This is an article about blind men and elephants. You can hear three or four opinions from the un-sighted about what that thing in the room is but not a one of them has stepped in the poop yet.

For starters, it has nothing whatsoever to say about proximate causes. Housing doesn't go up 76% over 5 years because ZOMG everyone wants to move to Seattle. Housing goes up 76% over 5 years because the growth industries are the same ones that pushed prices to nosebleed levels in Palo Alto. People surfing Redfin for houses to buy don't leave San Francisco for three years running because they've decided they can't afford to live there. People leave houses and buy new ones because they've got a new job somewhere.

Rachel Sandoval is one of them. An elementary schoolteacher in the Denver Public Schools, Ms. Sandoval earns about $50,000 a year, enough to afford a condominium or a modest house in most markets. But not in Denver, where the median sales price for all homes was $410,000 in August, and where even condos routinely top $300,000 — a price Ms. Sandoval calls “not even close to feasible.” She said she was scoping out jobs in Texas, where houses are cheaper and pay is higher, and considering leaving teaching in search of a higher salary.

For now, Ms. Sandoval, 41, is sharing a one-bathroom rental house with two roommates, a nurse and an adjunct professor. The three stick to a strict schedule to make sure they can all get to work on time.

“We are professionals, we have degrees,” Ms. Sandoval said. “This was not the plan.”

We were supposed to gain 12,000 sqft of mixed commercial across the street from the birth center. It's now going to be 30,000 sqft of mixed commercial... and 115 apartments. But those 115 apartments are all 375sqft studios and 500sqft 1brs. That's because it's going to be one bus stop from a light rail terminal which is going to be an hour to Amazon.

And when you're working for Amazon, you aren't putting down roots.

Few analysts expect an outright decline in home prices anytime soon. That’s because, unlike the speculative bubble of the mid-2000s, the recent run-up in prices has been driven primarily by economic fundamentals: People are moving to Denver faster than developers can build places to live. The Denver region has added more than 300,000 residents since 2010, making it one of the country’s fastest-growing areas.

LOL Seattle dropped 6% last month. Flippers are now listing houses with basements that have studs but no drywall.

Ultimately, the key to breaking the logjam is to build more homes. Downtown Denver is crawling with cranes, many of them erecting amenity-filled apartment complexes aimed at young professionals. A drive in almost any direction from downtown reveals freshly built subdivisions with names like Tallgrass, The Enclave and Green Gables Reserve.

Most of those new homes, however, will list for more than $400,000. And hardly any builders are selling properties for under $300,000 without government subsidies. Even many home builders worry they are pricing themselves out of the market.

Ultimately, when quantitative easing has pumped 14 trillion dollars into the banking industry and the Fed seeks to wind that down, it's foolish to assume that the banking industry will continue business as usual. Quick quiz question: what has a higher profit margin, luxury condos or commodity tract housing?

The linked Redfin post is almost equally hilarious:

However, when we looked at the county level, we saw that the most common areas homebuyers were looking at were more affordable areas of the LA market, like the Inland Empire (Riverside County, CA).

Phoenix was a top destination for both Seattle and Denver last quarter, and had the largest net gain of Redfin users looking to move to the area from elsewhere. This was up significantly—34 percent—from a year ago. Phoenix is also much more affordable, with a median home sale price of $257,000 as of April, compared to $415,000 in Denver and $580,000 in Seattle.

...that would be retirees looking to parachute out of the equity in their red-hot markets so they can afford to live somewhere else. Ain't no microserfs bailing on Kirkland to open a startup in Hemet or Indio.

But yeah this shit is all the signs of a healthy market yup yup.