Once permanent housing stock dried up, the problem trickled down to rentals, particularly as the investor-landlord class went looking to squeeze more profit out of the entire system.

But the incentives have all been aligned in this direction for decades.

Even when local governments tried to pay developers to make affordable housing, the efforts were stymied either by racist, NIMBY homeowners trying to protect their real estate values or by builders who refused because they would rather build luxury units for the higher profit margin.

Prices were held artificially high by investors sitting on numerous empty properties looking for a big pay day down the road.

This is a parable about the American economy writ large.

The top 10% have so much money they command excessive attention from the entire market. Houses, cars, electronics, you name it. The luxury markets have been running hot.

By themselves, they were able to prop up the economy, at least on the averages. Higher interest rates generally worked in their favor.

The lower half of the market stagnated, leaving poor and working people eating continually higher prices for lower quality products.

To talk politics, you have to understand how these groups split.

The top 1% made out like bandits. Billionaire wealth skyrocketed. But the greedy fucks backed Trump for tax cuts deregulation to game the system harder.

The top 10-20% were tickled pink and generally thought Biden was a great guy. Why mess with perfection as far as they were concerned?

The bottom half of the economy got told to suck it up and shut up and either tuned out or broke for the guy promising to destroy the system.

The top 10-20% are almost exclusively white. Many of them are older. And they swung for Harris in the election where almost nobody else did. There just aren't enough of them to matter.

The bottom half is obviously younger, more diverse, more female, more queer, and more liberal because that's disproportionately who the US has offloaded its poverty problem onto.

The more marginalized members generally felt Biden-Harris weren't interested in helping them and checked out of the process.

The people most likely to survive Trump burning things down -- or who thought they could anyway -- tended to swing right, particularly if they were activated by other bigotries.

That's mostly younger to middle aged white cis-het men, who were already doing better than most.

You can dissect who broke for Trump based on the big "culture war" issues going on. Men mostly broke over machismo / patriarchy. White people mostly broke over racism / immigration. But so did a surprising number of Hispanic voters, who wrongly felt they and their families would be insulated. Evangelicals and Catholics, including some Hispanic voters, obviously broke over abortion or trans rights.

Superimposed on all of this is a profound loss of trust in the Democratic Party.

Throughout the Biden years, I and many others kept pointing out why his poll numbers were sagging and how the electorate was likely to split over a K-shaped recovery.

Basically, if you were an upper class white homeowner, you saw your real wealth dramatically improve.

If you were a renter or solidly working class, and especially if you were already marginalized, you were eating shit from inflation, price gouging, and higher credit card bills the entire time.

We were ignored because of the Chuck Schumer theory of politics: Democrats would get two white suburbanites for every poor, working, and marginalized person they lost.

Well, it didn't turn out that way.

People who are struggling to pay rent or their mortgage or buy groceries don't look kindly at the party in power. People who already feel abandoned and betrayed just stop showing up.

The rest vote out of spite, and if nothing else, Trump is a magnet for spite.