> But there's a lot more where it hasn't and housing is affordable

In many of those places salaries have been stagnant or work has dried up

So we have a weird situation where someone living in a big city with a large salary is priced out of real estate by high prices, and someone living in a smaller city with more reasonable real estate prices is priced out by a lower income

It's not universal of course, but it's a squeeze that a lot of people are feeling

Both are true. We’ve made cheap housing illegal and we’ve demanded ever higher quality housing.

We need to allowed for revealed preferences. In developers we trust.

The house I live in has one small bathroom. It was probably built before there was indoor plumbing. (Early 1800s.) A back of the mind concern when the day comes I end up selling but not much I can do about it. The house has had a lot of upgrades over time but some things can't be easily changed.

> Once the boomer generation dies off or goes into assisted living you'll see a lot of those 1970s houses coming back on the market

But will they be affordable? Or will they be bought up by real estate conglomerates to be rented to the younger generations?

This is only part of the picture. Part of the reason houses are so much larger today is cultural, but I would argue a larger part is that economies of scale scale make it more profitable to build larger houses, so that's what developers build.

Also, the average cost of raw, undeveloped land in 1970 was about $197/acre, or about $1690/acre in today's dollars. Today the average cost of raw, undeveloped land is about $4,350/acre.

All of the other costs associated with building a house are higher as well. There are more regulations, materials are more expensive, etc. Labor is probably the only part of the equation that isn't much different after adjusting for inflation.

So it's not just that we all decided to buy larger houses and that's why they are more expensive. There are a lot of structural issues at play.