People do eventually sell due to life events, even at a loss, in fact I'd say that is probably the primary cause of sales rather than anything financial in nature. At least anecdotally, I've sold twice and both times I would have had to do it even if it was at a loss.
However, you are correct that the price is pretty sticky at the moment.
Yep I agree that a large contributing factor in all of this has to do with location.
The shortage of skilled labor is another instance where we need to ask why supply is not meeting demand. I think in the case of the supply of skilled construction workers it is not difficult to come up with a plausible explanation that doesn't require any malicious actors.
Anyway, I'm not really trying to make a political point or give everybody my own pet theories as to how this happened. I'm mostly just trying to make the point that the way this issue is generally discussed in the media is economically illiterate at a pretty fundamental level.The observation in the media that supply is not meeting demand is worthless on account of that not being a meaningful statement.
We don't know if that is the primary cause though. The US population was growing at a quicker rate for much of it's history, and that population was more rural, and a number of other reasons we can't rely solely on historical data for our predictions of current behavior. With a closer to zero population growth rate and a more urbanized population we would expect there to be fewer houses built.
Additionally, the pure supply and demand argument is insufficient because it does not explain why we have failed to create the additional supply to meet the demand. In a pure sandboxed supply/demand analysis with no other factors, we would expect to see supply increase as demand increases since in theory it means building homes is more profitable. The high school version of supply/demand is that they balance eachother eventually and the timeframe over which that happens is influenced by the elasticity in price of the good in question. Something about how the housing market functions has changed in some locations.
However, you are correct that the price is pretty sticky at the moment.