We as a society can define how our economy looks like, it is not some hard defined concept like the speed of light or the very basic principles of mathematics.
Economics is a soft science, and we should treat it is suchs.
The raw numbers don't say much, expect the result of how we have shaped our economy.
There is very little preventing us from changing the way the housing market is structured in a real, hard fact kind of sense.
No, it starts and ends with peoples' lives and how much of it they must expend to keep it going. There are no such thing as "raw numbers".