S&D. Housing is doing well in certain markets where people want to live. For example, from yesterday's front page of my local paper: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/20...ells-for-record-price.html#storylink=misearch Wages are going up for highly skilled, hard to find people, for investors and for speculators. OTOH, for most of the country, housing prices and wages are flat (if people are lucky) to trending down. We have an oversupply of average. Average housing markets, average skillsets - we have more of these than we know what to do with. We also have a huge oversupply of subaverage. Those folks are in for some real pain. You can see it everywhere. High end stuff is doing well and so is bargain basement, heavily discounted stuff. The 30% or so of us at the top are doing well. The 70% or so of the rest of us are struggling.
Houses are bought with high leverage. In a dollar collapse we can expect leveraged assets to decline in value as lenders are unwilling to make loans that will be paid back with worthless dollars. But hard assets like gold that are generally not bought with leverage will go up. It is entirely possible to have high unemployment (and thus stable or declining wages) and inflation in other things. Look at most of the historical examples of hyperinflation and you will see that wage increases, if any, did not match the increases in everything else.
Why is core CPI not going up? If dollars are becoming truly worthless I would expect core cpi to go up. The bubbles seem to be confined to food and precious metals. If we are going to have hyper inflation, why isn't real estate just as good a hedge as gold? Shouldn't all real assets maintain their value in an hyperinflation environment?
Fear is what marks these bear cycles we are in which means accesability is a big driver, so is liquidity and low liability. You won't be able to get out of your position overnight and hide your money from governments as good as possible buying a house.