You say: "House prices go up simply because houses are things whose prices go up."

That's a bit unmaterialist and illogical. Surely it's to do with supply and demand? The question is why demand has outstipped supply for so long, and why has the market not redressed this imbalance? Is it the Government's fault (greenbelt laws, restrictions on the building of social housing), or due to market failure (an oligopoly of builders, landlordism)?

Constant house price rises are not a Good Thing if one believes in the self-correcting nature of the market.

Of course it's to do with supply & demand. What I'm referring to is what's driving demand. Sure, the factors you mention kicked it off, but it's gone beyond that now, as I think the example of my own house amply demonstrates. Three years ago, houses were already too expensive for most people. A 50% across-the-board house price drop would be considered catastrophic. Yet such a drop would leave houses in my area 50% more expensive than when they were already too expensive. To get house prices back to something reasonable for working families to afford and have a bit left over for food and in case of interest rate hikes, we'd need a drop more along the lines of 70%. So imagine that all the factors you mention were fixed overnight. Can you see such a price drop occurring as a result? No, me neither.

Look at the behaviour of investors. There used to be two ways of investing in property: buy a place, do it up, sell it on at a profit; or buy a place, fill it with tenants, charge them rent at a profit. But now there's an increasingly popular third option: buy a place, board it up to keep squatters out, leave it untouched and empty for a year or two, sell it on at a profit. The reason this has become profitable is that houses can be relied upon to go up in price because that's become part of the definition of what they are. That can't last, but it can do a lot of damage before it stops.