[SQueeeeeL]

Big houses are all that's built and is on the market. You can't buy apartments in anywhere except New York and Seattle. They also cant't build mixed housing that isn't single family homes in most cities because of zoning laws.

[dcolkitt]

And I'm totally sympathetic to that argument. If it was up to me, I'd nuke all zoning laws. But there's no real evidence that these bigger homes are imposing any significant financial strain in aggregate. The percent of household expenditures spent on shelter has barely budged since 1990 (19.8% vs 17.7%)[1].

Maybe all else equal we'd prefer to use rising incomes and productivity to stay in the same size houses. It's definitely plausible. Comparatively expenditures on apparel have fallen by nearly 50% since 1990.

But what isn't plausible is OP's thesis that housing is making us poor. (Well at least in aggregate across the US, it is probably making Bay Area residents poor.) At most you can argue that zoning laws are making us spend a constant percent of our growing paychecks on proportionately bigger homes. For which we're no longer deriving much marginal benefit from the increased square footage.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/cex/1990/share/age.pdf