I think you need to give us the location. Because if that's Europe or a metropolis like San Francisco, housing prices have been kept somewhat artificially high with zoning restrictions and labyrinthian construction codes that go wildly beyond what's actually useful for the public good. Huge chunk of the reason businesses are leaving California is that it can take several extra
years to build infrastructure thanks to utterly insane bureaucratic requirements.
The US in general has inflated housing costs from a nasty real estate market standard, caused by our urbanization patters being driven by rapidly escalating transportation abilities. Rather than have reasonable apartments, the urban sprawl demands extremes in conditions... And there's no restriction on rent costs, so you get insanity like that because there's nothing stopping it beyond the ability to pay among the public. College tuition has exploded for much the same reason, because student loans nearly guarantee
they get the tuition fee, no matter how high it is.
As damn-near always, the problem is more that the problems just aren't cared about than something actually unsolvable and inherent to being Capitalist. It'd actually be remarkably trivial to remove that sort of nonsense by just capping off rents to a fraction of the cost to make what's rented. Damn near every major problem with capitalism comes down to price-gouging, because there's many things people can't really
live without, and will thus pay absurd sums for. Some of these things can be nationalized in the sales to consumers fairly safely, like utilities and medicine, others have been shown to routinely get fucked when moralizing bureaucrats get involved, like a lot of raw resource extraction.
But don't you understand? The Numbers say that this is a good thing and that we are living in the best times ever! Why do you hate the global poor Rodyle?
As for this, have you bothered checking the portion of income used on necessities? Increased need for dense urbanization in cities developed as sprawl and eternal penny-pinching have caused some aspects of quality of life to decline, but when it comes to stuff outside needs, it's utterly exploded upwards. We have privately owned
space programs at this point, the only genuine complaints to be had come
entirely down to "but the rich are
obscenely above us!" or the aforementioned penny-pinching making quality go down.
Regarding the former, it's an inevitability of having
any sort of hierarchy where wealth
can concentrate at the top. The question to ask isn't how big the gap between top and bottom is, it's how things are towards the bottom and how much damage the top is
actually able to do. And that continues to prove to decline, in the few ways it
does decline, due to immense scaling difficulties with high-standard lifestyle needs and cutting costs, rather than the ability to do so declining. Everyone against Capitalism banks on somehow keeping the ability to do so intact after completely overhauling the economy and being able to somehow act on that ability under fundamentally different resource distribution methods without breaking anything out of incompetence or ignorance.
Overall, it's an issue of Capitalism having some perverse incentives in its current dominant form. These can mostly be solved with proven-to-work regulations. The alternatives fail because of much more fundamental problems in having incentives at all. Sure, you count sustain the world's current living standards on the work of 5% of the population, but how do you get that 5% working and how do you make sure they're doing the right jobs? It also generates a remarkably stagnant system because temporary interests are extremely hard to fulfill and there's entirely separate problems involved in incentivizing progress.
A big thing to realize about why the penny-pinching is so dominant is that the highly-developed contries consume
obscene amounts of resources. You'd need another five Earths to give the whole world American living standards,
just for the food. Capitalism handles this trivially, dealing with resource bottlenecks by turning to alternatives and making solutions and just upping the costs until sustainable consumption and expense rates are reached. Any sort of planned economy seeking to give the highest standard of living to everyone inherently can't, because the only solutions are either
forcing innovations to solve the issue or reduce the standard of living, defeating some point of the system either way.