Plus, if you move to a low-CoL area with a high-CoL job then you're not really solving housing, you're just moving your problem elsewhere onto other people making housing unaffordable for them. How many former cheap places to live have been gentrified into oblivion in a short amount of time?
The goal is to make housing affordable AND help preserve local communities and culture(even though that might be contradictory to a degree), not to keep gentrifying and uprooting them in a musical chairs style game and then wonder why communities are dying, family units are dying, birth rates plummet, family support networks are dying, mental illnesses are up, loneliness is up, etc.
The free market could work if housing was a depreciating asset like cars. Too many people in the west would be pissed off if that happened, though. It will come to some countries with collapsing demographics and that won’t be a pretty sight.
Except that's not how it happens. Demographics have been collapsing in many EU countries for a while now and prices have been going nowhere but up at rates beyond wage growth.
Internal migration from rural to urban, and external migration from war torn and impoverished nations also to urban centers, keep pushing demand up regardless of local reproduction numbers.
Sure, you can now buy cheap properties in some empty towns in the south of Italy for example, but to what end if there's no jobs there?
