Avocado

From my perspective most people who talk about this issue are missing two important factors.
One.
The anti-Arab anti-foreigners brain washing of the USA population over the last eight yeas which was reflected in “foreigners” not investing in real estate – even if they wanted given all the restrictions to travel to the USA. This was a substantial change since 2001. We, in Australia, have “benefited” from this and the real estate business has grown tremendously over the same period with hundreds of thousands of Asians investing in Australian properties with terrible effects on the poorer part of the Australian population that saw the cost of buying a house, small flat or even renting going up enormously.
Two.
The Free market ideology that exported USA jobs to China, Korea, Mexico, etc.
As a result of these two combined factors, ordinary people in USA were forced out of well paid industrial jobs are not able to buy new houses and since foreigners are not buying neither. As a result all those people investing in housing have not had anyone to buy the new properties. And then we have all the other factors that ad to the economic crisis of today.
In Australia although we lost many industrial jobs, foreigners are buying heavily and the continued success in exporting minerals has kept the real estate growing steadily and the economy more or less stable.