"The wall" is already manifesting in Europe as well, in terms of CoL and real estate prices[1] where even skilled workers can't afford a decent home anymore or build any wealth after paying the inflated rents from their stagnating wages. You either inherit something from your parents or are screwed if you don't get a top FAANG/F500 job out of university. Working for small or average companies doesn't cut it anymore.
It feels like the society collectively decided "no more new building" to make housing scarce and inflate up property prices of existing owners at the expense of the newcomers.
Seems like a common theme among the developed world from the Americas all the way to AU-NZ.
> It feels like the society collectively decided "no more new building"
This, more than anything else, seems to be the problem in the developed West, at least when it comes to real estate prices and related cost of living issues. At least in the US, there's a pretty strong correlation between land-use freedom[0] (that is, the ability for landowners to develop that land into more productive use, including higher-density housing) and median home/rent prices.
In the EU in particular, there's the nZEB standard, which became a requirement for new buildings. This makes the initial costs higher, but the ongoing ones lower.
