All good points. I’d just like to add that there is no net gain for the population when housing prices go up; the nominal increase in wealth of homeowners is exactly balanced by the increasing difficulty of non-homeowners to buy. This is nothing specific to housing, of course: with any boom in asset prices, the increasing cost to those who don’t have the assets balances the increasing nominal wealth of those who do.
Needless to say, this doesn’t mean there aren’t any economic effects of asset price changes; there are. But they aren’t the “gravy train” that many people seem to think; in fact, in the current situation the (former) house price increases have been very detrimental to the economy as a whole.
