[ChrisLomont]

>The REAL reason American's are broke is cost of living. Rent and housing costs have skyrocketed and wages have stagnated.

Inflation adjusted housing costs have not risen much over time [1].

If you don't account that housing now is vastly bigger than before you lose this fact.

Here's [2, Figure 5] a shorter timespan, showing that the ratio of income to housing payment has remained essentially flat 1985-2005.

Nothing in any of this data supports skyrocketing costs. If you're going to claim it's skyrocketed in small pockets, then yes, it has, but over that same window it's crashed in some pockets.

[1] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/pdf/Trends_hsg_c...

[2] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/pdf/Trends_hsg_c...

[ChrisLomont]

For those interested, average house sizes look like this over time [1].

Here is inflation adjusted housing price per square foot over time [2]. It is not much different for anytime in the past 100ish years as far as I can find from various datasets.

[1] http://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes-...

[2] http://www.aei.org/publication/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...