If someone is going to cause trouble because of some words someone said, they are mentally unwell and it is best to get that out in the open so they can receive the help they need.
Everything is transactional. Even trying to not be transactional towards another because it makes you feel good that you are not being transactional is actual transactional. Those good feelings are payment for your efforts.
Price is what moderates demand. The higher the price, the less demand there is. Maybe you can eke out a million dollar home, but at a billion dollars I’m sure you are tapping out and moving to the forest to live under a pile of branches. Well, I certainly am!
So long as price is able to rise, rise it will, and demand will keep eroding until equilibrium with supply is found. And I think it is fair to say we have found equilibrium. If you are in the market, there is no trouble finding a home. If you have sufficient transactional value in hand, someone out there will sell you their home, guaranteed.
That’s quite unlike the toilet paper situation we saw a few years ago, where even a million dollars in your pocket wouldn’t necessarily secure you a roll, even though the lottery winners were paying dollars at most. That happened because price gouging laws prevented price from rising. That’s a shortage.
If you ignore the price component then everything is in a shortage. There is always someone who is happy to take more, more, more. Call it that if you want, but what’s the point? What, exactly, are you communicating when there is nothing not in shortage? There is good reason why the formal definition is more succinct.