board game monopoly. Has anyone succeeded anywhere at any time at making housing affordable for the plebs?
What was home ownership like in the US prior to the 1900's? Rural areas were farms that people owned and maintained, and repaired, if possible, with the help of neighbors. In urban areas only the wealthy owned homes, and it was very much landlords and boarding houses. It wasn't until post WW2 when freeways appeared and the suburban boom + baby boom that people actually started owning houses en-masse. I fear that we are boomeranging back to the urban landlord / renter model because now all of the suburbs have been bought up as investments. (A couple I'm friends with owns 13 houses; they've been buying them since the 1990's, fixing them up, and renting them. It's crazy, fortunately they are nice people.)
So to answer your question, there was a brief period in American history for about 50 years where housing was affordable (1945-1995) then shit just went sideways. But it required massive investment from the government (freeways & GI bill). To return to this would require massive, complicated legislation; or some simple push that collapses the housing market as an investment strategy. Maybe higher interest rates. Maybe killing the mortgage deduction. Maybe an inheritance tax with teeth.
