Personal Finance

No. Reasons:

• You can't make more land. The feasible land around most cities has already been built on. Either you increase urban sprawl further (not considered desirable) or you build new cities.
• NIMBYs: What about increasing density? Sure, but this requires rezoning which NIMBYs and the "save our neighborhoods" types will fight tooth and nail. And even if it does succeed, you also need utility and transportation upgrades to accommodate more people which costs money and creates more NIMBYs fighting anything that might affect them or the "views" from their property.
• Labor shortages. There have been too few people going into the trades for decades now. As the previous boomers retire there's too few people to replace them. This drives up construction costs considerably.
• Materials costs, on average, will only go up. For example, the logging industry in the US has been decimated over the past few decades resulting in higher costs for raw materials. This too increases construction costs.
• Complexity in building codes and permits is far more than it previously was. In the area I live the amount of red tape to get through in order to get a building permit can easily eat up years of time and tens of thousands of dollars just for one single family home, and that's before a single shovel hits the ground. Increase that considerably for multi-family home buildings or larger subdivision projects.

For whatever reason, it seems like many people focus on the real estate speculators, and while that's undoubtedly part of the problem, the costs and red tape of actually building new housing is often ignored. When population increases and you can't increase supply there's no where for prices to go but up. The root cause of the problem needs to first be addressed which is the need to build more housing and that's not a simple problem to solve since it involves the intersection of so many other problems. Therefore I can't say I'm optimistic that housing will go anywhere but up.