UtopiaPunk parent
I think things are breaking, for sure, but how badly and in what ways is very local. To your point (and my point, a bit), with current market conditions, many homeowners are staying in their homes rather than moving. We had a pretty long period of very mortgage rates, and now rates are higher. Home prices have not decreased, either. So someone with a home that is a little too big has something valuable that they want to hang to, and buying a smaller house is, at least for now, not necessarily a good financial decision. But if housing were not an investment, a elderly retired couple could just move to a smaller house and not think too much about it. But it is an investment, so they stay in their unnecessarily large house hoping the market changes in their favor.