[rayiner]

You’re mixing inflation adjusted versus non inflation adjusted numbers. $70,000 is adjusted for inflation. Housing costs have increased faster than inflation in some places, but not by a factor of 10. Indeed, nationally, the price per square foot for housing has stayed pretty stable for the last 40 years: https://www.supermoney.com/2019/01/inflation-adjusted-home-p...

There are two aspects to that trend:

1) People are buying bigger houses. That is consistent with the fact that they’re making more money. Instead of just having extra money, they’re buying bigger houses.

2) People are buying new houses in the south, where they’re cheap. That makes sense too. A house in Palo Alto is a lot more than it was in 1970. But Palo Alto wasn’t Palo Alto in 1970. Today it’s East Egg. Your $2.5 million is buying you into a haven for the elite. But back then, it was Round Rock. You were buying into a nice, but otherwise ordinary suburb. You can still buy a nice family house in a good school district for $250,000 in Round Rock.