That’s a historically unusual artifact of the financialized housing market in a country where the population outpaces new available housing units.

Go to Italy or - God forbid - Iraq or Ukraine or Myanmar, and you’ll find record inflation combined with falling real estate values. Buying a home in Lebanon or El Salvador or Bulgaria in 1975 wasn’t a good move. You had to be a certain proximity from the US/EU money printing machines and a distance from the US/Russia bomb dropping machines to get that arbitrage to work.