These articles frustrate me because they rarely manage to mention obvious factors like, say, supply and demand—a problem that I wrote more about here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/connecting-the-dots... . If you're unhappy about rapidly rising housing prices, the simple solution is to build more of it. We have the technology to do so and have for a hundred years.

One can argue that high prices are a reasonable cost for low density, but to do so at least requires some basic knowledge of how supply and demand work.

On a separate note, articles like this also show why newspapers are having so many problems: if a random commenter like me knows more introductory-level econ than the reporter writing about such issues, the reporter has no business writing about business.