Cracksmoking econs will try to come up with all sorts of wacky bullshit to “prove” that housing is not more expensive than it was forty years ago. Some greatest hits:

1) If you move to Cow Fart, Iowa, houses are very cheap! (Caveat: There are 1,800 people and four jobs in Cow Fart. Total.)

2) If you bought a house in 1960, it would’ve been 900sf and now you buy a house that is 2200sf. See! (Never mind there are almost no new 900sf houses constructed now.)

3) A perennial favorite: If you didn’t eat all that avocado toast, you could afford five houses by now!

4) Young people just don’t want to own houses. They love forking over half their income to a landlord. It’s what they live for.

5) Quality has improved so vastly much that a 2024 house is certainly worth 4x as much in real dollars as a 1970 house, from some figures I just pulled out of my ass!

Meanwhile:

And that data only goes to 2017; it’s gotten tons worse since then. And that’s the real deal, not some economist’s fairy tale.