My country's population has been in slow decline since the late 90s, with very little(~1%) change over the 20 years before the pandemic - of course plenty of people moved out, but they didn't bother to report that so that's just the official number.
Prices still went up before the 2008 crisis at the same pace as in the rest of the world and started going up in the latter part of the previous decade - exactly like in the rest of the world.
All that despite record-breaking construction.
There's no realistic explanation of this that doesn't involve treating real estate as a commodity.
People are moving from poor areas to rich areas, from villages to cities, which is actually bad for both cities (overpopulation) and villages (dying out). Half of my parents' village is just empty houses. Meanwhile prices in the city 2h drive away are unimaginably high.
Look at detailed population density map of any developed country across time. Nobody wants to live in villages, everyone comes to big cities, preferably the capital.
Thing is, over here the urbanization rate peaked at 62% in the late 90s and also started declining because people increasingly moved out of cities into the suburbs due to the sheer inability to get a mortgage on any city property.
Despite that prices went up across the board.
The most egregious example this is a city(Łódź, Poland) which between 1995 and 2020 went from 823k inhabitants to 658k at a steady pace, all while prices going into overdrive mid last decade.
There's clearly little demand from people who actually intend to live in the homes they purchased and government statistics confirm that.
If it went up all across the western world and zoning is different all over then zoning is probably not the main culprit.
Real estate's suitability as a store of value (the more land hoarded, the more it goes up in value) coupled with rising wealth inequality is a more likely cause than a global problem with local zoning codes.
If your housing prices went up you have a supply shortage. If your city is near a larger city your demand may be auxiliary in which case it’s potentially related to the bigger city’s supply shortage, which in the US is predominantly caused by zoning and code.
I don't know any western nation outside the US (i.e., Canada, UK, Aus and NZ) where that'd be the cause. Yanks don't emigrate often and in large enough amounts to effect any other nation outside a few edge cases that I assume exist in Canada/Mexico. You mostly witness that within your own borders if I'm correct, e.g., the California exodus raising Texas and mid-west prices.
For outside the US, while London is a mix of factors, the markets in the remaining nations were primarily upended by housing being seen as an investment vehicle in the late 90's by the preceding generation (boomers) and then later as a store of money by foreigners wanting to park cash offshore, predominantly Chinese nationals. Further manipulations by market players who stand to earn more the higher the price soars (banks, realtors) leaves us with a problem of house prices where no one loses, except the poor millenial buyer, the higher they go.
UK had some of the most restrictive housing policy in the world. It’s not really multi-faceted, is it. It’s just a supply shortage. People want to live there but the UK doesn’t build enough homes.
This isn't to say that seeing real estate as a store of value or investment isn't also part of the problem.